Immanuel Kant - The Critique of Pure Reason

[Kuko 4000]

Could someone open up a few of the main points that Kant raises in his Critique of Pure Reason? I guess I need a bit of a push to start reading it finally.

Which chapters would you recommend and why?

What kind of challenges would his ideas give to a modern day skeptic such as many on this message board?

Thanks in advance!

 

[roger]

Well, as you probably know, it was an attempt at discovering what we know a priori - knowledge independent of experience.

And (of course) he corked it up by page 5. For example, he claimed that 5+7=12 is synthetic a priori. Unfortunately this evidences a complete lack of understanding of math. Which is understandable enough, since at that time we hadn't developed the underpinning of mathematics as formal systems, nor was he aware of the possibilities of non-Euclidian geometry, etc. OTOH, what hubris to argue for 1000+ pages, deliberately sans experience and knowledge of what he is talking about.

That sort of thing goes on and on - long chapters on the nature of space, time, etc (hint: he didn't discover relativity, or any other original fact acknowledged by physicists, people that accept empiricism as the best way we know to acquire new knowledge about the world).

I loved and hated the book. At the time I read it I was quite exhilarated to think of two titans clashing - Hume vs Kant, empiricism vs transcendentalism. But, I was also aware of modern math. So, at the time I was extremely frustrated by Kant. Now, I recognize how doomed his effort was, but acknowledge that at the time he was fighting that battle he may not have known that. He came out on the losing end, but we can understand why that wasn't immediately obvious back then.

So... definitely read the introduction. He clearly (one of the few times I'll accuse him of being clear!) lays out his program, defines his terms, and gives some introductory arguments and examples (such as the 5+7=12 argument). Skip forward to some of his musings on space and time (sorry, I no longer have my copy, it was destroyed in a flood long ago, so no chapter) to see how easily we go wrong and how unlikely we are to discover truth if we aren't using empiricism.

People will argue I'm being very unfair to him. Fine - probably true enough. It's an fascinating book from a historical perspective - that book was a watershed moment in philosophy, where idealism and empiricism really split apart. OTOH, I'm not sure how much patience I have anymore to read things I know to be entirely wrong.

People will argue that I'm not supporting my argument. Again, fine - true enough. I recall the endless knock-down threads about idealism on JREF, and I have no interest in reliving them. I'll merely say we have endless evidence that empiricism does work. not that we have found all the answers, or that sometimes we are not mislead by evidence. But by its nature it is self-correcting. OTOH we have endless evidence of reasoning absent evidence reaching completely wrong conclusions, with no method of self-correction except, well evidence (empiricism).

For awhile I found his morality interesting even though I found his thinking about reason bankrupt, but I don't any longer. He still bases it on pure reason - concepts about the soul, free will, etc. Again, I turn to empiricism. We are still just grubby apes. If I bonk you over the head and take your food, I eat tonight, but I break the bonds of society, and the rest of society isn't going to put up with that. If you examine all of our morals I submit you will see the ape in us - what is moral for us is what works within the confines of our biology and social nature. Transgressors get slapped down. It's not much different than wolves or any other mammal, though of course for them what is acceptable and not is different due to their different natures, wants, and needs. Injecting pure "reason" into the argument just leads you to more errors, and you end up talking about entirely unsupported notions like souls, free will, etc.

edit: I don't know how much math you know, and if you see why the 5+7=12 is such a failure. The argument could have equally been that parallel lines never meet. Except, that is a condition of Euclid geometry, nothing more. You can look it up on wiki, but basically mathematicians sought to prove the fifth axiom of Euclid (parallel lines never meet) because they felt it shouldn't be an axiom (something unproved, but stated up front). One method taken was to assume that it was false, and then start deriving new theorems. If it was true, and fell out of the other four axioms, eventually you would run across a contradiction. This would prove that the 5th axiom was actually provable from the other 4.

Except, of course, no contradiction existed. There is no "truth" to the statement. In Euclid geometry, of course parallel lines don't meet. However, in curved space, they do meet. You can assume any version of the 5th axiom you want, and come up with an internally consistent geometry. In fact, different geometries work best depending on the scale you are working - subatomic, human scales, or multiple light years. And, of course, you can invent geometries that have nothing to do with any physically realized thing.

The same is true for math. 5+7=12 is a consequence of a particular system of axioms and definitions - axioms and definitions that happen to model how we add, apples, say. But that is not required - other systems are possible and have been developed.

