David Hume's essay Of Moral Prejudices offers a spirited defense of "all the most endearing sentiments of the hearts, all the most useful biases and instincts, ...
_Postures of the Mind _was first published in 1985. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. Annette Baier develops, in these essays, a posture in philosophy of mind and in ethics that grows out of her reading of Hume and the later Wittgenstein, and that challenges several Kantian or analytic articles of faith. She questions the assumption that intellect has authority over all (...) human feelings and traditions; that to recognize order we must recognize universal laws—descriptive or prescriptive; that the essential mental activity is representing; and that mental acts can be analyzed into discrete basic elements, combined according to statable rules of synthesis. In the first group of essays—"Varieties of Mental Postures"—Baier evaluates the positions taken by philosophers ranging from Descartes to Dennett and Davidson. Among her topics are remembering, intending, realizing, caring, representing, changing one's mind, justifying one's actions and feelings, and having conflicting reasons for them. The second group of essays—"Varieties of Moral Postures" - explores the sort of morality we get when all of these capacities become reflective and self-corrective. Some deal with particular moral issues—our treatment of animals, our policies regarding risk to human life, our contractual obligations; others, with more general questions on the role of moral philosophers and the place of moral theory. These essays respond to the theories of Hobbes, Kant, Rawls, and MacIntyre, but Baier's most positive reaction is to David Hume; _Postures of the Mind _ affirms and cultivates his version of a moral reflection that employs feeling and tradition as well as reason. (shrink)
Annette Baier's aim is to make sense of David Hume's Treatise as a whole. Hume's family motto, which appears on his bookplate, was True to the End. Baier argues that it is not until the end of the Treatise that we get his full story about truth and falsehood, reason and folly. By the end, we can see the cause to which Hume has been true throughout the work. Baier finds Hume's Treatise of Human Nature to be a carefully crafted (...) literary and philosophical work which itself displays a philosophical progress of sentiments. His starting place is an overly abstract intellectualism that deliberately thrusts passions and social concerns into the background. In the three interrelated books of the Treatise, his self-understander proceeds through partial successes and dramatic failures to emerge with new-found optimism, expecting that the exact knowledge the morally self-conscious anatomist of human nature can acquire will itself improve and correct our vision of morality. Baier describes how, by turning philosophy toward human nature instead of toward God and the universe, Hume initiated a new philosophy, a broader discipline of reflection that can embrace Charles Darwin and Michel Foucault as well as William James and Sigmund Freud. Hume belongs both to our present and to our past. (shrink)
_Postures of the Mind _was first published in 1985. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. Annette Baier develops, in these essays, a posture in philosophy of mind and in ethics that grows out of her reading of Hume and the later Wittgenstein, and that challenges several Kantian or analytic articles of faith. She questions the assumption that intellect has authority over all (...) human feelings and traditions; that to recognize order we must recognize universal laws—descriptive or prescriptive; that the essential mental activity is representing; and that mental acts can be analyzed into discrete basic elements, combined according to statable rules of synthesis. In the first group of essays—"Varieties of Mental Postures"—Baier evaluates the positions taken by philosophers ranging from Descartes to Dennett and Davidson. Among her topics are remembering, intending, realizing, caring, representing, changing one's mind, justifying one's actions and feelings, and having conflicting reasons for them. The second group of essays—"Varieties of Moral Postures" - explores the sort of morality we get when all of these capacities become reflective and self-corrective. Some deal with particular moral issues—our treatment of animals, our policies regarding risk to human life, our contractual obligations; others, with more general questions on the role of moral philosophers and the place of moral theory. These essays respond to the theories of Hobbes, Kant, Rawls, and MacIntyre, but Baier's most positive reaction is to David Hume; _Postures of the Mind _ affirms and cultivates his version of a moral reflection that employs feeling and tradition as well as reason. (shrink)
The Cautious Jealous Virtue is an illuminating meditation that will interest not only Hume scholars but also those interested in the issues of justice and in ...
