Deepest Divide in Modern Philosophy?
Whether it's possible to specify the conditions under which how someone reacts suffices to make that reaction true. Put in other words, the divide is over whether under non-circularly-specified ideal conditions, it's still possible to make a mistake.
Basically: Humeans think no, Kantians think yes.
Basically: Humeans think no, Kantians think yes.
posted by Charles P. Everitt at 8:06 AM
6 Comments:
I'm somewhat embarrassed to admit that I don't understand what you mean--perhaps because the divide is so deep. Could you provide an example?
or rather, more embarassingly: I understand your characterization of the divide, but I don't see how it is supposed to apply to Hume/Kant.
The idea is just that Hume and Kant stand for two radically opposed ways of understanding what it is to make a judgment. For Kant it's something that we're responsible for doing, such that even under ideal conditions we can screw it up. For Hume, judgment is just something we do. Freedom, responsibility, etc., don't enter into the picture at all.
My picture of this divide is partly shaped by thinking about what motivates the various Kantians and Humeans I've known. The Humeans have tended to think that ultimately judgment can be understood in dispositional terms. Whereas the Kantians have tended to think that can't be right, because of the normativity of judgment. And I think that the way that they understand normativity commits them to thinking that there's always room for us to make a mistake.
Don't know if that's any clearer. This is all impossibly vague and much too big picture to really get much traction. But I do think it marks a deep divide. Let me know what you think.
Yes, that helps; it was the Hume side of things that I was not getting (perhaps because I am on the other side of the divide). Putting it as: judgment as just something we do/understandable dispositionally, helps.
Do you have a tentative list of denizens on either side?
I wish that now we could go back and have the conversation we had at Portillo's; it pertained to this issue on the Kantian side.
Aristotelians think no such specification of conditions for truth is possible, not because truth requires freedom, but because in order for a thinker to attain truth he has to have the relevant capacity (episteme, phronesis, etc.).
It's an error to think that such a capacity can be understood at the level of a particular episode of thought, either as conditions on it or as obedience to a requirement that applies to a thinker simply insofar as rational.
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