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Fodor on Hume

Jerry A Fodor, Hume Variations, Oxford, 2003, OUP

Fodor's little book about Hume is a terrific gale of fresh air.

"Back (way back) when I was a boy in short pants and graduate school, there was a substantial philosophical consensus about how to read Hume; or, more precisely, about how much of Hume is worth the bother of reading. According to the understanding that then prevailed, the historical Hume had been subject to a misapprehension, characteristic of his time (come to think of it, of all times but our own) as to the nature of the philosophical enterprise. Hume didn't know what methodological inquiry has since discovered: that the philosophical enterprise consists (indeed, consists solely) in the analysis of concepts. Because he didn't know this, a lot - indeed, most - of what Hume took to be important about his soi-disant philosophy was actually not philosophy at all."

Fodor, HV, p.5.

Fodor shows the eccentricity of understanding philosophy in this way, and the distortion involved in reading Hume from this perspective.

What is interesting in Hume for Fodor is not any conceptual analysis but his attempt to explain how the mind works, which has contemporary relevance:

"[T]he main reason I've cared about Hume's account of the mind was that it seems, in a number of respects, to anticipate the one that informs current work in cognitive science." p.2

"Hume saw that accepting (what historians of philosophy call) the "Theory of Ideas" is central to constructing an empirically adequate account of cognition; indeed that it is primarily the commitment to the Theory of Ideas that determines what form an empirically adequate cognitive psychology must take. For Hume, as for our contemporary cognitive science, the mind ispreeminently the locus of mental representation and mental causation. In this respect, Hume's cogntive science is a footnote to Descartes's and ours is a footnote to his." Fodor, HV, p.8.

Misc

His doctrinal errors in this respect were embarrassingly upfront: "the only expedient from which we can hope for success in our philosophical researches [is] to march up directly to the capital or center of [the] sciences, to human nature itself; which being once masters of, we may every where else hope for an easy victory" (1985: 43).