A brief and enlightening exploration of Hume's life and ideas, presented in entertaining and accessible
“A year after Hume published his "History of England," he was honored by having all his works placed on the Roman Catholic Index of banned books. In the centuries before our era, this accolade was very similar to the Nobel Prize. It concentrated on genuine scientific, humanitarian, and literary achievements but was occasionally extended to charlatans or harmless mediocrities for political reasons”
“Atoms, as conceived by late-nineteenth century scientists, were like miniscule indestructible billiard balls. Mach contradicted this notion, on Humean grounds, and he was right to do so<....> Indeed, by the early decades of the twentieth century quantum physicists had begun to question the whole idea of 'picturing' the atom at all. According to the great German scientist Heisenberg (he of the famous Uncertainty Principle), it was not possible to describe such a thing as an atom. All we could do was take observations of what happened at this physical level, and record the data. Such data could be read only as a series of tables, and was not to be hung onto some "picture" of an atom. All such pictures were concepts, not based on any observation, which could only be misleading. Mach's approach (Hume's empiricism) appeared to have some relevance after all.”
“Our insensibility before the composition of the body seems to natural reason a proof of a like state after dissolution.”David Hume
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