Anyway, all of that was discovered past Kant's time. But I say it is still damning to him - he claimed to be able to arrive at the truth when he clearly could not. In contrast, I say empericism works better than anything else we know of at this time. I can support that by comparing known methods, but I make no claims about whether there is an as-yet-unknown better way to arrive at the truth.

 

[PixyMisa]

What roger said.

 

[!Kaggen]

Kant formally demonstrated that the human imagination allows us to invent a wonderland.

The quandary is why does this wonderland often track reality?

and what Pixy did not say

 

[Kevin_Lowe]

For awhile I found his morality interesting even though I found his thinking about reason bankrupt, but I don't any longer. He still bases it on pure reason - concepts about the soul, free will, etc. Again, I turn to empiricism. We are still just grubby apes. If I bonk you over the head and take your food, I eat tonight, but I break the bonds of society, and the rest of society isn't going to put up with that. If you examine all of our morals I submit you will see the ape in us - what is moral for us is what works within the confines of our biology and social nature. Transgressors get slapped down. It's not much different than wolves or any other mammal, though of course for them what is acceptable and not is different due to their different natures, wants, and needs. Injecting pure "reason" into the argument just leads you to more errors, and you end up talking about entirely unsupported notions like souls, free will, etc.

I do find it interesting that almost every attempt to iron out an internally consistent yet palatable moral philosophy ends up involving some kind of Kant-like appeal to moral principles which seem to most people to be more important than efficiency, effectiveness or preserving social cohesiveness.

Utilitarians like Peter Singer try to hash out moral rules entirely in terms of social benefit, but an awful lot of people have a very strong attachment to the idea that some other ideals should trump social benefit.

Medical and scientific ethics, for example, has lots of hard and fast Kant-like rules about what you must do and should not do, with no exceptions allowed for convenience or social benefit. Doctors aren't allowed to kill healthy people for their organs, even if it would be socially beneficial in some cases. Scientists aren't allowed to experiment on people without their knowledge and consent any more, even if they are really careful to make sure the subjects don't find out.

These rules didn't arise in a neat, easy way from human nature either. They're something modern civilisation arrived at out of a series of violent reactions against individual errors or crimes, which the perpetrators thought to be acceptable actions or risks. So you can't argue that they pop right out of our chimpanzee-like social instincts, because it's definitely a lot more complicated than that.

You could perhaps even be forgiven for thinking that the human brain is capable of value judgements beyond both self-interest and pack-interest. For some humans some of the time, at least.

 

[Kuko 4000]

Thanks roger, I think I'll start from the intro and the chapters that deal with space and time. My understanding of maths is poor, I have never studied it. I hope I can still understand what Kant is trying to say and whether or not I agree with his points.

But I say it is still damning to him - he claimed to be able to arrive at the truth when he clearly could not. In contrast, I say empericism works better than anything else we know of at this time. I can support that by comparing known methods, but I make no claims about whether there is an as-yet-unknown better way to arrive at the truth.

Can anyone give me more examples (in non-technical terms) of why Kant would disagree with this? And what is the truth that he claimed to have arrived at?

 

[roger]

Thanks roger, I think I'll start from the intro and the chapters that deal with space and time. My understanding of maths is poor, I have never studied it. I hope I can still understand what Kant is trying to say and whether or not I agree with his points.





Can anyone give me more examples (in non-technical terms) of why Kant would disagree with this? And what is the truth that he claimed to have arrived at?

Have you read the wiki article on this book? I haven't read every word of it, but it seems to be a good synopsis.

As an example: he claims that two parallel lines cannot enclose a space and thus form a figure. He tried to prove the converse, and failed. Thus, he concludes, this is not provable through logic, but is still knowledge that we have a priori - through intuition, if you will.

Okay, first of all, parallel lines do meet in 4 dimensional curved space - which is how our universe is shaped. Second of all, failure to prove something is not evidence that it is not true. There's a million math theorems I am personally incapable of proving - yet somebody else has proved them. Failing to prove something is not the same as proving something is not true. It's just a personal failure.

And thus we can confidently say that his synthetic a priori is bunk. He was sure he was right, but he was very, very wrong. He had no way to know that because his method gave him no way to test his conclusions. All he did was assume he was right when he failed to find a counter-argument. Well, we now know the counter-arguments. He was wrong.

"I know it's true because, well, I just know it" is the battle cry of the psychics, of the homeopaths, of the dowser, of the charlatan. It's not a reliable path to truth - it's just a path to a made up world that bares no resemblance to reality. Yes, he dresses it up in fancy terms like "transcendental dialectic" and such, but that is all it boils down to.

