Page 19 - GALIET THE HEROIC SPECTACLE OF MORALS: Hume IV

Galiet & Galiet
controlled and limited by universal principles. 223, 98. Stronger, selfish and private passions, often overpowered by their own force, yield to social and public principles
SO?
“By this it appears how necessary it is for any man that aspires to true knowledge, to examine the definitions of former authors...”62
“All I know is that I know nothing...all we can express is correct belief and give a particular or universal account of something, of the differenceness of the thing...but this is not knowledge... all knowledge is but a recollection.”
(Socrates in Plato’s Meno)
ACT III. Philosophy’s Magnifying Glass: Confessions
Post-Mortem
Ì Then I had asked (page 2), is it possible to deduce general maxims by comparing particular instances? Logically and epistemologically, it is suspicious to derive universal conclusions from particular instances. To say a particular affirmative, some S are P, does not entail a universal affirmative, All S are P. If Hume insists on this partialàtotal inclusion undertaking, then he is theorizing a la Plato. He then needs the secret key and logos: participates. So choosing, he inevitably has to admit, to avoid paradoxes, those uncanny divagations & perplexities of the imagination, that some particular ‘s’ has to participate in the universal ‘S.’ If he were to see this as it is, he, and us, would leap back to the net of one Aristocles or Plato 2299 ß [This, of course, is intuitive]
Ì Again, does Hume resort to Plato’s argument? By defining the principle of private- social reflexive equilibrium in relation to the universal principle of humanity, Hume triggers that which he denies: Plato’s Timaeus. In it, Plato claims that the ‘particular participates in the universal and the universal dominates the particular.’ This suggests that the humanity in each one of us participates in the humanness of humanity and that humanness dominates the particular. (Humanness as the sublime eternal form, the ‘is of
62 Hobbes. Leviathan IV. 13. Hobbes. Leviathan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
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