Modernity, The Human Animal and Philosophical Tradition

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Notes

¹See my discussion in Infini Rien, Pascal's Wager and the Human Paradox, Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press for the Journal of the History of Philosophy Monograph Series, Chapter 3.

²As it happens, apart from Hegel, this particular list of books is dominated by Britons.

³ British Moralists on Human Nature, 226.

⁴ British Moralists, 226–40.

⁵The term ‘natural belief’ does not occur in Hume's writings and seems to have been introduced into Hume scholarship by Norman Kemp Smith in his Philosophy of David Hume (London: Macmillan, 1941) 87. It refers to his views about the idea of the self, the external world and causality. However, Hume's Dialogues on Natural Religion suggest a related view of what is ‘natural’ and Hume's History of England suggests that there is never enough evidence to overturn our basic political beliefs and that we come to grief if we try.

⁶We are used, of course, to the ‘new Hume’ of people such as John Wright who think that Hume did not really concern himself with metaphysical causality, and recently Helen Beebe in Hume on Causation, Routledge, 2007, has even wondered how greatly he was concerned with epistemology though, like Helen Steward in her Times Literary Supplement review (24 and 31 August 2007, p. 31) we may well want to be cautious of this. That Hume was a serious historian with an interest in the philosophy of history is not to be doubted.

⁷Sophie Botros, Hume, Reason, and Morality (London: Routledge, 2005).

⁸‘The way to happiness and the practice of truth incur into one another’, The Religion of Nature Delineated, (Dublin: George Grierson and George Ewing, 1726) 40. (Wollaston notes that a few, evidently rough, copies were run off the press in 1722.)

⁹See, e.g., the discussion on 39–40.

¹⁰ Natural History of Religion, 1757, quoted here from the edition of A. Wayne Colver, (Oxford: Clarendon, 1976) 92. Hume's claim there is strong: ‘It scarce seems possible, that anyone of good understanding should reject that idea once it is presented to him.’ This is not the place in which to settle questions about Hume's beliefs. David O'Connor in Hume on Religion (London: Routledge, 2001) 11 calls Hume's ‘final’ position ‘weakly deistic’ but says it is ‘deeply ironic’.

¹¹Edited by L. A. Selby-Bigge and Peter Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon, 1978) 461; edited by David Fate Norton and Mary Norton (Oxford: Clarendon, 2007) Vol. 1, p. 297.

¹²Hegel speaks of the ‘march of God in history’ and of the state as the ‘divine in the world’ in the Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts. (See Sections 259, Addition, and 272, Addition.) The latter calls on us to venerate the state as a ‘secular deity’(Irdisch-Göttlisches). Hegel also insists that ‘states, nations and individuals’ all arise as a result of the ‘world mind’ (Section 344). Hegel says that the future of relations between states is unwritten; but there is no secular authority which is above the state (Section 333). Thus, international relations are only open to the arbitration of the ‘world mind’. He means the Absolute by this. Hegel says there is ‘no secular praetor’ to do this job, but his Absolute becomes a Divine Praetor. Unlike Kant, Hegel denied that there could be an international authority such as the United Nations because he thought that individuals derive their rights only from states which express and arise out of the particular ‘civil society’ on which their culture is based.

¹³ Hegel & Christian Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

¹⁴Is it an accident that several great sceptics about metaphysical certainties – La Mothe Le Vayer and Pierre Bayle in the Seventeenth Century, Hume and Kant in the Eighteenth for instance – found themselves tempted out of their skepticism when they came to write history or to write about it? Perhaps the reason is, though none of them says it, because if one has no grip on the past, if knowledge and even the world exist only in the last moment, then nothing including the sentence one has just read would seem to make sense.

¹⁵Kant, Immanuel (1963) The Idea of a Universal History and The Conjectural Beginning of Human History, translated by Lewis White Beck and Emil Fackenheim in Kant on History (Liberal Arts Press, Indianapolis).

¹⁶The Gabriele Rabel translation of ‘What Does it Mean: To Orient Oneself in Thinking?’ in Kant, A Study (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1963) 169 reads ‘As regards the degree of certainty, it is not inferior to any knowledge’. For the German text see Werke, German Academy of Sciences, Vol. VIII, pp. 127 ff. Kant wrote this little work in 1786 between the editions of the Critique of Pure Reason. In The Critique of Practical Reason itself, translated by Lewis White Beck (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1956), Kant seems to go further still. On p. 126 he says ‘in the combination of pure speculative with pure practical reason in one cognition, the latter has primacy …’.

¹⁷I have discussed this in Logic and Reality (Assen: Royal Vangorcum and New York: Humanities Press, 1972).

¹⁸Hodgson, 247.

¹⁹cf. William Desmond, Hegel's God: A Counterfeit Double? (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), esp. 137–40 where Desmond explains hyperbolic good in terms of the good as the absolute origin of finite goods and so beyond any of them or the world and accuses Hegel of having an unacceptable God. He says ‘Hegel's language of holistic immanence counterfeits worship’, 138. It is Hegel's insistence on immanence that Desmond objects to. For Desmond on Hegel and autonomy see 4–5.

²⁰Hodgson, 254. On Desmond's account, this goodness is the transcendent cause of everything.

²¹It forms volumes 3–5 of G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen: Ausgewählte Nachshriften und Manuskripte (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1985).

²²The others were R. F. Brown and J. M. Stewart ‘with assistance’ from H. S. Harris (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984–7; and Oxford: The University Press, 2007).

²³See the earlier note on the Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts.

²⁴Cudworth does not make it into the index.

²⁵See, e.g., the discussions of McTaggart on time in D. H. Mellor's Matters of Metaphysics (Cambridge: The University Press, 1991). His discussions of F. P. Ramsey on relations and complex predicates also lead us back to Bradley. Mellor, now Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge, would certainly not call himself an idealist, but elements of the idealist tradition figure in his writings, and he is very much a metaphysician.

²⁶ John Grote, 365–6.

²⁷John Offer, ‘Man's Evolution to a Just and Beneficent Being’, The Times Higher Education Supplement No. 1807, 17 August 2007, p. 25.

²⁸13 August 2007, 75–9.

²⁹London: Duckworth, 1988.

³⁰‘Careless’ evidently means not sloppy but without care, not having the prudence which led Hume to postpone the publication of the Dialogues.

³¹This was the first essay in Four Dissertations (London: A. Millar, 1757) 21.

³²I am not sure that this is the right conclusion about Hume's writings.

³³I have discussed this issue in a book written with Richard Feist, Inference and Persuasion (Halifax, NS: Fernwood, 2005).