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Hume's Skeptical Crisis: A Textual Study (Hardback)
$45.32 - Save $2.38 (4%) - RRP $47.70 Free delivery worldwide (to United States and
all these other countries) Usually dispatched within 48 hours | |Short Description for Hume's Skeptical CrisisHume's Skeptical Crisis is a textual study of the shifts in perspective that unfold as Hume attempts to produce a complete science of human nature. In the process, Hume's standpoint shifts from buoyant optimism to profound skeptical melancholy and finally comes to rest at a stable form of mitigated skepticism.
Full description- Publisher: Oxford University Press Inc
- Published: 17 September 2009
- Format: Hardback 192 pages
- See: Full bibliographic data
- Categories: History Of Ideas | History Of Western Philosophy | Western Philosophy: Medieval & Renaissance, C 500 To C 1600 | Western Philosophy: C 1600 To C 1900 | Philosophy: Epistemology & Theory Of Knowledge | Philosophy Of Mind
- ISBN 13: 9780195387391 ISBN 10: 0195387392
- Sales rank: 795,871
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Full description for Hume's Skeptical Crisis
In Hume's Skeptical Crisis Robert Fogelin provides a textual study of the changes in perspective that emerged as Hume pursued his attempt to introduce the experimental method of reasoning into moral subjects--the subtitle of the Treatise of Human of Nature. In the process of giving an account of the operations of the human mind, Hume discovered that the mechanisms that create and sustain our beliefs are deeply unreliable and, in fact, capricious in their operations. Hume's crisis emerged when he recognized that the weaknesses that he ascribed to the operations of the human mind apply with equal force to the operations of his own mind. How, he asked himself, could he justify pursuing profoundly difficult investigations employing mental faculties that were manifestly not up to the task? His response was to trim back the ambitious program announced at the start of the Treatise. Hume returned to this topic in the opening section of the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, where, in a more circumspect mood, he weighed the reasons for and against pursuing what he calls abstruse philosophy. Given our limited capacities and the complexities of the subject, what, he asked, are the chances of success in pursing abstruse philosophical investigations? Hume answered that we could expect at least modest success by adopting the stance of a mitigated skeptic, where one cautiously examines only those topics suitable to our limited mental capacities. Hume held that this standpoint could be attained by counter-balancing radical Pyrrhonian doubt on one side with our non-rational instincts to believe on the other side. As a result, Hume's initial attempt to produce a "compleat system of the sciences" was transformed into "reflections of common life, methodized and corrected."
