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I Get So Emotional Baby
David Hume, the Enlightenment grandee, knew there would be days like these.
I wrote recently about the development of “Ethical Emotivism” in Twentieth Century philosophy; an approach which says our moral reasoning is constituted not by logic but by our attitudes and interests and feelings.
In this article, I want to go back in time—all the way back to the eighteenth century—in search of the roots of this way of thinking.
Ideas, after all, have a habit of reinventing themselves for the times.
So buckle up. Our destination is the epicenter of the Enlightenment: Edinburgh, Scotland.
It is 1739 and a twenty-eight year old David Hume has just published A Treatise of Human Nature.
He was a child prodigy, in the public eye, and he expected the world would hang on his every word. Treatise was the first book of its kind—a work of revolutionary philosophical psychology—and Hume thought it would secure him a university professorship.
However, as is often the way, no one even read the thing, let alone cared about what it said, and Hume would toil away in obscurity for many years before catching his break and making the big bucks with which he would later build his New Town Edinburgh townhouse.
