Little White Lies

2018 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-55
Author(s):  
S. K. Wertz ◽  
Keyword(s):  
David Hume ◽  
Samuel Johnson ◽  
Interesting Comment ◽  
Sick People ◽  
Grave Danger

Samuel Johnson has an interesting comment on consequences and the telling of “white lies.” For example “Sick People and Children are often to be deceived for their Good.” David Hume apparently endorses this concept in one of his letters. Both Johnson and Rousseau anticipate Kant’s argument about consequences in that one is to tell the truth under all circumstances. Hume, I argue, would take issue with this claim in that there are cases (like the two above) that warrant telling white lies. Elsewhere (second Enquiry) he speaks about “harmless liars” who indulge in “lying or fiction . . . in humorous stories.” And he says “Noble pride and spirit may openly display itself when one lies under calamity [defamation or slander] or opposition of any kind,” especially if the opposition puts one’s life in grave danger, so one’s self-preservation is threatened. Under situations like these, lying is justified. In regard to fiction, if lying is for the purpose of entertainment and where “truth is not of any importance,” it is permissible. These cases are discussed in some detail, and they offer, along with their analysis, a pragmatic defense of Hume’s position.

How Inauthentic was James Macpherson’s “Translation” of Ossian?

2020 ◽  
pp. 190-208
Keyword(s):  
David Hume ◽  
Samuel Johnson ◽  
Horace Walpole ◽  
Scottish Highlands ◽  
James Macpherson ◽  
Epic Poem ◽  
Folk Literature

This chapter talks about the Scottish poet James Macpherson. It analyzes Macpherson's publication of the “Fragments of Ancient Poetry Collected in the Highlands of Scotland,” which he claimed was his own translation into English from old Gaelic manuscripts he discovered in the Scottish Highlands. It also looks into “Fingal,” an Ancient Epic Poem or cycle of poetry presumably sung by the legendary Scottish bard Ossian, which Macpherson also claimed was a translation from the Gaelic. The chapter examines the Ossian cycle that stimulated investigations and searches for ethnic folk literature, particularly for national epics throughout Europe and Russia that represented the mystical spirit of the nation. It looks into skeptics, such as Samuel Johnson, David Hume, and Horace Walpole who expressed doubt about the authenticity of Macpherson's translations.

The Passion for Happiness: Samuel Johnson and David Hume. Adam Potkay

2002 ◽  
Vol 100 (1) ◽  
pp. 112-115
Author(s):  
Jenny Davidson
Keyword(s):  
David Hume ◽  
Samuel Johnson

The Testimony of Sense

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tim Milnes
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
David Hume ◽  
Samuel Johnson ◽  
Social Solidarity ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
Instrumental Reason ◽  
Romantic Period ◽  
William Hazlitt ◽  
The Social ◽  
Epistemological Debate

British intellectual culture witnessed a sharp reduction in the volume of epistemological debate between the mid-eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This change coincided with a relocation of philosophical discourse from the treatise to the informal writing of the essayist. This study argues that these two phenomena are related. Around the middle of the eighteenth century, the idea of intersubjectivity emerged as a counterdiscourse to scientific empiricism. Exemplified by Hume’s ‘easy’ philosophy, it sought to reground epistemological correspondence in social correspondence, in the circulation of trusting conversation. Contemporaneously, the rise of the essay, like the concern with trust, reveals the period’s preoccupation with the ways in which intellectual life was being shaped by economic change. The essay genre sought to effect a performative critique of instrumental reason which, while essentially nostalgic in its desire for unsystematic accomplishment, presented a pragmatic counterthrust to Enlightenment rationality. For David Hume and Samuel Johnson, the performance of virtue represents and enacts the social solidarity that either underpins norms or reflects moral truths. For later essayists, however, the fiction of familiarity was both more tenuous and more urgent. In the Romantic period, the essayist’s primary burden became one of establishing social and epistemological norms through the exercise of imaginative power. In the essays of Charles Lamb and William Hazlitt, the enactment of familiar conversation created an experience of singularity and enchantment that was linked to idealized and nostalgic forms of sociability. Thus, while the eighteenth-century essay consolidated ‘truth’, the Romantic essay produced it.

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