Skip to main content

Celebrating World Philosophy Day around the international table with Hume and Friends!


I'm celebrating World Philosophy Day UNESCO and the reasons behind it: 
"Background

In establishing World Philosophy Day UNESCO strives to promote an international culture of philosophical debate that respects human dignity and diversity. The Day encourages academic exchange and highlights the contribution of philosophical knowledge in addressing global issues.

Why a Philosophy Day?

Many thinkers state that “astonishment” is the root of philosophy. Indeed, philosophy stems from humans’ natural tendency to be astonished by themselves and the world in which they live. This field, which sees itself as a form of “wisdom”, teaches us to reflect on reflection itself, to continually question well-established truths, to verify hypotheses and to find conclusions. For centuries, in every culture, philosophy has given birth to concepts, ideas and analyses, and, through this, has set down the basis for critical, independent and creative thought. World Philosophy Day celebrates the importance of philosophical reflection, and encourages people all over the world to share their philosophical heritage with each other. For UNESCO, philosophy provides the conceptual bases of principles and values on which world peace depends: democracy, human rights, justice, and equality.
Philosophy helps consolidate these authentic foundations of peaceful coexistence." 

So, to celebrate World Philosophy Day here’s a quote from Hume:
“……the genius of philosophy, if carefully cultivated by several, must gradually diffuse itself throughout the whole society…….”
SBN 11, E1.9, in ‘An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding’, Section I., ‘Of the Different Species of Philosophy’

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Hume’s aesthetics applied to classical music: Who decides when emotion is too much emotion - what does too much emotion mean? Part One

I’ve been inspired by Steven Isserlis’s interesting and thought provoking Facebook post 1 to start writing about Hume and music because Isserlis raises key notions which, I think, Hume could shed light on in order to help us untangle the complex concepts we often use in the music world. I would like to do something a little different from Isserlis by philosophically analysing the deeper implications of the terms we use casually. In summary, I understand Isserlis as arguing against “the danger of pouring superfluous beauty” into music, conveying “false emotion” in the way a musician goes about playing a piece. He advocates “judicious” “choices” about how we play a piece to transmit the meaning and truth of the music. He concludes that we must “ensure we are telling the right story” through the music and warns that “it is all too easy to inflame an audience through false passions; but if we do that, we are distorting the truth. And reaching the truth of the music has to be our ulti...
Post a Comment
Read more

How can we apply Hume’s passages on emotion to aesthetics? Part Two

Carrying on from my last post, how can we apply Hume’s passages on emotion to aesthetics? In this post, I shall examine Hume’s essay ‘Of Tragedy’ 1 as well as narrow my focus to music. This means that the suppositions and judgements in question are aesthetic judgements and our feelings about the music and how it is being interpreted and conveyed relate to our individual aesthetic taste as well as a more general standard of taste. Hume’s essay ‘Of tragedy’ and the concept of how the passions, including tragic emotion and the emotion of beauty, impact on an audience Hume agrees with L’Abbe Dubos that passions in aesthetics are a good thing because: “nothing is in general so disagreeable to the mind as the languid, listless state of indolence, into which the mind falls upon the removal of all passion and occupation.” 2 Hume adds to this positive view of the passions in aesthetics by adding that: “The view, or, at least, imagination of high passions, …. affects the spec...
Post a Comment
Read more