On Removing David Hume’s Name From A University Of Edinburgh Building And A Few Related Issues

 Tweet:

The university of Edinburgh @EdinburghUni, folks:

ed.ac.uk/news/students/…

"The David Hume Tower will be known as 40 George Square, [because] asking students to use a building named after the 18th-c philosopher....rightly cause[s] distress today."

F: 

Tough one.  First impression was that this was madness.  Then did a little research on him and thought, yes he did say some racist things and apparently participated in promoting slavery and removing his name was ok.  But, were they celebrating him for being a great philosopher of for his racist activities?  I think for his contributions to philosophy?  Then I thought, what if some guy discovers a cure for cancer but drove his girlfriend off a bridge while drunk and killed her.  Do we celebrate his achievement or not.  I don't know anymore.  Will have to think on it.   

Me:

To my mind, presentism, the imposition of our values on the past and judging the past accordingly, is an anti intellectual affliction. 

We’re creatures of of our time and we invariably in our growing up imbibe and share in many of the attitudes, conventions, mores, values, beliefs, principles, ethics and on and on of our most immediate environments and our cultures. And even when we try to cast a heterodox view on some of those, we can’t do that free from what Martin Heidegger calls our “background,” which we’re in the nature of things thrown into—our “thrownness,” he also calls it. He argues we can never get behind our thrownness. It’s too pervasive and, so, it can’t be unraveled.

So we of necessity will have strengths and blemishes that will be acutely apparent to later generations looking back on us. Moral purity is a delusion in those who believe they’ve attained it and it’s an impossible standard by which to judge the past, especially the past’s inevitably compromised giants, like Hume, who some, who are competent to make these judgments, judge to be the greatest English philosopher.

This willingness to reject, “cancel,” him for being a man of his time and, so, scuttle his immense achievements, is of a piece with the insanity of our moment, which is evident in North America’s more extreme left, which itself is, as I keep going on about, in many troubling ways continuous with the Democratic Party.