Come to think of it, Behe (of irreducible complexity fame) is a perfect Kantian. He can't personally think of an evolutionary path from X to Y, so he confidently states that none can exist. Of course biologists have completely destroyed his arguments, showing that these supposed irreducible mechanisms in fact did evolve.

But, if you want to do more than read my rant, look into his transcendental logic, where he claims to bridge the gap from pure idealism to the real world.

Yet, we have ample proof of his failures. For "fun", go read some Kantians argue about what Kant means by his various arguments. They are essentially impenetrable by people that devote their lives to their study. We can conclude, perhaps, that Kant is nearly infinitely brilliant, and worth decades of study, or, we can look to his false conclusions and apparently broken logic and conclude that it's not brilliant, just broken. Perhaps its clear I fall into the latter camp.

I suggest reading his great nemesis, Hume. Hume is lucid. Hume makes compelling arguments. In a sense, we can say all of modern science rests of Hume's shoulders. That's not to say I consider him necessary today. If you want to read about the modern scientific method there are plenty of modern writers - Sagan, Dawkins, et. al. But he was the prototypical skeptic - arguing that such things as miracles are extremely unlikely given the much simpler explanations, such as people lie, people don't investigate whether a story told to them is true, people don't search for alternative explanations, and that the stories come largely from superstitious cultures. He is a joy to read, and the assaults against his arguments from people like Kant have come to nothing. I type on this computer thanks to Hume's arguments. My friends and relatives live, having been saved by medical science built on Hume's bedrock. We flew to the moon, built nuclear power plants, particle accelerators, lasers, automobiles, because we think how Hume thinks.

Or, you can read 1500+ pages of opaque prose written by somebody just making things up about the universe. Your choice

 

[TraneWreck]

Hume definitely won the battle, but Kant's gambit was necessary for the progress that followed. He made the strongest possible argument against empiricism and lost. That tells us something hugely valuable.

I enjoy philosophy so I don't really require that someone be "correct" to enjoy their work (Kant's writing, more than his wrongness, is a problem). If there's anything the history of human thought and scientific progress has shown, it's that everyone who thinks their right is actually wrong, so some sizeable percentage of what we currently advance will ultimately be undermined--which 1) should be exciting and 2) is not a pan-argument for woo. We have to operate on the best justified evidence at any given time.

Interestingly, the Critique is often used as justification for broad-based science denial. Nothing can be known beyond the veil of our experience, ergo _______ is true (with ghosts, Jesus, psychics...etc. filling the blank). That's the obnoxious anti-empiricism that lies at the root of all psuedoscience insanity.

 

[roger]

These rules didn't arise in a neat, easy way from human nature either. They're something modern civilisation arrived at out of a series of violent reactions against individual errors or crimes, which the perpetrators thought to be acceptable actions or risks. So you can't argue that they pop right out of our chimpanzee-like social instincts, because it's definitely a lot more complicated than that.

This is where JREF becomes very annoying. A full fledged ethics would take, what, a book at the least? Realistically a book, rebuttals, further books, etc. It is perhaps possible that my one paragraph didn't address every nuance of ethics/morality, yes??

Our ethics are clearly compatible with a social species. It is also clearly compatible with a thinking, social species. I suggest, without the multiple books written required for back up, that our morals come down to "with what will we put up with"? There is no clear answer that logic and reason can provide. What we accept and allow varies over time. But, it all ties back to our mammalian nature. We don't eat our lovers, because we aren't spiders. Eating your lover works for spiders and their biology. It doesn't work for us. We have other social constructs to ensure our young get sufficient nutrition.

And, we have decidedly non-Kantian ways to determine what we want our ethics to be. We may, for example, argue that jazz leads to fornication and the destruction of society. Yet, using emperical evidence, not transcendental reason, we find that in fact it does not lead to those things. We can experiment, and find just how wrong we usually are when we use any kind of pure reason. And we can bounce that off of the deeply ingrained preferences we have as a social species to decide how best to regulate our lives.

Note that this is anything but an 'anything goes' argument. Our mammalian nature is going to again and again rebel against wholesale slaughter of, I dunno, minorities. It is again and again reach towards corroboration and group dynamics as solutions to problems. The details will change with time, cultures, and our thinking, but all available evidence suggests this is true. What Kant's pure reason suggests I don't know, but I'll just take another helping of evidence, thank you very much.

