Quiz Oct 19 answers

1. (Gopnik) But here’s Hume’s really great idea: Ultimately, the metaphysical foundations don’t matter. Experience is enough all by itself. What do you lose when you give up God or “reality” or even “I”? The moon is still just as bright; you can still predict that a falling glass will break, and you can still act to catch it; you can still feel compassion for the suffering of others. Science and work and morality remain intact. Go back to your backgammon game after your skeptical crisis, Hume wrote, and it will be exactly the same game.

2.  like Hume himself, I had found my salvation in the sheer endless curiosity of the human mind—and the sheer endless variety of human experience.

3. (Blackburn) The doctrine that eventually emerges is called “mitigated skepticism” by Hume. He never had any time for exaggerated skepticism — the kind that led Descartes to worry about whether he might be dreaming all the time. But Hume did think that overconfidence and dogmatism led to intolerance, to faction, to a lot of the crimes of human history. So if you could show, in a decisive way, where our limits lie, we could improve on that abysmal history.

4. There’s a suggestion that reason is always the slave of the passions?

Yes, that’s the famous provocative remark, “and has no other office but to serve and obey them.” There’s an insight there which is picked up in much modern philosophy, and it is of course the insight of pragmatism, that success in action is, in some sense, the mother of thought. It’s because we need our actions in the world to serve our needs and to generate success, that we have the intelligences we do. That’s the nutshell idea of modern American pragmatism, and the pragmatist tradition. 

5. (Hume's Essays) The second volume of Hume’s Essays, Moral and Political (1742) includes a set of four pieces on the sects, that naturally form themselves in the world. These essays, ”The Epicurean,” “The Stoic,” “The Platonist,” and”The Sceptic,”

6. Hume, in disagreement with the Sceptic, does believe that philosophy is the medicine ofthe mind (par. 28). It is, as he says in another of his essays, the sovereign antidote to the miseries caused by superstition and false religion?* But the abstruse philosophy, such as the Treatise, is only the necessary background to this therapeutic work. It is the popular essays that provide the cure.