After I posted about finishing Ontology Made Easy yesterday, some people asked me if I’d share my thoughts. Since it took me so long to get to it, I figured I’d make a new post. Here’s a long thread 🧵 If you follow me or frequently see my posts, chances are you know I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with contemporary analytic philosophy. I really feel like the tradition lost its way sometime in the second half of the 20th century. 1/

Some of you haven’t read about the history of communism and it shows!

https://twitter.com/doctor_rahmeh/status/2072064040206024816

I have very little sympathy for communism; I’m just a run-of-the-mill liberal who likes Hume, Smith, Mill, Hayek, Rawls, and the like, though I guess I’d count as a socialist in the eyes of many Americans, since, like most Canadians, I’m open to more social spendingm etc. 1/

I'm not even in the mood to joke about this, it's so depressing. You can't assign take-home essays anymore; it's completely pointless. Writing and reasoning abilities are very noticeably plummeting. Very discouraging to think where this is all going. On second thought, people are already pretty terrible at reasoning, so maybe this won't make that much of a difference.

The main this this meme has revealed is that nobody actually understands Hume’s account of causation. A lot of people are replying that Hume doesn’t say that causality is correlation, but rather that causality is an illusion. That’s really, really, really incorrect!

https://twitter.com/PAHoyeck/status/2048079218832011656

Hume is responding to one particular philosophical account of causation that was prevalent in his day, namely that it involves a necessary connection between events. Hume thinks this concept of a metaphysically necessary connection is obscure and ultimately incoherent. 1/