David Hume

Like, it's still just like, now you're just getting, now we're just talking about fucking stupid shit for no reason.

...introduced by David Hume, questions how we can justify our belief that the future will resemble the past.

For example, we expect the sun to rise tomorrow because it has risen every day before.

However, Hume pointed out that there's no logical guarantee this will always happen.

Just because something has occurred many times doesn't...

There's no logical guarantee that that will always happen.

And I know I had to read David Hume fucking last year.

But just because, yes, we are assuming that the sun will rise tomorrow because it's risen a million times prior.

I think I hadn't read the Spanish scholastics, the School of Salamanca much, but I was quite taken with some of their theoretical contributions.

I did not know, for example, that Azpilcueta first articulated the quantity theory of money before... before Baudin and the French and before David Hume.

So their theoretical insights were really important.

Lessius is another important figure.

But had an amazing memory.

And he goes to Oxford and the kind of like defining thing that happens to him there is that he is caught reading the work of David Hume, who is thought to be heretical for his ideas about religion.

And so he kind of like becomes an iconoclast via that.

Like he kind of is like, well, then I don't care what you guys have to teach me.

This book is called the invisible hand of Mariah Edgeworth.

Isn't it the invisible hand of the market or it's a more abstract book? I think it's more abstract.

You know what this book also didn't do to my satisfaction is like, okay, he's reading David Hume, who's an atheist, but I don't think there's really a way to interpret an invisible hand of the market in an atheistic way.

I think it's shifting the role of God from the kind of like great designer and like maker of the watch or whatever to market forces.

then you see reformers responding to these, as I've already indicated, Francis Turretin tends to side with Thomas Aquinas on this particular issue.

And then over time, what ends up happening is you have someone like Immanuel Kant who comes along, and David Hume.

These two individuals do a lot of damage to natural law theory as such.

And then and then it kind of gets kind of gets lost at Peters out You'll see some individuals in the 1700s still trying to trying to argue for it I was reading something of the day by the time you get to the 1900s You don't really have a major evangelical theologian arguing for natural law now Is there maybe some somewhere that that does give a good classic account of natural law there may be but I'm not sure how how widespread that is And the thing that is, for me, that I think is unfortunate is when I see contemporary evangelicals imbibing explicitly the arguments of someone like David Hume against someone like Aristotle and the teleology that it brings to the table to contradict natural law.

And I go, why is it we think we can imbibe explicitly David Hume and bring in a kind of skepticism, a Humean skepticism, and call it total depravity and act like, oh, this is good, this is doctrinal, this is Calvinistic.

Can you give an

example of a Humean argument against natural law?

Yeah, well, Hume is very concerned about the relationship between an ought and an is.

So yeah, I don't really know if I fucking covered this idea very well.

I could go into more philosophers like Hume and Spinoza and shit, but they all fucking say the same thing in different ways.

And sometimes they go into other, like Wittgenstein goes into like, I guess a more word-based argument.

It's very hard to explain what he's trying to say.

It's probably going to be a long one.

To start out, this is one of the weirdest books that you can read philosophically.

It's a lot different from reading Plato or Aristotle, Friedrich Nietzsche, David Hume, or any other philosophers that are trying to convey their opinion to an audience.

Marcus Aurelius' meditations were private notes that This Roman emperor, that's who he is.

It's used by John Locke.

It's used by David Hume, who criticizes Locke's definition as too broad because Locke said that a self-evident truth is something that's axiomatic.

Like two plus two equals four.

I intuit its truth immediately.

Everything else said Hume is a matter of fact and it's open for debate.

And I may not be able to trust my senses that it actually exists.

Then you have the Scots, I've dug in deeper since we talked last, like Thomas Reed, Wilson and Jefferson's law tutor, who said, that's absurd to say that we don't know that the chair is red or that all men are created equal defies common sense.

Actually, it does.

65% like David Hume.

I hated reading Hume.

That pisses me off.

This is a problem that philosophers have been wrestling with for some time.

Back in the 18th century, David Hume was interested in why people took pleasure in watching tragedies.

Why should representations of suffering, misery, and death entertain us when experiencing those things ourselves would be anything but enjoyable? In 1990, the American philosopher Noel Carroll attempted to address this problem in his book The Philosophy of Horror or Paradoxes of the Heart.

Carroll was interested in understanding what makes horror frightening, but also why we find that experience so appealing.