“Hume Sweet Hume”: skepticism, idealism, and burial in Finnegans wake

What is the relationship between the Irish modernist writings of James Joyce and the Scottish empirical philosophy of David Hume? Here I discuss Joyce’s conception of Hume as a philosopher and explore the presence of Hume’s work in Joyce’s final masterpiece, Finnegans Wake. How then did Joyce concei...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Barlow, Richard Alan
Other Authors: School of Humanities and Social Sciences
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: 2014
Subjects:
Online Access:https://hdl.handle.net/10356/106138
http://hdl.handle.net/10220/23945
http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/phl.2014.0017
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Institution: Nanyang Technological University
Language: English
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Summary:What is the relationship between the Irish modernist writings of James Joyce and the Scottish empirical philosophy of David Hume? Here I discuss Joyce’s conception of Hume as a philosopher and explore the presence of Hume’s work in Joyce’s final masterpiece, Finnegans Wake. How then did Joyce conceive of Hume’s thought, and to what extent did he engage with it? Well, in his lecture “Realism and Idealism in English Literature,” given at Trieste in 1912, Joyce denounces the interest in the sanity (or otherwise) of artistic and philosophical geniuses, before offering the following comments: