No. I thought it was an unduly emotional reaction to a very well-established, well-thought-out viewpoint in the history of ideas. If you can’t handle a single paragraph by Hume, maybe philosophy isn’t for you.
Or maybe you realize that Aristotle needs serious revising…and you get the rest of the history of philosophy. These inane accusations won’t get you anywhere.
no, I would not exist in your reality prior to your perception, and that’s all to which you have access…
not exactly… but yes, when you discover something you have created it in your sphere of perception…
Hume and Nietzsche both did quite well actually… and even Socrates knew that he knew nothing… knowing that one knows nothing is not uncommon at all, just as there are absolutely no absolutes…
in fact it was quite the opposite for Nietzsche, he uncovered the nihilism behind the theories of morals and knowledge…
it may appear to be sophistry, but one must affirmitavely answer the question, what and how do you know and can you prove it… the proof is never there except definitionally which really isn’t useful knowledge at all…
How does one understand this statement?
Hume didn’t prove that knowledge was impossible…his project was to redefine knowledge based on empiricist prinicples.
…and Socrates is just using hyperbole.
Logo, thanks for the exchange.
So how do Kant-Hume empiricists know essences. Are they nominalists as well? If so there’s been a recent thread related to this.
(Excuse my one-sidedness in argument. We mostly did Aristotle in college. Kant and Hume were mere seminar readings.)
Actually Kant wasn’t an empiricist…he was an idealist (it’s an important distinction when you get to twentieth century figures like Russell). I think that while they would both have embraced a form of nominalism, it was Locke who did most of the work on that subject. Alan Sidelle, who has taken his cue from Locke, has probably written the most recent and important book on nominalism (or anti-realism, as it’s often called today).
He asserts that universals are “explained in terms of us, in terms of our carving up of the world, and not in terms of an independently existing modal structure of reality.”
Interesting. Seems like that when you regard artifacts, but in natural things there seems to be something further. My cat is not just “rat-killer” (a relation to the human), she has an essence “cat” which goes beyond our ability to fully express – but we still know it when we see it.
i wonder if maybe nominal names are nominal, and essential understandings realist.
I am not sure… one does or one doesn’t… but it is “true,” if anything may be considered “true”
yes, I believe Hume proved the impossibility of knowledge quite well actually, his revelation of the inductive fallacy destroys science… if knowledge is nothing but a language game, it has no value outside of the language game…
no, Socrates was not simply using hyperbole… Socrates argued for the forms and the main part of the forms argument is that knowledge in this existence is illusory but the actual knowledge appears only after death when one can directly experience the forms… this is why Nietzsche calls him the first christian…
-Imp
Do muscles have An essence? I’m being serious.
I don’t know what you mean by “true”, but the statement is incoherent. That’s my problem with it. There is no possible way for one to understand a contradiction like this. If there is one absolute than the statement, “there are no absolutes” is false.
Where does he claim that knowledge is impossible?
It does? Seems to me science has gotten along quite well in spite of it. What Hume showed is that induction can’t be proven to give us knowledge of the world. But the key word is proven; Hume’s attack is on certainty, not knowledge in a general sense. Knowledge can proceed, but it proceeds on a set of assumptions that everyone must make. No I can’t prove that the sun will come up tomorrow, but I’m wired to assume it will. I can’t think otherwise. And inductive inferences made on the basis of such pragmatic presuppositions qualify as knowledge in a post-Humean world. The bottom line is, science works whether or not it gives us certainty.
But that’s huge. No it doesn’t have any value outside of the language game…but that only matters if there is an “outside” to the language game; there isn’t. Our knowledge of the world only has value for us, but that’s all that matters.
Hmm…I think the statement “I know nothing” is more a claim about philosophic methodology than about metaphysics. It’s clear from Plato’s dialogues that Socrates took himself to know quite a bit. But I suppose what he actually thought is irrelevant. The statement (if read literally) is self-contradictory…and therefore incoherent.
I for one have never seen an essence.
-Imp
To Aristotle, i think, muscles are a part of an organism and are defined in relation to it.
Well, you don’t strictly see essences, you know them. And if you know what a cat is, you know an essence. Thanks for keeping me on my toes.
We know them…how?
Wouldn’t it require an Absolute being (God, for example) to verify that statement? And wouldn’t that, in itself, prove it untrue?
Also,
If an absolute can arrive as the result of the negation of an idea, then there must be an absolute for every idea ever thought. Because all that is required to stand as an absolute is the negation. Thus nothing itself is an absolute.
Nothing exists absolutely or Nothing Absolutely exists.
There are absolutely no X’s.
There are absolutely no Y’s.
etc
lets call the whole thing off.
ok, it is absolutely called off… or
-Imp
You make absolutes sound… relative. A neat trick for sure! 
So if one ‘judges’ several other things to be absolute, then they are, at least for them?
But even a universe filled with nothing but subjective beings ruled by subjective truths is a universe. The domain of discourse is absolutely what it is, unless you want to argue the extreme idealistic view that what is is the result of your thought, but even then, you must be thinking, and those thoughts comprise your universe… absolutely. Because if there is any objective truth outside of one’s thoughts… then it is true outside of one’s thoughts.
And if it is true outside of your thought, then it can be true whether you think of it or not. And if it can be true whether you think of it or not, it can be true absolutely… beyond even our ability to experience, observe or know. Because we cannot know the limit of a thing if we do not know the thing in question. Only an absolute being can know, absolutely, whether or not nothing absolutely exists.
And if this is so, subjective knowledge, or personal judgements, answer nothing… they merely indicate one’s personal tastes.
Well, how does Kant explain it?
Kant? He’s a friggin idealist! He doesn’t think we can know anything about essences.
…which is still contradictory. But I suppose the more interesting question is, how do you know this to be the case?
That doesn’t answer my question. Where in the “Treatise” does he specifically say that analytic and synthetic judgements cannot lead to knowledge?
This is far from obvious. Even accepting Plato’s definition of knowledge, what serious philosopher in the last hundred years has actually held this view of justification? At the very least you need to give a reason why justification must involve certainty.
No…you have assumptions plus experience plus a well-confirmed scientific theory. That’s knowledge…as the term is used in English.
Mmn? Do I really need to step you through it? Okay…
Socrates: I know nothing.
Logo: How do you know?
Socrates: Well, imagine a cave with a fire and shadows…etc, etc
Logo: Well how do you know all THAT? And why the hell am I wasting my time talking to you?
Socrates: Chill out man…I was using hyperbole.
As a first time poster- am quite bewildered and enchanted by the different posts.
This might sound naive, but isn’t reality in the eyes or mind of the beholder? An aborigines’ thought has the same value as and Oxfordian with 2 or 3 PHd.