Brooks: This growing, dispersed body of research reminds us of a few key insights. … emotion is not opposed to reason; our emotions assign value to things and are the basis of reason.
Facetious answer: Because as this article argues, what David Hume feels is just as important as what he thinks.
But seriously, I think the point is more that these things have been known (to some at least) for centuries, and David Hume is presented as one writer who articulated them. It’s still nice to have these things experimentally concerned, although I’ll be damned if the author of the article cited any sources, unfortunately.
Isn’t “discovered” often just shorthand for “described in a rigorous way” in a scientific context? It seems fair to say that descriptions of the interaction between emotions and conscious reasoning have only started approaching rigor fairly recently, although non-rigorous descriptions are of course much older.
David Hume probably would have mixed feelings about this. One the one hand, he probably applauds the idea that the emotions direct reason. On the other hand, he might cringe at the idea that this discovery was the result of modern research.
Non-facetious question: why should anyone care how David Hume would feel about anything?
Facetious answer: Because as this article argues, what David Hume feels is just as important as what he thinks.
But seriously, I think the point is more that these things have been known (to some at least) for centuries, and David Hume is presented as one writer who articulated them. It’s still nice to have these things experimentally concerned, although I’ll be damned if the author of the article cited any sources, unfortunately.
Isn’t “discovered” often just shorthand for “described in a rigorous way” in a scientific context? It seems fair to say that descriptions of the interaction between emotions and conscious reasoning have only started approaching rigor fairly recently, although non-rigorous descriptions are of course much older.