Word: hume
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...Vague Generalities are anathema, sparkling chips of concrete scattered throughout your bluebook will have you up for sainthood. Or at least Dean’s List. Name at least the titles of every other book Hume wrote; don’t just say Medieval cathedrals, name nine. Think up a few specific examples of “contemporary decadence,” like Natalie Wood. If you can’t come up with titles, try a few sharp metaphors of your own; they at least have the solid clink of pseudo-facts...
...Hume brought empiricism to its logical extreme.” (Philosophy...
...check the operation of a vague generality under fire, take the typical example, “Hume brought empiricism to its logical extreme.” The question is asked, “Did the philosophical beliefs of Hume represent the spirit of the age in which he lived?” Our hero replies by opening his essay with, “David Hume, the great Scottish philosopher, brought empiricism to its logical extreme. If these be the spirit of the age in which he lived, then he was representative...
This generality expert has already taken his position for the essay. Actually he has not the vaguest idea of what Hume really said, or in fact what he said it in, or in fact if he ever said anything at all. But by never bothering to define empiricism, he may write indefinitely on the issue, virtually without contradiction...
DIED. WILLARD VAN ORMAN QUINE, 92, rumpled yet rigorous Harvard philosopher who developed a system of truth and knowledge, in the tradition of Berkeley and Hume, based on radical empiricism: that everything we can know about the world derives only from our sensory perceptions and that anything else we might think exists--ranging from physical objects to metaphysical beliefs--is merely a mental construct that may help predict our perceptions but cannot be known as objectively true; in Boston. His seminal 1951 essay "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" and 1960 book Word and Object built upon the works of such logical...