Monday, December 19, 2011

We are ALL Humean Beings Now

My favorite philosopher, by a wide margin, is David Hume. (Never mind the epistemology stuff, not sure what he was doing there, forget that).

Very nice article in NYT on Hume, and why he gets disrespected.

In fact, it seems to me that Ron Paul is the modern political version of David Hume. Everyone says that he's right about a lot of things, perhaps wrong about some things, but in any case they certainly can't take him seriously, because.... hard to say why, actually.

As Bertrand Russell put it: "Rousseau was mad but influential; Hume was sane but had no followers."

3 comments:

Expected Optimism said...

I don't think it's at all hard for Ron Paul's detractors to say why they don't take him seriously. If they're Republican, it's his foreign policy. If they're Democrat, it's his domestic policy. And for both sides, there's his tendency to get wrapped up in conspiracy theories, not to mention the blind fanaticism of many of his followers. That kind of thing turns people off, for good reason.

Mungowitz said...

That's why an individual might choose not to vote for him.

The question is why the media ignore RP, even though he is at #1 or #2 in some polls.

Of course, that means my analogy was false in the first place, doesn't it? Hume / Rousseau are about taking ideas seriously, not polls. You win, EO!

Stephen said...

LibriVox has four of Hume's works (well, three, with one in two volumes) available as free audiobooks to download. Which, if any, might be good for a casual or novice student of philosophy to listen to? See https://catalog.librivox.org/search.php?title=&author=david+hume&status=all