Imagine that as a book length essay, not 4 paragraphs .

edit: as an example, we have been talking about honor killings in various threads on JREF. Well, again, pretend the following is fleshed out in a book length treatment, don't latch on a single phrase as intending to be all encompassing with no nuance that was not stated. Honor killing comes out of a lot of our cultural/social being - the woman 'dishonors' the family, the family responds by killing her to ensure the family maintains status in the culture. Against that we have many other aspects of ourselves - altruism, co-operation, etc., and yes, things we have learned over time. We have evidence of how society goes when you don't have honor killings, for example. We can learn from experience, not pure reason, how things go under specific systems. The world has largely moved away from honor killings, and I suggest it will continue to do so, as a function of us being social creatures with a brain capable of weighing evidence and choosing how we want to live. Women, as they gain power, will reject honor killings, being mammals that prize their own existence. Others, without perhaps such a personal stake, will back women up in this because of altruism. Etc.

We are social mammals, and our ethics are a result of that. That is in no way a claim that they just simply "pop out", or whatever wording you used against my argument.

 

[Marquis de Carabas]

This is where JREF becomes very annoying. A full fledged ethics would take, what, a book at the least? Realistically a book, rebuttals, further books, etc. It is perhaps possible that my one paragraph didn't address every nuance of ethics/morality, yes??

Our ethics are clearly compatible with a social species. It is also clearly compatible with a thinking, social species. I suggest, without the multiple books written required for back up, that our morals come down to "with what will we put up with"? There is no clear answer that logic and reason can provide. What we accept and allow varies over time. But, it all ties back to our mammalian nature. We don't eat our lovers, because we aren't spiders. Eating your lover works for spiders and their biology. It doesn't work for us. We have other social constructs to ensure our young get sufficient nutrition.

And, we have decidedly non-Kantian ways to determine what we want our ethics to be. We may, for example, argue that jazz leads to fornication and the destruction of society. Yet, using emperical evidence, not transcendental reason, we find that in fact it does not lead to those things. We can experiment, and find just how wrong we usually are when we use any kind of pure reason. And we can bounce that off of the deeply ingrained preferences we have as a social species to decide how best to regulate our lives.

Note that this is anything but an 'anything goes' argument. Our mammalian nature is going to again and again rebel against wholesale slaughter of, I dunno, minorities. It is again and again reach towards corroboration and group dynamics as solutions to problems. The details will change with time, cultures, and our thinking, but all available evidence suggests this is true. What Kant's pure reason suggests I don't know, but I'll just take another helping of evidence, thank you very much.

Imagine that as a book length essay, not 4 paragraphs .

Can I imagine illustrations?

 

[wogoga]

Quotes from roger (in blue):

"For example, he claimed that 5+7=12 is synthetic a priori. Unfortunately this evidences a complete lack of understanding of math. … 5+7=12 is a consequence of a particular system of axioms and definitions - … - other systems are possible and have been developed."​

2 = oo (concept formation)
5 = ooooo (concept formation)
7 = ooooo oo (concept formation)
10 = ooooo ooooo (concept formation)
12 = ooooo ooooo oo (concept formation)
12 = ooooo ooooo oo = ooooo + ooooo oo = 5 + 7 (synthetic a priori judgement)

If you think that the above is not necessarily (a priori) true, but only a result of arbitrarily chosen "system of axioms and definitions", then I cannot help you.

There is a huge progress from the axiomatic method of Euclid (and a formalistic interpretation of logics) to Kant's synthetic a priori judgement, and big step backwards from Kant to the neo-axiomatic method ala Hilbert & Russel, which essentially is the same as the old one of Euclid (and no better).

"Which is understandable enough, since at that time we hadn't developed the underpinning of mathematics as formal systems, nor was he aware of the possibilities of non-Euclidian geometry, etc. …"​

Insofar as geometries are purely formal systems, they are essentially only like games with arbitrary rules, and haven't a lot to do with our knowledge of the world.

If the concept curvature of non-Euclidian geometries is more than a word without meaning (outside the game), then it presupposes even, straight, non-curved space (where parallel lines never meet).

"Okay, first of all, parallel lines do meet in 4 dimensional curved space - which is how our universe is shaped."​

In the same way you could say, parallel lines on the surface of a sphere do meet, such as the meridians (lines of longitude) of a globe.

It is obvious that you can reduce Kant's epistemology to absurdity, if you call geodesic lines parallel lines.

