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Re: Hume & the Postmodern Grin without a Cat (was Re: pomois...



This misreads Hume. Hume is not a radical individualist--quite unlike Hobbes,
who really does give us a world of atomic of atomic individuals bound
together only by contract. Hume's metaphysics is a mosaic of events that
merely happen together, but his social philosophy is genuinely social. Look
at his account of justice, where he makes fun of the very idea of a social
contract, and explains justice instead as a functional convention arising
from the needs of people for mutual accommodation given their
interdependence. The implications Hume drew from this were cionservative
rather than radical--Hume is a Burkean liberal who thinks we oughtn't go
around radically disturbing the conventions that have  arisen, but he favors
English liberty as it existed, more less, in his day, as a successful set of
conventions.

There's no particular reason to expect one's ontology and one's social
philosophy to mirror one another--only a premodern "great chain of being"
metaphysics would lead you to think that the structure of events as such
would be in any way like the structure of human relationships. So a "mosaic"
metaphysics doesn't imply an individualist social philosophy--or indeed, vice
versa. Hobbes was a strong believe in natural necessity and opposed the
corpuscularian new philosophy of Boyle and Newton.

--jks

That's why I mentioned in the post that Hume backed off -- sensibly so -- from the most radical implications of his own epistemology (which brings "everything solid melts into air" to its extreme). One can have beliefs that one can't justify by reason, and without those (unjustified) beliefs one can't have society (a line of reasoning often adopted by conservatives), or so thought Hume, I think.

Yoshie




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