David Hume’s Empiricism: Context and Critique of Causality
David Hume: Biography and Historical Setting
Hume was born in Edinburgh in 1711 and died in 1776.
Historical Context
England after the Revolution of 1688
- The Revolution established bourgeois parliamentary democracy and the supremacy of Parliament.
- Intervention of the people in the laws, rights, and political liberties.
- Economic and religious freedom: Abolition of monopolies.
- England becomes the first economic, industrial, and capitalist power.
Pre-Revolutionary France
- “Enlightened Despotism”: “All
Core Concepts in International Relations Theory and Global Politics
Fundamental Concepts in Political Theory
Polarity
The state of having two opposite or contradictory tendencies, opinions, or aspects.
Absolute Gains
A measure of the total effect of an action, comprising power, security, economic, and cultural effects.
Relative Gains
The actions of states considered only in respect to power balances, without regard to other factors.
Third Party Regimes
A person or group besides the two primarily involved in a situation, or a political party organized as an alternative to
Read MoreCore Concepts and Challenges in Moral Philosophy
Foundations of Ethics and Morality
Defining Ethics
Ethics refers to moral judgments and sets of principles concerning an action (good, bad, right, wrong). The repetition of acts creates habits that determine attitudes. Throughout life, personality is formed through behavior.
The Concept of Ethics is a discipline that seeks to value judgments, provided that such value judgments are applied to the distinction between good and evil.
Defining Morality
The Concept of Morality is a set of beliefs, customs,
Read MoreDefining Human Action, Labor, and Technological Risk
The Nature of Human Action
The human being knows and is intelligent, but also acts. Precisely through intelligence, we feel the need to react to different alternatives. Action can be defined as the capacity to imagine, organize, plan, and realize desires, projects, plans, and intentions.
Defining Traits of Human Action
Three traits define human action:
- Intentionality: Aristotle understood the way the subject acts, moving towards the external world as reality. Two modes are directed towards the object:
Immanuel Kant’s Pre-Critical and Critical Philosophy
Immanuel Kant’s Pre-Critical Philosophy
Physics: Forces, Space, and Time
The physics problem during this period was the problem of forces, contrasting the defending Cartesian identification of the body with extension (space). Leibniz identified the monad with a living force, asserting that space, or extent, was merely the result of the activity of the monads. Kant attempted a synthesis of Newton and Leibniz in his first book.
This period also addressed the second major problem of physics: space and
Read MoreKant’s Ethical Framework: Duty, Reason, and the Moral Law
Kant’s Ethics: The Practical Use of Reason
In Kantian ethics, virtue is defined by acting according to duty, adjusting our actions to the moral law. This framework is built upon two fundamental facts:
- For humans, the measure of an action’s moral value is solely its intention, i.e., the goodwill that drives it.
- People believe that goodwill is one that acts purely out of duty, regardless of any empirical contingency or the material interests of the subject, accepting the simple mandate of its existence.