Reid's Critique of Hume - podcast cover

Reid's Critique of Hume

Oxford Universitypodcasts.ox.ac.uk
Under “David Hume”, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy begins with, “The most important philosopher ever to write in English”. His most formidable contemporary critic was the fellow Scot, Thomas Reid, the major architect of so-called Scottish Common Sense Philosophy. The most significant features of Hume’s work, as understood by Reid, are the representive theory of perception, the nature of causation and causal concepts, the nature of personal identity and the foundations of morality. Each of these topics is presented in a pair of lectures, the first summarizing Hume’s position and the second Reid’s critique of that position.
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Episodes

Reid on the Principles of Morals

The final part of Professor Dan Robinson's series on Reid's critique of David Hume. “Like all other sciences, morals must have first principles, and all moral reasoning is based on them... In all rational belief, the thing believed is either a first principle or something inferred by valid reasoning from first principles”. As for utility, “Suppose that mice rescue the distressed person by chewing through the cords that bound him. Is there moral goodness in this act of the mice?” Beyond the armch...

May 14, 201453 min

Hume’s “Sentimentalist” Theory of Morals

The seventh part of Professor Dan Robinson's series on Reid's critique of David Hume. In his Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals [1751], Hume states: “The final sentence, it is probable, which pronounces characters and actions amiable or odious, praise-worthy or blameable; that which stamps on them the mark of honour or infamy, approbation or censure; that which renders morality an active principle and constitutes virtue our happiness, and vice our misery; it is probable, I say, that thi...

May 14, 201450 min

Reid on Personal Identity

The sixth part of Professor Dan Robinson's series on Reid's critique of David Hume. In the third of his Essays on The Intellectual Powers of Man, Reid devotes the fourth chapter to the concept of 'identity', and the sixth chapter to Locke's theory of 'personal identity'. This latter chapter is widely regarded as a definitive refutation of the thesis that personal identity is no more than memories of a certain sort, less a “bundle of perceptions”. As he says, “This conviction of one’s own identit...

May 14, 201449 min

Hume on Personal Identity

The fifth part of Professor Dan Robinson's series on Reid's critique of David Hume. “There are some philosophers who imagine we are every moment intimately conscious of what we call our self; that we feel its existence and its continuance in existence; and are certain, beyond the evidence of a demonstration, both of its perfect identity and simplicity…For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light...

May 14, 201442 min

Reid on Causation and Active Powers

The fourth part of Professor Dan Robinson's series examining Reid's critique of David Hume. “It is evident that a power is a quality, and therefore can’t exist without a subject to which it belongs…This (Humean) suggestion— There exists some power that cannot be attributed to any thing, any subject, which has the power —is an absurdity…No principle seems to have been more universally acknowledged by mankind ever since the first dawn of reason than that every change we observe in nature must have...

May 14, 201446 min

Hume on Causation

The third part of Professor Dan Robinson's series examining Reid's critique of David Hume. Causality arises from a habit of the mind formed by repeated experiences. “There is nothing in any objects to persuade us, that they are either always remote or always contiguous; and when from experience and observation we discover, that their relation in this particular is invariable, we, always conclude there is some secret cause, which separates or unites them…”

May 14, 201450 min

Reid and Common Sense Realism

Part two of Professor Dan Robinson's examination of Reid's critique of David Hume. Is it the case that every simple idea is a “copy” of a simple impression? Hume is but the latest to deny that we have direct access to the external world. The “ideal” theory, relegating ideas to a mental realm whose occupants are but “copies” of some indefinite thing, is the sure path to skepticism and is at variance with the proper methods of science.

May 14, 201452 min

The “representational” theory of knowledge

Professor Dan Robinson, Oxford University, delivers the first part of his series examining Reid's Critique of Hume. Hume defends the thesis according to which “ALL THE PERCEPTIONS OF THE HUMAN MIND RESOLVE THEMSELVES INTO…IMPRESSIONS AND IDEAS”. Accordingly, “We may prosecute this enquiry to what length we please; where we shall always find, that every idea which we examine is copied from a similar impression”.

May 14, 20141 hr
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