A Treatise of Human Nature by David Hume
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Much simpler shorter and less expansive than An Enquiry into Human Understanding but all the same, intensely interesting.
Karatani is correct, for Hume all knowledge is synthesis save for math, and counting, which Hume doesn’t seem to be able to account for at all — so he claims such a thing is innate. Indeed, we can grasp that such an ability (counting) and spacial-motoral skills seem to be bred into us, as innate mental structures. Still, Kant in this one area is more radical than Hume, claiming that math is also synthetic knowledge.
What I found startling was a passage here, in which Hume posits in paragraph section 122, that the nature of modern enquirers understand that qualities are separate than the objects themselves. Here he lays groundwork for a phenomenal and noumenal distinction, something Kant later picks up, through the transcendental framework if abstraction… that the ideas we have are innate to us, as such ideas require material expression which we get from senses and feelings. Kant also takes serious the conjoined nature of two objects; where Hume takes sufficient reason to task, Kant understands this as an ex post facto (retroactive) synthesis, one that later on Bergson utilizes to tie together disparate fields despite their different culturally determined signifying functions.
Hume is pretty fantastic.
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