David Hume

Yesterday, one of my just-finished philosophy students asked me who my favorite philosopher is, and I said although that's a hard question, I would have to say David Hume. He was such a provocative philosopher and such a good-hearted person; he had fun with ideas (and put forward some that are still difficult or impossible to answer). He is a very important figure in my course; the lecture on him comes at the dead center - everything before that flows into him, and everything after that flows out of him. (Kant's philosophical efforts, for example, largely begin as a response to Hume.) When I get to Rousseau a couple of classes later (the class on the Enlightenment in general comes in-between), I have great fun with the story of the friendship-turned-sour between Rousseau and Hume, which has been the subject of a whole book, The Philosophers' Quarrel:

 http://www.amazon.com/Philosophers-Quarrel-Rousseau-Limits-Understanding/dp/B005M4MTJE/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1354287884&sr=1-1&keywords=rousseau+hume

 Here are the two short videos about Hume that I use in class; the first one is pretty funny.





That first Hume video is a good example of the way I try to enliven the material with humor, anecdotes, and so on. My best group this semester, Bilingual Group 6, loved that approach and made that clear at the end of the course; they actually gave me a round of applause with shouts of "We love you, teacher," and a number of them wrote thank-you notes on their final exams as well. The other two philosophy groups this semester, not so much love. It's always hard to figure why one class "clicks" and another doesn't, when you're delivering the material pretty much the same way in each.

It's funny, I like teaching high school as long as I can teach it like college, which is ironic since these days, college classes are largely taught like high school! It is an unstated but universally held opinion at my campus that our prepa is FAR more rigorous than our university division. Night and day.

The creator of the second video, Massimo Pigliucci, is the chair of the philosophy department at the City University of New York; Hume is also his favorite philosopher. He recently published this interesting article about the philosophy of science, in which Hume again figures:

http://www.aeonmagazine.com/world-views/massimo-pigliucci-on-consilience/ 

Hume remains a key figure throughout the rest of my course; I refer to him a lot. One bit I particularly like is Maurice Merleau-Ponty's brilliant refutation of Hume's Bundle Theory (although he does not refer to Hume by name) in a 1948 radio lecture:



It's dazzling. Here is the pertinent section of my teaching notes:

3. VIDEO: Maurice Merleau-Ponty – Sensible Objects
a. This is part of a series of radio lectures that Merleau-Ponty gave in 1948
b. In it, he is replying to David Hume’s bundle theory (although he doesn’t mention Hume by name) - Hume’s idea that an object is nothing but its features, that there really is no underlying object
c. Merleau-Ponty disagrees, and points out that the objects he discusses here, lemons and honey, have a unity of being for us, in terms of both emotions and bodily reactions
i. It is clever to respond to Hume in this way, since he was one of the first philosophers to stress the importance of emotions over reason
ii. Merleau-Ponty uses the idea of synesthesia – perceiving or describing one type of idea or sense-data in terms of another type of idea or sense-data
1. For a synesthetic, a particular musical key might be co-perceived as a particular color (G major = blue, for example)
2. So Merleau-Ponty points out that honey is both sweetly sticky and stickily sweet – this brings together the senses of taste and touch – the sweetness and stickiness are not separate qualities, as Hume would have it, but interdependent ones
a. Each individual feature suggests and affirms the whole being of the object
b. He quotes his friend Jean-Paul Sartre: “It is the sourness of the lemon that is yellow; it is the yellow of the lemon that is sour.” (Notice how poetic this is – the French existentialist philosophers were great literary writers.) 3. The senses work together “in concert” – not separately, as Hume would have it
4. An object therefore is more than the sum (addition) of its properties
iii. The character of a man can be revealed in his attitudes towards objects, places, colors – as many have said, we are what we prefer (just as Fichte said that the type of philosophy you do depends on the type of person you are)
1. Merleau-Ponty: “Our relation with things is not a distant relation; each of them speaks to our body and our life…Man is invested in things, and things are invested in him.”
2. For example, objects can “hold” our memories for us a. In the great seven-volume French novel Remembrance of Things Past, by Marcel Proust (1871-1922), the narrator starts to remember his entire youth because of the taste, smell, and texture (mouth-feel) of a madeleine cookie dipped in tea
iv. Notice how in this lecture Merleau-Ponty mentions psychology and psychoanalysis several times
1. Psychoanalysis is the process pioneered by Freud of analyzing the contents of the mind in a phenomenological way, to shed light on human behavior
2. This includes analysis of the contents of the subconscious mind, which have to be “brought up to the surface”