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Jan 5, 2007 · While Hume admits that Newton was the “greatest genius” that “ever arose for the ornament and instruction of the species”, he is unwilling to acknowledge Newton’s “Virtue” or “Usefulness to the Public”. Moreover, Newton’s project lends cover for gross “superstition”.
- Isaac Newton
Isaac Newton (1642–1727) is best known for having invented...
- Isaac Newton
Jan 5, 2007 · This quote reveals crucial details about Hume's position in three areas: a) Hume's understanding of the relative merits of Newton's philosophy and the mechanical philosophy of Boyle; b) Hume's attitude toward criteria of intelligibility; c) Hume's skepticism.
Jul 1, 2014 · In the first part of the paper, we argue that, in the Treatise, Hume advocates a version of the analytic and synthetic method of philosophy as described in Newton’s Principia and Opticks. This means that Hume places a form of explanatory reduction at the center of his own philosophical method.
The influence on Hume of Newton and the Scientific Revolution is clear from the sub-title to each book: 'Being An Attempt to introduce the experi-mental Method of Reasoning into Moral Subjects'. 'Experimental' means based on experience and 'Moral Subjects' are those about men. Hume's most weighty contribution to the study of politics is in the
Feb 26, 2001 · As the fledgling Newton of the moral sciences, Hume wants to find a set of laws that explain how the mind's contents—perceptions, as he calls them—come and go in the mind and how simple perceptions combine to form complex perceptions in ways that explain human thought, belief, feeling and action.
Some writers, such as Duncan Forbes, Norman Kemp Smith, and James Noxon, have discerned and emphasized Newton’s influence on Hume’s philosophy chiefly in Hume’s experimental methodology which, as with Newton’s, is grounded in experiments and empirical observations.
What Newton had done for the physical realm, Hume proposed to do for the mental one. Thus he would become the Newton of the mind. So, corresponding to Newton’s physical objects, Hume has what he calls perceptions: these comprise all the things that occur in the mind.
