A Virtuous Way of Doing Philosophy: The Moderation of Curiosity and Hume’s Philosophical Method in A Treatise of Human Nature
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract: In A Treatise of Human Nature , Hume proposes a new philosophical method. This method results from integrating an empirically founded skepticism with an innovative study of the epistemic role of emotions. This combination of skepticism, empiricism, and moral psychology aims to establish a virtuous way of doing philosophy based on the regulation of our epistemic emotions. In this paper, I present the operating principles of this virtuous way of doing philosophy. The paper has three parts. I firstly claim that four principles compose Hume’s philosophical methodology. I contend that the moderation of curiosity plays the central role among them. Secondly, I claim that that is the case because of the pernicious effects resulting when this passion becomes excessive and misplaced. Finally, I show the role of curiosity’s moderation in the Conclusion of Book 1 of the Treatise , to substantiate the claim that the crisis Hume there depicts illustrates his virtuous way of doing philosophy.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.023 | 0.020 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.042 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".