Richard Popkin and philosophy made simple

Avrum Stroll

pp. 247-258

in: The legacies of Richard Popkin, Berlin, Springer, 2008

Abstract

The story of how Richard Popkin and I wrote Philosophy Made Simple is less simple than the book itself. It begins in the early 1950s. Dick was a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley, from which I had recently received my Ph.D., and I had just begun teaching at the University of Oregon — my first professional job. I saw Dick before meeting him. Along with about 200 other auditors, I was in the audience at a presentation he was making to the American Philosophical Association. His topic was Hume' philosophy and he was arguing that Hume could best be understood as a radical skeptic and not primarily as an empiricist. After the talk concluded there was the usual question period. I had the temerity to question Popkin' elucidation of Hume. I contended that the standard construal of Hume as influenced by Newton was correct, and cited as evidence the subtitle of Hume' masterpiece, the 1739 A Treatise of Human Nature. The sub-title reads: Being An Attempt to introduce the experimental Method of Reasoning into Moral Subjects.Popkin responded that the problem was too complicated to discuss in such a large forum and that if I would meet him later we could talk in detail about our diverse interpretations. After the session ended, I went down to meet him and his first remark to me was a question: Do you play two-handed pinochle? I admitted that I did. Popkin proposed that if I came over to his house after dinner we could play pinochle and also discuss Hume.

Cited authors

Hume David

Popkin Richard H.