Why I left Scientology.

[Cat's Squirrel]

Anyone else like David Hume? (I haven't read his original writings, just a commentary about his work).

 

[The Anabaptist Jacques]

Anyone else like David Hume? (I haven't read his original writings, just a commentary about his work).

I love Hume.

Kant said that reading Hume "stirred me from my intellectual slumber."

Hume personally, was a very admired man.

There is a great recent book about Hume and Rousseau called "The Philosophers' Quarrel."

I think you would love it.

The Anabaptist Jacques

 

[Student of Trinity]

The Greek word translated as 'lord' in the New Testament was "kyrios". It pretty much does just mean 'lord'. I audited a first course in New Testament Greek once, and though I didn't really learn all that much, I gained the distinct impression that there is not actually much to be gained from reading the New Testament in the original. It was almost all written in very simple Greek, in the rather crude dialect that served as a lingua franca all around the Mediterranean, by writers for whom Greek was a second language. I went through a phase of eagerly tracking down original versions of favorite texts, looking for new insights, and found only that the standard translations were pretty much word-for-word exact. If you think about this, though, it makes some sense. Translating the New Testament has been a major activity for quite a few centuries, and although science and technology have advanced a lot in this time, knowledge of Greek has not. People have had plenty of time to get this pretty much right.

I'm no real expert on Bertrand Russell, but for what it's worth I think he may be brilliant but unreliable. Unreliable because he's brilliant, in fact. I suspect him of treating things that just didn't happen to interest him rather casually, tossing them off with a few clever phrases, when of course with the things that actually did interest him, he was extremely careful and profound. "Consider the set of all sets that are not members of themselves."

I read a bit of Hume once. His critique of empiricism is devastating. You looked at X and saw Y; great. Just why do you think that this means, it will always be Y? The fact is, empiricism is an exercise in faith. A very good one, of course. But for people who want to condemn faith as folly, and count experimental data as certain knowledge, Hume is painful to read. It's having your own skeptical weapons turned against you. They're sharp.

I wrote a song once, to an obvious tune:

Oh give me a Hume
With his skeptical gloom
And his fears that he doesn't exist.
How seldom is heard
Anything so absurd;
Was he mad, or just thoroughly pissed?

Hume, Hume is so strange.
He's a positive negativist.
His thinking was blurred,
If it even occurred,
And he probably doesn't exist.

In fact I was just being facetious. Hume deserves a lot of respect.

 

[The Anabaptist Jacques]

The Greek word translated as 'lord' in the New Testament was "kyrios". It pretty much does just mean 'lord'. I audited a first course in New Testament Greek once, and though I didn't really learn all that much, I gained the distinct impression that there is not actually much to be gained from reading the New Testament in the original. It was almost all written in very simple Greek, in the rather crude dialect that served as a lingua franca all around the Mediterranean, by writers for whom Greek was a second language. I went through a phase of eagerly tracking down original versions of favorite texts, looking for new insights, and found only that the standard translations were pretty much word-for-word exact. If you think about this, though, it makes some sense. Translating the New Testament has been a major activity for quite a few centuries, and although science and technology have advanced a lot in this time, knowledge of Greek has not. People have had plenty of time to get this pretty much right.

I'm no real expert on Bertrand Russell, but for what it's worth I think he may be brilliant but unreliable. Unreliable because he's brilliant, in fact. I suspect him of treating things that just didn't happen to interest him rather casually, tossing them off with a few clever phrases, when of course with the things that actually did interest him, he was extremely careful and profound. "Consider the set of all sets that are not members of themselves."

I read a bit of Hume once. His critique of empiricism is devastating. You looked at X and saw Y; great. Just why do you think that this means, it will always be Y? The fact is, empiricism is an exercise in faith. A very good one, of course. But for people who want to condemn faith as folly, and count experimental data as certain knowledge, Hume is painful to read. It's having your own skeptical weapons turned against you. They're sharp.

I wrote a song once, to an obvious tune:

Oh give me a Hume
With his skeptical gloom
And his fears that he doesn't exist.
How seldom is heard
Anything so absurd;
Was he mad, or just thoroughly pissed?

Hume, Hume is so strange.
He's a positive negativist.
His thinking was blurred,
If it even occurred,
And he probably doesn't exist.

In fact I was just being facetious. Hume deserves a lot of respect.

Great post!

Thanks for the info.

I like Hume for the very same reason.

Because of Hume I often contemplate if I am real or not.

I mean, are my memories just my consciousness and is my consciousness just simply that---consciousness, but no a real identity.

I could simply be a collection a photographs, so to speak, but no real entity.

Hume really makes you think.

Thanks again for the post!

The Anabaptist Jacques

 

[Mick Wenlock]

Anyone else like David Hume? (I haven't read his original writings, just a commentary about his work).

"David Hume could out consume Schopenhauer and Hegel

And Wittgenstein was a beery swine who was just as sloshed as Schlegel"