Status Updates From An Enquiry Concerning Human...

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it feels like we can reach any radical philosophical conclusion of our fancy as long as we can think of sufficiently neat definitions.

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definitions. Wtf is the good in this form of linguistic wordplay?

It's like how he first defines an idea to be a copy of an impression, and then proceeds at breakneck speed to search for the corresponding impression of every single idea and discard ideas whose impressions cannot be readily identified as meaningless .....

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free will - do I even know how crushing it is to REALLY understand the implications of determinism? The only outcome can be a futile devastation like Sergeant Slick. I must be like Rex and Cody - ignorant of the truth (whatever it may be), but focused on worldly missions to achieve worldly success.

Also, much of Hume's arguments regarding liberty and necessity are obviously just playing around with ...

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discussions, I reflected on how the problem of free will has really never been a foremost philosophical interest of mine. It is also fitting that I watched Ep16 - Season 1 of 'The clone wars' yesterday, with the profound opening crawl 'Truth enlightens the mind, but won't always bring happiness to your heart'. I feel like there is really nothing much to gain with too much penetration into the problem of ...

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According to many sources, Hume is obviously a compatibilist, so idk why tf Millican notes here that Hume 'is showing that his determinist worldview is compatible with morality'. I read Hume's arguments until I fell asleep last night and I still don't know how this determinism is compatible with morality, if every action that a person will ever do is already predetermined before his birth.

Through these...

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other editors by miles. He put in the effort to guide the reader section by section, and his notes are self-referencing.

No wonder I couldn't understand 'On liberty' and the Nicomachean ethics.

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'Nicomachean ethics'. The explanatory notes and introduction by Millican are heads and shoulders above the Mill book. This is unacceptable - I would've thought OWC had a central editor committee that ensures consistent quality across all their books. The Enquiry is much shorter than the Mill and the Aristotle volumes which allows for more room for expert commentary, but still, Millican outshines the...

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attribute a breakdown in some expected factor return pattern (e.g. the value factor earning me a negative excess return in a given year) to a breakdown in the uniform rule, by chance - I don't usually assume a contrary cause, like value stocks suddenly becoming less risky than growth stocks.

Finally, I compared my copies of Oxford World's Classics 'Enquiry', 'On liberty and other essays' and ...

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objects) and thus the doctrine of necessity. I get it.

I'm not sure if I agree with Hume's argument that the vulgar commonly attribute uncertainty in events to contingency in the causes, whereas philosophers know that they are due to contrariety in the causes. When I see the clock stopping, yes I assume some defect (a contrary cause); but in the uncertain spheres like the financial markets, I commonly ...

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explain/ predict empirical phenomena, and not wasting our time with the futile endeavour of speculating about the underlying metaphysics of things.

Humorously, I am currently unsure why Hume has chosen to go into this multi-page ramble about the uniformity of human nature, just to argue that people indeed have become accustomed to human nature's uniformity (as they have to the uniformity of other ...

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I feel indignant at Hume now, as he labels the vulgar as 'those who take things at first appearances' (I recall this accusation of the vulgar in the Treatise as well) - because zooming out, I feel like there's no conceptual difference between the 'vulgar' and instrumentalists, of which Hume subscribed to. They are both about accepting events and phenomena as they ARE and as they pertain as tools to ...

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Indeed, it was Alex O'Connor's insight to me that one's actions follows from one's will, but one's will IS causally determined, that convinced me of determinism.

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since it does not matter whether one's will is causally determined. Millican teaches that Hume follows Hobbes and I remain to read how he does so: I also now recall that he touches on liberty and necessity at the tail end of the 'Abstract'. I can imagine that Hume will proceed as follows: that we constantly observe our actions following our will, so custom gives us the idea of liberty. Something like that.

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anything that Wittgenstein said new, then?

Furthermore, Millican does me a great favour yet again: I would not have known that Hume followed Hobbes in the compatibilist theory, if it were not for Millican. Hobbes posited compatibilism in Leviathan using a somewhat cheap linguistic hack: if you define liberty as 'One's actions being directed according to one's will', then this is obviously compatibilist ...

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broader instances in the past. I do not imagine a small child would infer that a positive earnings announcement CAUSES a drop in the stock price, just by observing one such instance (because the positive earnings were below the whisper number).

Hume anticipates Wittgenstein here by commenting that much disagreement in philosophy stems from ambiguity of the definitions of the terms we use. So, how is ...

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we often ascribe causation irl after just observing ONE instance. In fact this is the root of much bad thinking in our politics, in our work, in our investing, and much of daily life. I myself have done this many times in the past. How do you explain this phenomenon then, in the strictly positive sphere?

This can only be explained if the singular instances we observed were derivations of similar, ...

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I simply must challenge Hume on 1 point now: he says that custom is necessarily, positively how we have an idea of causation. He says the mind only gets an idea of causation after it observes a long course of uniform experience. From what I can read, it is not just normative that we should not infer causation from a single instance - he says that this is positively so.

But this is clearly not the case:

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system, custom alone can create an internal impression that imprints an idea.

Finally, Hume maintains that a cause = if the 1st object had not been, the 2nd never had existed. This jives exactly with that Goodfellows episode 'The counterfactual show' that I watched in 2024, where I learned the profound concept from Stephen Kotkin that all causal explanations are counterfactual arguments BY DEFINITION.

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capital which caused its trade deficit? I thought that the temporal priority of many events in real life are highly ambiguous but no one can doubt that they are causally intertwined. Thus I concur with Hume to drop this condition of temporal priority.

Millican's commentary that Hume had 'finally tracked down the impression of necessary connexion' also confuses me: I did not know that, within Hume's ...