Related posts of mine:

Finite time in an INFINITE space-time continuum?
Kant & counterrevolution & Einstein​

By the way, Immanuel Kant was also one of the first who presented biological evolution as a consistent hypothesis (see 1, 2, *3*)

"People will argue that I'm not supporting my argument. Again, fine - true enough. I recall the endless …"​

The same is valid for me.

Cheers,
Wolfgang

 

[Darat]

roger - great posts just one complaint - I've just seen what the Marquis is imagining for chapter 3!

 

[roger]

Quotes from roger (in blue):

"For example, he claimed that 5+7=12 is synthetic a priori. Unfortunately this evidences a complete lack of understanding of math. … 5+7=12 is a consequence of a particular system of axioms and definitions - … - other systems are possible and have been developed."​

2 = oo (concept formation)
5 = ooooo (concept formation)
7 = ooooo oo (concept formation)
10 = ooooo ooooo (concept formation)
12 = ooooo ooooo oo (concept formation)
12 = ooooo ooooo oo = ooooo + ooooo oo = 5 + 7 (synthetic a priori judgement)

If you think that the above is not necessarily (a priori) true, but only a result of arbitrarily chosen "system of axioms and definitions", then I cannot help you.

Ah, what you just did was analytic, not synthetic. I'm arguing against synthetic a priori.

If the concept curvature of non-Euclidian geometries is more than a word without meaning (outside the game), then it presupposes even, straight, non-curved space (where parallel lines never meet).

"Okay, first of all, parallel lines do meet in 4 dimensional curved space - which is how our universe is shaped."​

In the same way you could say, parallel lines on the surface of a sphere do meet, such as the meridians (lines of longitude) of a globe.

I assume by this that you do agree that parallel lines meet in space.

Kant argued they did not. He was wrong. It seems you are trying to have it both ways. If we are just arguing about formal systems, then we are just arguing about formal systems. But Kant was trying to talk about the real world absent evidence. He. Got. It. Wrong. He did not arrive at a true description of the universe. He is the one that mistook formal systems for reality, not me. I'm saying, look to reality, because that is the only thing that is going to provide evidence for reality. Formal systems are not, except by coincidence or design. You'll note our formal system for arithmetic is largely modeled on how arithmetic works at the human scale for materials (there are exceptions, as I'm sure you know). So, it is not surprising to either of us that 5 apples and 7 apples are 12 apples. But the only way the math - the formal system - of 5+7 matches the real world is because we formed our axioms and definitions to be a close match to how apples add. If you want to be sure of how it works in the real world, you need empiricism, not a formal system.

If we can prove a one-to-one relation between our formal system and reality, then we have some small hope that anything derived using the formal system matches some as yet undiscovered fact about reality, but there is no guarantee. Our formal systems built on facts derived back in Newton's time absolutely fail to generate relativity or quantum mechanics. We had to develop new formal systems on the back of new evidence (and, at the beginning, assumptions, like "what happens if the speed of light is constant) to start achieving results in these new fields. Kantian pure reason would never generate anything like those, except by pure luck. And, of course, we'd have no way to know if it actually explained the nature of the world besides by looking to the evidence.

edit: to be clear, there are physical systems where 5+7 != 12. For example, add 5 liters of a small molecule liquid to 7 liters of a large molecule liquid. You end up with less than 12 liters. We derived 5+7=12 from our experience of adding apples. We derived the idea that the interior angles of a triange add up to 180 from our common experience of human sized triangles. They are not universally true, however. They fall out of the axioms and definitions we are using that largely, but not completely, mirror the human-scaled physical world. They are not synthetic a priori.

 

[roger]

roger - great posts just one complaint - I've just seen what the Marquis is imagining for chapter 3!

And that is why I have the ****** on ignore!

 

[Ichneumonwasp]

deleted


Going off to think about this more


ETA:

Let me rephrase:

Doesn't the definition of '12' imply components that can add to 12? Like 6 and 6, or 5 and 7, etc.? Shouldn't this really be considered an analytic truth?

I mean, when it comes to these statements with 12 being the subject, the predicate is not '5', '+', or '7' but '5 + 7' isn't it?

 

[roger]

Doesn't the definition of '12' imply components that can add to 12? Like 6 and 6, or 5 and 7, etc.? Shouldn't this really be considered an analytic truth?

I mean, when it comes to these statements with 12 being the subject, the predicate is not '5', '+', or '7' but '5 + 7' isn't it?

Well, who knows

Professional philosophers are still arguing about the 'meaning' of synthetic a priori, and whether it applies to any knowledge about physical structures, and to what extent, if any, it applies to purely logical structures. They still argue whether 5+7=12 is SAP or not. I say 'meh'. If you can't get it together after a few centuries, it's not an understood concept, and shouldn't be used as the foundation in any system of thought.

