I want to discuss a doctrine and a concept in theory of knowledge which has various manifestations from at least the seventeenth to the early twentieth century. The concept is that of direct or immediate cognition, the doctrine says that only what is like mind can be directly or immediately present to mind. This doctrine raises the question of how we can know things other than ourselves and our experiences: the concept of direct presence most usually had the consequence of making our knowledge of the world indirect, uncertain, or impossible. The directly present must in some way inform us about the indirectly present.

This paper is in two parts. I begin the first part by presenting a brief resume of an account of Hume's Section “Of Personal Identity” which I offered at length in a paper first published twenty years ago. I shall then try to respond to some criticisms of my interpretation of that Section. The authors of these criticisms consider that Hume's account of personal identity is less sceptical and more defensible than I suggested it is. The purpose of responding to these criticisms is not, I trust, that of protecting an ego: this would be an objective that would be uniquely inappropriate in such a context. It is rather to look again at some difficult but important problems in Humean exegesis. In the second part of the paper I turn to some criticisms that are commonly levelled against Hume, and which I have been inclined to subscribe to myself in the past. I do not think that a proper assessment of these criticisms depends upon accepting or rejecting the reading of Hume that I have tried to defend in the first part, so the two parts of the paper are largely independent of each other. I now incline to believe, however, that the criticisms I shall deal with in the second part are criticisms to which Hume has, or could find, quite plausible answers.

Studying some familiar truth-conditions, I shall detail the role they play in elementary logic and inquire into our grounds for holding them true. I shall discharge the first of these assignments with a good deal of assurance, but the second with far less; to my mind, (1) below mirrors our use of ‘and’, (6) our use of ‘every’, (8) our use of ‘necessarily’, etc. pretty accurately, but little evidence to that effect has ever been supplied, and — disturbingly enough — many take exception to the conditions under study.

There seem to be as many interpretations of the Theaetetus (Tht.) 201c–210b as there are scholars who care to interpret it. This, of course, is not surprising. As Cherniss well puts it,

the fascinating and perplexing history of Platonic interpretation…has been so largely a series of insistently charitable efforts on the part of Western philosophers and their acolytes, each to baptise Plato in his particular faith — having shriven him first, of course, by interpreting the heresies out of his works.

J'endoctrine, nous endoctrinons: voilà des expressions qu' on n'entend pour ainsi dire jamais; le fait même de les énoncer rendrait impossible l'acte qu'elles désignent, puisque la condition essentielle de tout endoctrinement est de se dissimuler.

Le Disciple: Maître, ayez pitié de moi! Je ne suis que l'humble disciple de l'auteur de la seconde Méditation. Comme Descartes, je brûle d'un terrible désir de savoir.

Le ton préremptoire de Nietzsche lorsqu'il condescend à parler d'autres penseurs et le style provocateur dans lequel il mesure son propre génie ont rendu ses critiques timides; on le menage comme s'il allait se lever pour écraser son interlocuteur sous les invectives. Tout en assurant qu'il est inimitable et n'a point fait école, ses grands commentateurs se veulent d'abord ses disciples. Us entretiennent un nuage de sacralité autour de textes dont il devient difficile d'aborder l'analyse. Nietzsche a le droit de se contredire, de se tromper sur l'étymologie, d'ignorer la recherche historique érudite de son temps, de ne jamais citer dans le texte les auteurs qu'il attaque, de malmener telle ou telle théorie scientifique: sa hauteur de vue sauve tout. Mais à quel titre les ceuvres de Nietzsche pourraient-elles sérieusement échapper à un regard rigoureux, visant un objet linguistique precis, daté et done assignable dans une tradition? Suffit-il que Nietzsche ait renié d'avance toute interprétation et souhaité de rester incompris? Cela ne paraît ni nécessaire, ni suffisant.

Eric Weil commence sa philosophic par l'opposition abrupte Philosophic et Violence; le chapitre XVI de sa Logique de la Philosophie (1950) — l'action — qui englobe en fait sa Philosophie morale (1961) et sa Philosophie politique (1956), renoue au premier paragraphe avec son début; raison et violence. C'est dire du même coup que cette antithèse constitue le fil conducteur de l'ceuvre de Weil dont l'ampleur, la puissance et la rigueur en font l'une des æuvres maîtresses de la philosophie contemporaine. Aborder ce thème ici ne peut done signifier qu'une trop brève introduction: la pensée de Weil défie le résumé. Aussi nous contenterons-nous de ressaisir la logique interne de son point de départ; nous esquisserons ensuite son rapport à la finitude de l'homme.