Word: humes
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...have so thoroughly transformed the debate, it helps to understand how deeply entrenched in our intellectual history the false dichotomy of nature vs. nurture became. Whether human nature is born or made is an ancient conundrum discussed by Plato and Aristotle. Empiricist philosophers such as John Locke and David Hume argued that the human mind was formed by experience; nativists like Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant held that there was such a thing as immutable human nature...
...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 of it.” This generality expert...
...artful equivocation is an almost impossible concept to explain, but it is easy to demonstrate. Let us begin with the question, “Did the philosophical beliefs of Hume represent the spirit of the age in which he lived...
...equivocator would answer it in this way: “Some people believe that David Hume was not necessarily a great philosopher because his thought was merely a reflection of the conditions around him, colored by his own personality...
...long run the expert in the use of unwarranted assumption comes off better than the equivocator. He would deal with our question on Hume not by baffling the grader or by fencing him but like this: “It is absurd to discuss whether Hume is representative of the age in which he lived unless we note the progress of that age on all fronts. After all, Hume did not live in a vacuum...