Hmmm...not much seems to be happening on the blog tonight.
Everyone turning their attention to other matters after getting the papers in?
General bafflement where Hume is concerned?
Perplexity about how to approach this reading?
If the questions below are daunting, feel free to break the silence here. What questions do you have about this text? What do you find particularly puzzling or difficult to understand?
Deadline: Wednesday (3/2), start of class.
11 comments:
I found that Hume's "Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion" was not the easiest read. I had to re-read several paragraphs, but I did find it interesting. I agreed mostly with Philo in the first 9 parts.
I agree that Hume is a rather difficult author to read. His language needs to be "deciphered", and his arguments are a little harder to understand when stacked together like this. I'm getting through it, but with some difficulty and it's delaying my visits to the blog.
Also, I don't mean to be belittle this class, but I have a lot going on in terms of tests in other classes and working, so the blog might skip my mind occasionally. Sorry in advance if this happens.
I agree with the previous comments. To be given so many pages to read and over the week too, is asking a little too much when there are other homeworks to consider. Also this book is not easy to read, it's not like you can just sit down and be able to read this and be expected to understand everything. This book requires some time and quite a bit of thought to understand everything that the characters are trying to express. Not only that, but unfortunately this is not the most interesting book to read, they only speak about philosophy its not like an action, romance etc. It might have been better if this book was given in small portions, and we discussed it little by little instead of being expected to most of the book by wednesday and not get confused. I usually like reading, but this book just doesn't grab my attention for very long and even then the bits that I do read don't make much sense. I am finding myself going over the things I have just read. Plus probably most people like myself can't spend a whole evening trying to understand this book, when there are other classes. We probably need more than week to discuss this. It might have been better to have this assigned over the weekend. Sorry if this sounds mean.
I sort of agree with those above me, it was a bit harder to read and to some it might have been a bit boring. However, eventually I found it interesting it some aspects. I found that after re-reading my position on the nature of God would shift and that I could see some of the characters logic in their arguments. However, I'm hesitant to post any blog posts regarding my opinion because there are parts of it I still don't fully understand.
I stand with those who think it's pretty dense stuff. I keep having to read three or four times over to get at the meaning, and I noticed that sometimes you have to read the next speaker's bit before you can understand the point of what the previous speaker was saying. But I agree with Vivian; I don't really understand where I fit into his thoughts, so I'm hesitant to put it out there.
It kind of bothers me that it would appear that Hume is really just placing his own internal issues with these existential questions out there on paper as a transcription of a thought process rather than as a coherent argument, which we saw in Kant. He wasn't easy to read either, but he asked the questions and then he gave his opinion. What I'm getting out of Hume is that he's thrice divided on issues, writing a treatise on the fact that he can't decide, and yet we have to read between the lines to come to that conclusion. I agree that we're going to need a lot of time to deconstruct this sort of text.
Really don't have any question in regards to the text as of now. A bit on the same page with the rest of the class, in the way that this text requires some slow and close reading, especially to grasp the different concepts and arguments. I feel what will be helpful so far, like Monday in class, to try to go through and point out the different arguments that have been made up to the specific point for Wednesday. This will help us understand which character agrees and disagrees with the arguments made by each.
I actually do have one topic of great interest from Monday. I'm not sure it is one of the more directly related themes of the reading, but it was talked about in class and my mind was so argumentative with itself once I left that I felt it was something worth discussing further. I forget the proper terms for the topic, but we were talking about if someone can actually understand something without experiencing. The "classic" example given was being a bachelor. Maybe I missed something, but I do not understand it. At first, I agreed that there are some thing you may understand that you have not yourself experienced. Then I tried thinking of such situations and I just could not find any. s for the bachelor example, say from the moment of birth, the child was matched with a girl born the day before and they spent every day of their lives together and knew they were to be married, have a family, and never be with anyone else. How could this boy know the feeling of bachelorhood? Even for some things that one may know the general idea about, even the simplest things, I do not feel they can truly know what it is like. One example may be having a brother. You can have a best friend your entire life. You can join a fraternity and go through things with people you could never ever do again. You could have such a relationship with someone that the worst torture imaginable could not tear you apart, and you can have the idea of what a brother is. But if you have not held your brother moments after he was born, or threatened the bully his age at recess, or shared a room with him so you know things about him he may not even realize, you do not fully understand the experience. Even if a boy is brought into your family from another directly at birth, you do not share the same blood as him. You were not created by the love of the same two human beings who will shape you the rest of your life. Without experience, full understanding of something can never be achieved in my opinion. It is something worth arguing, but right now I cannot find an example otherwise.
Chad, I'm so glad you brought it up so we can straighten out the confusion here. The issue we were talking about was *a priori* a *a posteriori* truths. *A posteriori* truths are things that we can only know from experience, and as Chad eloquently notes above, any claim about what it's like to be a bachelor or what bachelors do would be *a posteriori* (for purposes of simplicity, I'll phrase it as a statement--something like "Bachelors are less happy than married men" would--if it WERE true (which it probably isn't)--be an *a posteriori* truth. But in any case you could only determine its truth or falsity by experience--for example, by talking to a lot of bachelors and married men.
The example that was offered in class as an example of an *a priori* truth was a different kind of statement: "All bachelors are single." You don't have to be a bachelor, talk to a bachelor, or even live on a planet where there are men to know that all bachelors are single. If you know what a bachelor is in the first place, you know that one is single. Other examples would be things like mathematical facts (2 + 2 = 4) or geometrical claims (parallel lines will never meet). We know these things are true, not because scientists have counted 2 + 2 over and over again or because intrepid explorers have followed pairs of parallel lines deep into the wilderness, but simply because its in the nature of these things that they can't be otherwise. And (unlike the bachelor example which some would say is a trite analytic claim, not a particularly interesting truth), they go on being true even if there's no one there to notice.
This is definitely a difficult text to get through, but I find it to be worth it and very interesting when I understand the points being made. It takes a lot of close and focused reading; I sometimes read a page or so and then have to go back and read again. From what I do understand, I particularly enjoy how I can almost see people I know and the arguments that they would agree with or disagree with. I think the stereotypes of Cleanthes, Demea, and Philo are still present today and it's helped me when I'm reading to try and focus on the characters as actually having a conversation rather than simply trying to parse the arguments they're making.
In David Humes, "Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion" I found it a little difficult to read and understand when I first started reading it. After going back and trying to depict how Hume defined and illustrated his rationality of religious beliefs in the three characters: Cleanthes, Demea and Philo. According to my understanding, of this text I believe that Hume whats to find the correlation between morality and the existence of God. Through this he has three characters which he underlines has a different belief. Cleanthes believes that we can have knowledge of God through reasoning but we must find proof through nature. I actually agree to an extent but gets confused as to why Demea believs that we can not know like the nature of God through our reasoning. Hence, Philo has similar belief as Demea but feels that God is very unclear (unintelligible) but also infers that God could be dishonest. I find it hard to really agree or disagree with one character that Hume defines because I have my own religious beliefs about religion and the existence and nature of God. Address me if I am wrong, but I think that in Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion he is attempting to find an answer or justice to whether evidence suggest that God can be smart, good, and powerful altogether.
Whenever a philosopher writes one of these dialogues, s/he's never really giving each of the viewpoints a fair hearing, but rather tends to have their own voice be one of the characters in the discussion as a way to set up straw men to be picked apart by the philosopher's chosen viewpoint. I'm having trouble deciphering precisely who Hume sympathizes with most strongly here. Clearly not Cleanthes, most strongly it seems to be Philo but there are some points where it seems that Demea could be the strongest voice.
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