Reflection:
I have decided that I am a very big fan of David Hume and the theories that he brings to the table. When I learned that he thinks that people use facts merely to back up their feelings, not the other way around. I have begun to notice that this is very obvious in how people argue and bring about points, people tend to use facts to back up what they see as a better option. I do this as well myself, and I have no problem admitting this. It is rather hard to no tie this into the current political climate, so that’s what I’ll do. People vote based on how they feel, they can lie, or dance around the truth that they do, but in the end people back someone based on their presentation. If I don’t like the religion of Islam for personal reasons, I’m probably going to vote for someone who backed a hypothetical Muslim ban. This isn’t where my love of Hume ends, his views on perception also intrigues me. You cannot see something with at least a little bit of a perception to go along with your vision. When I see a Toyota Camry, I can see that it’s blue, I can see that it’s a very average car. In doing this I allow my perceptions to get in the way of just seeing the beast of a Camry, my perceptions alter the vision of what Car and Driver has described as “wanting to party.”
Connection:
To the untrained mind, there is little to tie a sensible family sedan to philosophy. However, we have been on a roll with empiricist and rationalist thinkers. The role of senses in knowledge was a hotly debated topic in the 1700s, but less so now. I think that discussing this, especially at the time that we are, is a great opportunity. There is little known about the way that we come about knowledge, and there is little being done to resolve this. People don’t have the philosophical debates that Descartes and others had, we don’t discuss how we know what we know, or if we are even real. I think that this is a shame, we don’t know the answers to these questions, we can’t know the answers to them either, but we sure as hell should try to get the best possible answer. Without discussions like this, we have no one thinking about important ideas that we don’t understand yet. We are having blazing innovation on the technological front, but very little is being done to innovate the philosophical Zeitgeist. We’ve gotten bogged down in discussions about whether people should have to use a particular bathroom, rather than talking about whether the bathroom exists or not. I can’t understand how people can think this as trivial. We clearly don’t know enough about the world and how it works, this is something that we need to fix.The only way that I can see to fix it is to have conversations such as those that Hume would have had.
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