Download Human Nature and Historical Knowledge: Hume, Hegel and Vico by Leon Pompa PDF
By Leon Pompa
This publication provides a learn of the character and prerequisites of old wisdom, carried out via a research of the suitable theories of Hume, Hegel and Vico. it is often proposal that during order to set up historic evidence, we need to have a thought of human nature to help our arguments. Hume, Hegel and Vico all subscribed to this view, and are hence mentioned intimately. Professor Pompa is going directly to argue that there's in reality no approach of researching something approximately human nature other than via old research. it's important for this reason to discover a distinct state of mind approximately how we find historic proof. this is often performed within the final bankruptcy the place, against just about all current perspectives, it truly is argued that we should have a framework of inherited wisdom sooner than we will think in something which ends up from historic enquiry.
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Additional resources for Human Nature and Historical Knowledge: Hume, Hegel and Vico
Example text
Since this is an assumption about which he is much more explicit when he advances the thesis of the constancy of human nature, I shall defer discussion of it until later in the chapter. Hume's account of the formal conditions of historical knowledge is thus defective in two ways. The first is that it fails to distinguish between inherited and inferential knowledge and treats the question as though it were solely a matter of inferential knowledge. The second is that, even with regard to inferential knowledge, it conflates the proposition that the historian works in the present to acquire knowledge of the past with the proposition that knowledge about the present is the logical basis of knowledge of the past.
If you were to ask a man, why he believes any matter of fact, which is absent; for instance, that his friend is in the country, or in France; he would give you a reason; and this reason would be some other fact; as a letter received from him, or the knowledge of his former resolution and promises. A manfindinga watch or any other machine in a desert island, would conclude that there had once been men in that island. All our reasonings concerning fact are of the same nature. And here it is constantly supposed that there is a connexion between the present fact and that which is inferred from it.
Well-supported beliefs about earlier events can influence the interpretation of evidence about later events in just the same way as well-supported beliefs about later events can influence the interpretation of evidence about earlier events. The relationship between the interpretation of evidence and the conclusions to be drawn from interpreted evidence is, therefore, logical and not temporal. The fact that if the historian wishes to inspect evidence he must do so in the present thus has no bearing whatsoever upon the reasons why he should decide in favour of one set of conclusions rather than another; and it will certainly not suffice to support Hume's claim, even with regard to inferential beliefs, that these must be arrived at by inferen- FORMAL CONDITIONS OF HISTORICAL KNOWLEDGE 31 ces from truths about the present, based upon the present availability of evidence.