Philosophy Club
Why is there somethingrather than nothing?
G. W. Leibniz, Principles of Nature and Grace, 1714 — the first question, he writes, that we are entitled to ask.
Hume, on the word ought
The paragraph below is Hume, word for word. The notes out in the margin are notes on it, and they are not his.
In every system of morality which I have hitherto met with, I have always remarked that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary way of reasoning, and establishes the being of a God, or makes observations concerning human affairs; when of a sudden I am surprized to find, that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not.Note. The complaint is not about the vocabulary. It is about the step: a conclusion in ought has arrived in an argument whose premises were all in is, and no premise was ever added that would license it.
This change is imperceptible; but is, however, of the last consequence.Note. Of the last consequence is eighteenth-century usage for of the utmost importance. Hume is not conceding that the change is a small one. He is saying that it goes past the reader unnoticed.
For as this ought, or ought not, expresses some new relation or affirmation, it is necessary that it should be observed and explained; and at the same time that a reason should be given, for what seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it.Note. Later writers call this the is–ought gap. It is often run together with the naturalistic fallacy of G. E. Moore’s Principia Ethica, 1903, though the two arguments are not the same one.
David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 1739-40. Book III, Part I, Section I.
Four more passages are set the same way, with notes in the margin — Plato, Epictetus, Descartes and Mill — under Readings.