Technically, I am still on holiday. But I did not want to postpone rebooting this weekly blog-entry until the middle of January. So this week's most-underrated-philosopher-of-the-week is: Kevin Meeker. Kevin has been publishing away on a wide variety of topics in top journals even though he is in a high teaching-load department. I know Kevin through the Hume Society, where for many years, against the Hume-is-a-naturalist or skeptical-realist crowd, he was a lonely voice arguing that Hume REALLY WAS A HONEST TO GOD SKEPTIC! (See also this lovely piece.) I recall that Kevin's arguments would be met with friendly ridicule--Humeans would not be mean, of course.
But the tide has been turning. As Paul Russell shows (with a brief, effective argument in chapter 13) in his majestic book, skeptical-realism renders Hume's position incoherent in a way that Hume clearly would not have intended. Kevin Winkler, Peter Millican ("Against the New Hume"), Graciela de Pierris, and Donald Baxter have all shown that Humean naturalism may guide one's actions, but that Hume's fundamental philosophical commitments are skeptical. Meeker did not get there first (after all, it's the traditional understanding of Hume), but he was certainly the most persistent advocate in those dark, gloomy days when the principle of charity demanded that every past philosopher must sound like a Quine-ean scientific naturalist!
Recent Comments