Hume's "New Scene of Thought": God, Causality, and the Science of Human Nature
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract: Hume scholarship has rarely questioned the internal—not necessarily explicit—process of Hume's thought that led him to "the most violent paradox" that it occurred to him to propose, i.e., the denial of any "efficacious" causal power in objects, including God. A reappraisal of Hume's early writings and testimonies suggests that this revolutionary move must be placed at the core of what he later called "a new scene of thought" and that the latter originated in a theological reflection based on a reading of Bayle's works which entailed the reversal of Malebranche's position on God and causality. Hume's thesis marks the definitive breaking of the umbilical cord between man and God and opens the way toward an entirely immanent "science of human nature." Hume's so-called "empiricism" is thus the consequence, and not the source, of the train of thought which would later lead him to write the Treatise .
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".