Philosophy and Psychology - According to Hume
Reading & the Good Life (16 Feb at Noon EST)
Reading & the Good Life
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This week continues our exploration into the wisdom of the eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher and historian David Hume. This month's book is The Great Guide: What David Hume Can Teach Us Being Human and Living Well by Julian Baggini (a previous podcast guest).
Who is David Hume?
Generally regarded as one of the most important philosophers to write in English, David Hume (1711–1776) was also well known in his own time as a historian and essayist. A master stylist in any genre, his major philosophical works—A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–1740), the Enquiries concerning Human Understanding (1748), and Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751), as well as his posthumously published Dialogues concerning Natural Religion (1779)—remain widely and deeply influential. […]
***Learn more: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hume/
Here’s a short video on David Hume by Jeffrey Kaplan:
Selected Passages
The following passages from The Great Guide by Julian Baggini will help guide our conversation (Register here). Here are a few reflection questions to consider: (1) How would someone embody these lessons in daily life? (2) What might make it challenging to implement these ideas? (3) How can the following insights help us to live the good life?
A related cognitive bias is hyperbolic discounting, the tendency to prefer immediate rewards over future ones, even when the future rewards are much greater. Hume describes this precisely when he writes that “there is no quality in human nature, which causes more fatal errors in our conduct, than that which leads us to prefer whatever is present to the distant and remote, and makes us desire objects more according to their situation than their intrinsic value.” Even when we are fully convinced that the more distant is much more valuable than that which is nearer, “we are not able to regulate our actions by this judgment; but yield to the sollicitations of our passions, which always plead in favour of whatever is near and contiguous.” […]
— Julian Baggini, The Great Guide (Ch. 4)
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