From: Andrew Brown (Andrew@LUBS.LEEDS.AC.UK)
Date: Mon Nov 17 2003 - 08:24:03 EST
Hi Ian, On 14 Nov 2003 at 18:10, Ian Wright wrote: > There's been lots of answers to Hume, not least Kant > and Hegel. A modern approach is Bhaskar's critical > realism, in particular "A Realist Theory of Science". > Related to Andrew's point: he holds that critical > realism doesn't fully answer Hume either, and that to > fully answer him requires a more forceful identity between > thought and reality. > > But really it is very silly to deny the reality of > causal change independent of our knowledge of it. > And Wittgenstein was regularly quite silly in his > reduction of ontology to epistemology, his empiricism > of language, and belief that philosophy was essentially > about analysing implicit common-sense theories. > Here I agree with Popper that philosophy (and reality) > is much more than that. > It is of course very silly to deny mind-independent causation. My argument is that many philosophical attempts to avoid this obvious silliness collapse to (Humean) scepticism. In a nutshell, if causation is mind-independent then causation could be impossible to grasp by the mind. Popper's philosophy is a case in point, I would argue, despites Popper's claim to overcome Hume. The philosophical trick is to uphold mind-independent casuation (reality) without succommbing to Hume and I argue that materialist dialectics does just that. Many thanks, Andy
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