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Wednesday, August 4, 2010

Hume that grand empiricist, humanist and naturalist

David Hume advocates the presumption of naturalism in effect that natural causes and explanations are not only necessary and  efficient but also primary and sufficient. They are the Necessary Beings and the Primary Causes, contradicting  Aquinas with the former and Leibniz with the latter. This hardly begs the question as it is no more than the honest demand for evidence as Einstein used evidence to overcome Newton. 
Before his dementia, Antony Garrard Newton Flew advocated this presumption , but under the influence  of an obscurantist science writer and his dementia , he forgot that Nature only reveals natural causes and answers as this presumption is akin to the presumption of innocence in the law , and Aquinas alluded to implicitly in making his five failed arguments.
 Home advocates the presumption of empiricism that forbids revelations, religious traditions,  unfounded intuitions and  folk psychology.
  He furthered the case against the existence of God that Carneades started.
 He and Thomas Hobbes advocate wide- reflective subjectivism that  of overriding mere whims with  the reasoned moral sense. I contend that  that underpins, paradoxically, objective morality!
 He  reasons that compatibilism - soft determinism - rules rather than contra-causal  free will. That is, we have causes -determinants from our heredity and environment that cause our free actions.
 My terminal shyness and slight paranoia causes me to seek therapy, thereby establishing new causes. And as Democritus notes, causes don't coerce us. Without causes, we'd be at the mercy of randomness, the inverse of what many think.
 And Hume was a historian.
 I wonder what my viewers have to maintain about any part of this, to which they can comment at whatever length they so desire.

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Please refrain from cursing. Please be respectful whilst contemnng arguments. Please be thoughtful. And please don't be pedantic1