Hume

Required Readings

Discussion Questions

(Write out brief answers to this week's discussion questions and submit them via a direct message to me on Slack no later than 11:59pm on Sunday, November 7th. Your answers should be brief, no more than a few sentences each. Be prepared to discuss them in class.)

1. Hume's famous argument is often called "the problem of induction" because it argues that all of the conclusions that we draw from inductive reasoning are ultimately unjustified. What is inductive reasoning? What sorts of information do we normally rely on inductive reasoning to get?

2. As briefly as you can, explain Hume's argument for the conclusion that inductive reasoning is unreliable.

3. What is the best criticism of Hume's problem of induction argument that you can think of? (In other words: what is the best reason you can think of that inductive reasoning is justified after all.)

Zoom Meeting

This week's Zoom meeting will be on Monday, November 8th, 11:10AM–12:25PM. Here is the link to join.

Writing Assignment

This week's writing assignment should be submitted to me in a direct message on Slack no later than 11:59pm on Friday, November 12th. Your entire written assignment should be about 500 words long. (Longer is not better; it is important to be clear and concise. One of the main challenges of this paper will be to fit everything you need into 500 words or so, and so you shouldn't waste space on anything.)

For this assignment, your job is to choose one argument from Descartes' Meditations 2–4 with which you think Hume would not agree, reconstruct the argument, and then explain how you think Hume would criticize it.

First Step: Choosing the argument. For this step, I would recommend that you first re-read the passage of Hume that is required for Week 11. Try to understand it well enough that you can think like Hume. Then re-read Meditations 2–4 and try to think about how Hume would react to each step of Descartes' argument. Try to choose an argument that is short and simple enough that you will be able to easily reconstruct it (something contained in a paragraph or two would be a good choice). And try to choose something that you are confident Hume would disagree with, and that you think you can easily explain how he would disagree with.

Second Step: Reconstructing the argument. Explain Descartes' argument as clearly as possible. What is the immediate goal of this argument—its thesis? How does Descartes try to convince us of this thesis? What premises does he rely on, and how does he take himself to know those premises?

Third Step: Explaining how Hume would criticize the argument. This part requires thinking like Hume in order to imagine what he would say in response to Descartes. Please make sure not to just criticize Descartes' conclusion. Instead, your job is to explain the flaws in Descartes' argument for that conclusion. There are two ways that you could do this. You can explain which of Descartes' premises Hume would say are false, or you can explain how all of Descartes' premises could be true without his conclusion being true.

This is going to be a much harder assignment than the ones we've done so far, and you won't be able to do it well if you leave it until the last minute. So please get started early. I highly recommend that you re-read Jim Pryor's Guidelines on Reading Philosophy and Guidelines on Writing a Philosophy Paper as part of the process of doing this assignment. Pryor gives excellent advice on how to reconstruct and criticize arguments. If you have questions, please post them in the "general discussion" channel on Slack.