• Gregory
    4.6k
    Hume's ideas on causality seem to be correlated with occassionalism. If a single principle is moving matter with complete freedom, what becomes of science then? What is scientific thinking at that point? How can one be good at it? What is reason? Didn't Islamic science suffer from these doctrines?
  • Gregory
    4.6k
    To try to get a conversation going...:

    Hume replaced Allah in the Islamic occassionalist system with matter as the prime mover (following Hobbes's on dynamics). With an infinity of possible forces involved in anything, science seems to be rather occultic. Zeno, through history's Pyrhonnians, probably led to Spinoza. Kant turn Spinoza's God into the unknowable, and Marx and his followers demystified the world by taking out anything that wasn't based in principle on matter. Then came Einstein who said time starts from motion. And finally we have Hawking, who points out there is no eternity outside of this universe for God to even act in. What are we left with except waiting for regularities to change?
  • jgill
    3.5k
    Didn't Islamic science suffer from these doctrines?Gregory

    I don't know. But to some extent scientists - especially Greek - were sheltered by Muslim societies during the Dark Ages. Mathematical contributions are obvious, but while science was burned on the stakes by the Church Islam came to the rescue. But that was then.
  • Valentinus
    1.6k

    It would help me if you referred to specific text of Islamic philosophers you have in mind.
    They did not all agree with each other. Grouping them together is a thesis in itself.
  • Gregory
    4.6k
    The only authors i know are avicenna, aveoroes, and the writer of the incoherence of the philosophers
  • unenlightened
    8.7k
    Hume replaced Allah in the Islamic occassionalist system with matter as the prime mover (following Hobbes's on dynamics)Gregory

    Hume's critique was epistemological, and not ontological.
  • Gregory
    4.6k
    If a guy (like Hume did) said that force was an undefinable thing, can we really say he is making no claims about ontology?
  • Wayfarer
    20.6k
    Your posts consistently attempt to present vast subjects in history of ideas in a few sparsely-worded sentences. I think overall they're failing for that reason. If you really want to discuss such big ideas, then break it down to smaller parts, and post some examples from the texts you want to discuss which help illustrate the point you're trying to make. ( I did a unit in Hume, and read nothing about Islamic influences or occasionalism, which I have only ever heard mentioned in connection with an obscure philosopher called Malebranche.)
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