David Hume's Critique of the Theoretical Perspective

By Tim L. Smith

The theoretical perspective, or rationalism, is the attempt to comprehend the world and ourselves from reasoning alone. By reasoning alone, human beings are conceived to be isolated, objective, disengaged thinkers. As isolated, thinking subjects, human beings are thought to have two tasks, a theoretical task and a practical task. The theoretical task is to discover how the world really is. There is, however, a serious, unresolved problem in trying to carry out this theoretical task. The problem is that modern thinkers have come to recognize that the standards of rationality are internal. That is, we invariably must begin with how things appear to us. We can't, however, guarantee the way things appear to us is the way things really are. Many modern thinkers work to determine whether our internal standards of knowledge can accurately describe an external, objective reality; none have succeeded. They haven't succeeded because the human beings who have to judge the success are still isolated and trapped within their own world. Thus, Hume's point of view is that the entire history of philosophy and religion is full of bad arguments, all of which attempt to appeal to theoretical reasoning alone. Hume revolutionized philosophy by adopting a new perspective for understanding ourselves, our relation to the world and our relation to each other. In a sense, Hume psychologizes metaphysics and morality. We can see this most clearly if we contrast Hume's critique of religion and the role of reason with the more theoretical perspective.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1502344688
• ISBN13: 9781502344687
• Release Date: September 2016
• Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
• Length: 130 Pages
• Weight: 0.56 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 0.3" x 6.0"