For the last 40 years, Hume's Newtonianism has been a debated topic in Hume scholarship.The crux of the matter can be formulated by the following question: Is Hume a Newtonian philosopher? Answering to this permanent issue has produced two lines of interpretation. I shall call them "traditional" and "critical" interpretations. The traditional interpretation asserts that there are many Newtonian elements in Hume, whereas the critical interpretation seriously questions this.In this article, I consider the main points made by both lines of interpretations, and offer further arguments that contribute to this debate. I shall first argue, in favor of the traditional interpretation, that Hume is sympathetic to many prominently Newtonian themes in natural philosophy, such as experimentalism, critique of hypotheses, inductive proof, and critique of Leibnizian principles of sufficient reason and intelligibility. Second, I shall argue, in accordance with the critical interpretation, that in many cases Hume is not a Newtonian philosopher: his conceptions regarding space and time, vacuum, reality of forces, specifics about causation, and the status of mechanism differ markedly from Newton's related conceptions. The outcome of the article is that there are both Newtonian and non/antiNewtonian elements in Hume.
Einstein acknowledged that his reading of Hume influenced the development of his special theory of relativity. In this article, I juxtapose Hume's philosophy with Einstein's philosophical analysis related to his special relativity. I argue that there are two common points to be found in their writings, namely an empiricist theory of ideas and concepts, and a relationist ontology regarding space and time. The main thesis of this article is that these two points are intertwined in Hume and Einstein.Keywords: Hume, Einstein, History of Special Relativity, Space and Time.RESUMEN: Einstein reconoció que su lectura de Hume influyó en el desarrollo de su Teoría Especial de la Relatividad. En este artículo yuxtapongo la filosofía de Hume y el análisis filosófico de Einstein en relación a la relatividad especial. Argumento que hay dos puntos en común que pueden encontrarse en sus escritos, a saber: una teoría empirista de las ideas y conceptos y una ontología relacionista en lo que se refiere al espacio y al tiempo. La tesis principal del artículo es que estos dos puntos están en interconexión en Hume y en Einstein.Palabras clave: Hume, Einstein, historia de la relatividad especial, espacio y tiempo.
Eternalism is the view that all times are equally real. The relativity of simultaneity in special relativity backs this up. There is no cosmically extended, self-existing ‘now.’ This leads to a tricky problem. What makes statements about the present true? I shall approach the problem along the lines of perspectival realism and argue that the choice of the perspective does. To corroborate this point, the Lorentz transformations of special relativity are compared to the structurally similar equations of the Doppler effect. The ‘now’ is perspectivally real in the same way as a particular electromagnetic spectrum frequency. I also argue that the ontology of time licensed by perspectival realism is more credible in this context than its current alternative, the fragmentalist interpretation of special relativity.
This article investigates the relationship between Hume's causal philosophy and Newton's philosophy of nature. I claim that Newton's experimentalist methodology in gravity research is an important background for understanding Hume's conception of causality: Hume sees the relation of cause and effect as not being founded on a priori reasoning, similar to the way that Newton criticized non-empirical hypotheses about the properties of gravity. However, according to Hume's criteria of causal inference, the law of universal gravitation is not a complete causal law, since it does not include a reference either to contiguity or to temporal priority. It is still argued that because of the empirical success of Newton's theory-the law is a statement of an exceptionless repetition-Hume gives his support to it in interpreting gravity force instrumentally as if it bore a causal relation to motion. ZUSAMMENFASSUNG: Dieser Artikel untersucht die Beziehung zwischen Humes kausaler Philosophie undNewtons Naturphilosophie. Ich behaupte, dass Newtons experimentalistische Methodik der Gravitationsforschung eine wichtige Grundlage darstellt, um Humes Auffassung der Kausalität zu verstehen: Hume sieht die Beziehung von Ursache und Wirkung nicht in einem a priori Grund -ähnlich wie Newton, der nicht-empirische Hypothesen über die Eigenschaften der Schwerkraft kritisiert. Aufgrund Humes Kriterien der kausalen Inferenz jedoch kann Newtons Gravitationsgesetz nicht als vollständig kausales Gesetz bezeichnet werden, da es sich weder auf Kontiguität noch auf zeitliche Priorität beziehen lässt. Es wird dennoch argumentiert, dass Hume die Newton'sche Theorie aufgrund ihres empirischen Erfolges -das Gesetz ist ein Ausdruck ausnahmsloser Wiederholung -unterstützt, indem er die Schwerkraft als Instrument interpretiert, als ginge sie eine kausale Beziehung mit Bewegung ein.
Given the sharp distinction that follows from Hume's Fork, the proper epistemic status of propositions of mixed mathematics seems to be a mystery. On the one hand, mathematical propositions concern the relation of ideas. They are intuitive and demonstratively certain. On the other hand, propositions of mixed mathematics, such as in Hume's own example, the law of conservation of momentum, are also matter of fact propositions. They concern causal relations between species of objects, and, in this sense, they are not intuitive or demonstratively certain, but probable or provable. In this article, I argue that the epistemic status of propositions of mixed mathematics is that of matters of fact. I wish to show that their epistemic status is not a mystery. The reason for this is that the propositions of mixed mathematics are dependent on the Uniformity Principle, unlike the propositions of pure mathematics.
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