Hume’s version, in An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals, section 9,, of the viewpoint from which moral assessments are made, and from which traits are recognized as virtues or vices, is that it is one which activates a “universal principle of the human frame,” the “principle of humanity.” It displays “the force of many sympathies,” and depends upon our possession of “some propensity to the good of mankind”. Does this represent a revision, on Hume’s part, of his Treatise claim (...) that sympathy with a person’s “narrow circle” is what enables us to judge that person’s moral goodness? A humanity-wide circle is scarcely “narrow,” even if it is not wide enough for those who see our treatment of animals as relevant to our moral merit or demerit. (shrink)
The pioneering moral philosopher Annette Baier presents a series of new and recent essays in ethics, broadly conceived to include both engagements with other philosophers and personal meditations on life. Baier's unique voice and insight illuminate topics ranging from patriotism and future generations to honesty, trust, hope, and friendship.
Both a morality, like Kant's, which relies on wrongdoers' guilt feelings and expectation of punishment, as enforcement for its requirements, and one which, like Hume's, relies on the feelings of shame and expectation of their fellows' contempt which will be felt by those showing lack of the moral virtues, seem to merit the charge that morality is an intrinsically cruel institution. The prospects for a gentle non-punitive morality are explored, and Hume's views found more promising, for this purpose, than Kant's.
Both in ethics and in epistemology one source of scepticism in its contemporary version is the realization, often belated, of the full consequences of atheism. Modern non-moral philosophy looks back to Descartes as its father figure, but disowns the Third Meditation. But if God does not underwrite one's cognitive powers, what does? The largely unknown evolution of them, which is just a version of Descartes’ unreliable demon? “Let us … grant that all that is here said of God is a (...) fable, nevertheless in whatever way they suppose that I have arived at the state of being that I have reached, whether they attribute it to fate or to accident, or make out that it is by a continual succession of antecedents, or by some other method — since to err and deceive oneself is a defect, it is clear that the greater will be the probability of my being so imperfect as to deceive myself ever, as is the Author to whom they assign my being the less powerful”. (shrink)
Berkeley says that "the making and unmaking of ideas doth very properly denominate the mind active." What did Berkeley take as the paradigm of that making which denominates mind active? He speaks in the same passage of exciting "ideas in my mind at pleasure," of varying and shifting the scene "as oft as I see fit. It is no more than willing and straightway this or that idea arises in my fancy." This quite clearly takes human idea-making to be fantasizing. (...) But if this is the only sort of making we are capable of, it is a poor model for that divine making which Berkeley wishes to obtain by "reflecting on my own soul, heightening its powers, and removing its imperfections." Ideas of the fancy are not strong, lively, vivid, nor real for other minds. Has Berkeley any other, better, human model for the divine making? In his Commonplace Book, Berkeley notes tersely, "We move our legs ourselves." This suggests that our voluntary actions could be taken by Berkeley as ideas made by us. This would at least give him a human model for that divine responsibility for something real, something strong, vivid, lively, something which other minds have no choice but to see, when in broad daylight they open their eyes from the appropriate vantage point. (shrink)
We discuss the variety of sorts of sympathy Hume recognizes, the extent to which he thinks our sympathy with others’ feelings depends on inferences from the other’s expression, and from her perceived situation, and consider also whether he later changed his views about the nature and role of sympathy, in particular its role in morals.
Philosophers have always seen at least part of their job to be social criticism, where by that I mean not necessarily negative assessment of existing social practices, but rather the attempt to understand them, to see existing local ones against a background of other possibilities. Included among these surveyed practices are, or should be, practices of justification and criticism, our own included. Socrates set the standard when, in the Apology and Crito he turned his method on his own activity, both (...) defending it and also showing understanding and acceptance of the judgment of those who condemned it. Most of us, after Socrates, have tried to emulate his self-conscious attention to philosophical method, but usually only to intellectual methods of reasoning, rarely following him in consciousness of the social role we play, and its relation to the whole network of roles in which it is embedded. Yet if our own activity is to justify itself, that justification surely depends upon the relation between what we are doing and the work done by others, including those who support us in the crude economic sense. It is not easy to survey the whole scheme of social roles and to consider alternative ways of dividing the social labor, but philosophers have often claimed to have synoptic vision. No greater hubris is involved in trying synoptically to survey a society's array of social roles, and its alternatives, than in purporting to produce moral principles valid in all conditions, or truths for all possible worlds. (shrink)
