Humeanism

It is essentially a mosaic philosophy, a philosophy of plural facts, like that of Hume and his descendants, who refer these facts neither to substances in which they inhere nor to an absolute mind that creates them as its objects.

But it differs from the Humean type of empiricism in one particular, which makes me add the epithet radical.

To be radical, an empiricism must neither admit into its constructions any element that is not directly experienced nor exclude from them any element that is directly experienced.

For such a philosophy, the relations that connect experiences must themselves be experienced relations, and any kind of relation experienced must be accounted as real as anything else in the system.

So that's Hume's whole point is like, why are you making this leap? So if you don't see purpose, then you also don't see, you know, moral, you don't see values and norms under the microscope.

Also, the Humean problem is what leads to ethical nihilism.

in ethics that basically...

They take Hume's thing that it's like, well, things are statements of fact or they're analytic truths, but you can't really have moral truths because there's nothing out there that you can actually...

There's not a metaphysical world called the ought, either in nature or above it.

And so...

This is precisely, and they're just being logically consistent, it's precisely this Humean kind of predicament that he brings up that ends up leading to moral nihilism.

And that just simply is to say that there are no moral truths.

And...

Yeah, so he's not a full Humean.

He doesn't fully fall into that line.

He rather says we need to reinvent Kant, but he doesn't go all the way.

I think it has come to copy and imitate the British state and the secular philosophy, which really is what animates the British state.

The British state has a vestigial commitment to Anglicanism, but is a Habesian, Humean, Millian entity at its core.

Yeah.

It's much more the state of Adam Smith than it is the state of the Anglican Church.

So Immanuel Kant had a series of criticisms about epistemology, and Lonergan is responding to them in this book, Insight.

But when he gets to his proof for the existence of God in chapter 19 in this book, Insight, he's basically saying, trying to incorporate that post-Kantian epistemology and cognitive theory into his whole philosophy so that it's not going to fall prey to Humean and to Kantian criticisms.

The second thing he's really trying to do, and again I'll elaborate this, he wants to bring it into the whole area of physics.

When you get into quantum physics, you're dealing with statistical heuristic structures and not just classical heuristic structures.

So that's a very, very very strong difference.

I think most people in this day and age, if they're not Nietzscheans, are Humeans.

There's certainly more Humeans around than Kantians for all kinds of reasons.

I'm not sure you mention Hume that much in the book, but one person who is important in...

I have it in other books.

Whereas on the other hand, following ideas which seem to work in practice even when we don't fully understand why they do, even when they seem slightly irrational, is more often a course which maybe doesn't lead to the very best outcome, the very least it avoids the worst.

The Humean approach, of course, is to combine these two.

We must always make reference to experience and base our knowledge on that.

There's no excuse not to use our reason to try and work out how things could be improved and made even better.

One consequence of this is that morality is rooted in emotion, not reason.

"'Tis not logic that tells us murder is wrong, but the compassion we have for our fellow human beings.'" The heart without the head often goes wrong, but a head without a heart wouldn't go anywhere at all.

My last big Humean idea is that we should understand as we would be understood.

Hume invites us to be honest about our own limitations and failings, and to be understanding of those of others.

Or does the rule bind future sequences and determine them to follow in the same order which the first sequence observed? Since it obviously does not do this when the observer judges wrongly that the first sequence is causal, all we can say is that it is a rule whereby his expectations of uniformity follow his causal judgments, be these latter true or false.

But wherein should this differ from the Humean position? Kant, in short, flounders, and in no truthful sense can one keep repeating that he has refuted Hume.

End footnote.

The word Verstand in Kant's account must not be taken as if the rule it is supposed to set to sensation made us understand things any better.

And then the contrast is the way in which we model or think about exchange relationships in markets versus in politics.

And what's fascinating is that Buchanan takes the Humean dictum in politics, which is really saying men are like rats.

which is the idea that men are names.

So in economics, he sees men as artifactual man, these self-architects, these individuals who recognize and deal with the agony of choice and are trying to fake it until they make it kind of idea.