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Possibility of objective knowledge
Thursday 14 February 2008
I see that Antony Flew now believes that David Hume was utterly wrong to maintain that we have no experience, and hence no genuine ideas, of making things happen, of physical necessity and of physical impossibility. Crucially and correctly, Flew goes on to say that Hume’s scepticism about cause and effect and his agnosticism about the external world are jettisoned the moment he leaves his study. “There is, for instance, no trace of the thesis that causal connections and necessities are nothing but false projections on to nature in the notorious section ‘Of Miracles’ in the first Inquiry. Again in his History of England Hume gave no hint of scepticism about either the external world or causation. In this Hume may remind us of those of our contemporaries who upon some sociological or philosophical grounds deny the possibility of objective knowledge. They then exempt from these corrosions of universal subjectivity their own political tirades, their own rather less abundant research work, and above all their own prime revelation that there can be no objective knowledge.”
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