Back in reality, 5+7=12 seems so friggin obvious because we count apples. Think of all the behavior we know about QM. The mind runs shrieking from the room, as it is so contrary to common sense, yet it is undeniably how the world actually works.

You can define synthetic a priori however you want, and I won't stop you (I may roll my eyes). The fact remains its a terrible way to ascertain knowledge about reality, and things we would happily label as synthetic a priori will prove not to be just wrong, but amazingly, stupendously wrong. Kantians can deny it all they want, but statements about the physical world that they label SAP are just things we have learned from experience that we consider 'obvious.' Just like it was once obvious that things were particles or waves, that time is a constant amongst observers, that if you drew a triangle between three star the angles would add to 180. It's just bias built from a narrow perception of the universe.

So, I don't care if you can come up with something that is SAP - the fact remains that much which has been labeled SAP has led to incorrect conclusions about the nature of reality. That absolutely destroys pure reason as a method of inquiry into the nature of reality.

 

[!Kaggen]

I think this discussion about Kant brings up the point I made in another thread about the general lack of investigating children/babies minds in philosophy. Perhaps this is due historically to a poor understanding of developmental psychology by philosophers, as others have pointed out.

Small children use both experience and reason to understand their world without questioning the strengths/weaknesses of either. They are both indispensable aids which evolution has bestowed on humans.

Reason is useful to create hypothesis which can then be tested against experience and little children do this all the time.

These hypotheses may even be radically wrong, but still children go on producing them. In fact experience may even be wrong, such as small children's first comments about perspective such as the mountain that will fit into a box.

How about all the small children who thrive on fairy tales, Shrek and self created fantasy worlds and go on to become scientists with a keen sense of reality.

The problem I think arises when the natural interaction between reason and experience is lopsided by adults with an unconscious vested interest in one or the other.
This can be seen in various education systems, religions, political systems and even "science" which has overemphasized reason or experience.

I think this is due to a general lack of clarity as to how reason interacts with experience and experience with reason. The result is the same as whenever there is a lack of understanding and general ignorance, fear and suspicion of the other side arises and this leads to an impasse or worse war and murder.

What I find a most compelling way out of this is to imagine that thinking as a type of sensory experience. Then reason and experience have a commonality in that they are are both empirical and both have the same weight. What is then required is a healthy brain/mind which can establish the correct relationship between reason's concepts and experience's percepts.
Of course this relationship might change as new empirical evidence becomes available in the form of a new concept or a new percept.

The critical thing personally for me and why I decided to become a farmer is to help humans develop a healthy brain/mind. As the saying goes "you are what you eat".

What I have learnt from having children is that love is the other essential ingredient.

Between the two ingredients, good food and love we have a winner.

In my opinion, Kant and most philosophers lacked these ingredients.

 

[PixyMisa]

No.

 

[PixyMisa]

Okay, first of all, parallel lines do meet in 4 dimensional curved space

Or diverge, of course, depending upon the curvature.

And thus we can confidently say that his synthetic a priori is bunk. He was sure he was right, but he was very, very wrong. He had no way to know that because his method gave him no way to test his conclusions.

He should have read Popper.

Oh, wait...

I suggest reading his great nemesis, Hume. Hume is lucid. Hume makes compelling arguments. In a sense, we can say all of modern science rests of Hume's shoulders. That's not to say I consider him necessary today. If you want to read about the modern scientific method there are plenty of modern writers - Sagan, Dawkins, et. al. But he was the prototypical skeptic - arguing that such things as miracles are extremely unlikely given the much simpler explanations, such as people lie, people don't investigate whether a story told to them is true, people don't search for alternative explanations, and that the stories come largely from superstitious cultures. He is a joy to read, and the assaults against his arguments from people like Kant have come to nothing. I type on this computer thanks to Hume's arguments. My friends and relatives live, having been saved by medical science built on Hume's bedrock. We flew to the moon, built nuclear power plants, particle accelerators, lasers, automobiles, because we think how Hume thinks.

Hume is awesome. As you say, it's not necessary to read Hume the way you'd read Kant, because most of Hume's thoughts have been subsumed into modern society and science. It's still well worth taking the time if you have an interest.

 

[SusanB-M1]

Can I imagine illustrations?

Nice one - thank you for the laugh! I am reading this thread diligently and with much interest, having never studied philosophy, but having dipped into it a bit during the past few years.