Defining a Woman - It's All Hume's Fault

In this video we discuss what is (for some reason) perhaps the most contentious question of our time: "What is a woman?" Then I propose why this question seems so difficult so suddenly. (It's all David Hume's fault for eliminating Formal and Final causes from our metaphysics.)

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[eismscience]

Thanks for this exceptionally clear and important breakdown. It would be interesting to hear you draw out the implications for political theory.

[catholicphoenix]

I've noticed that trying to define the word woman to gender relativists is like trying to define human to staunch prochoicers. Prochoice people who deny fetal humanity will bring up cancer cells, animals, hair follicle and finger nails in order to justify child murder.

I reckon it's a case of insincere people trying to act manipulative towards sincere people. I once heard from a YouTuber that specialises in combating narcissistic abuse say "abandon sincere discussion when dealing with the insincere".

[Google_Censored_Commenter]

As a Hume fanboy, I really take issue with this video. Outside of the fact that Hume was right about virtually everything he talked about, why Blame Hume, when the activists don't even know who the hell he is? Not even the academics.

There are WAY more modern thinkers to blame you could point to, that have a much more clear connection than David Hume. You mention Foucault yourself, so clearly you're aware of it, why the obsession with blaming my good boy Hume? Would you rather we were all still dogmatic thinkers who cast everyone in sin, and burned people at the stake for so-called sin, etc? Where has absolutism ever gotten us anywhere productive in society? Sure, he was an advocate of relativism of a kind, but not the variety we see on display today. He wouldn't accept that "anything goes" or that you can just "identify as whatever the hell you want". He was an empiricist, he wanted things to be grounded in reality, what we could observe. So he would very readily jump on the biological definition, since that's purely empirical. "Here's a pattern of what females are like, and that's what a woman" kind of thought-process, simple.

Furthermore, Hume was a fervent proponent of everything, almost no matter the topic, being *contingent* . Morality? Contingent. Free will? Contingent. Social contracts, ie. promises? contingent. Our experience with the world? Contingent on our senses. To Hume, everything is contingent on *something* . Nothing can be defined as simply just *being* unconditionally. Yet this is precisely what the gender theorists want to do with the word woman. They don't want to give it a definition, because to define it would be to make it contingent on something else, namely, its definition. So they have to resort to circular, or tautological definitions, which don't tell you anything. Precisely the type of arguments Hume called out all the time. And if you really just want to blame philosophers who are famous for their skepticism, why not go all the way back to Sextus Empiricus, or Pyrrho? They were deconstructing everything on a way more fundamental level than Hume did. At least Hume only did it as a philosophical exercise, he advised everyone to still believe in their intuitions for practical living.

Finally, if this really was Hume's fault in any meaningful way, why the hell did it take us 300 years for this problem to come up? Please explain that. Shouldn't the whole woman debate have happened a few decades after his death, if he truly had an impact? It's a silly argument. Anyone worth their salt knows feminism, wokeness, marxism, postmodernism etc. are way more causally related than Hume.

Edit: Might as well address why the forms argument doesn't work, even though I think you know why, but just in case someone else reads it. The reason it doesn't work is because there is no ideal "form" of a woman we can observe in reality. Anyone who claims to have knowledge of it, is merely postulating what they think a woman is, based on a *pattern* of particular persons they have identified as women throughout their life in the past. In other words, they're simply elevating this generality based on the average of a sample, to an abstract "form" status that is unwarranted. Because when you elevate it to this fixed state of a "form" or a "nature", you detach it from the ties of reality that gave birth to it. If you observe more women, or reobserve the women in the past, and find that they changed, you can no longer change the form to suit it, lest you abandon the concept of forms entirely. That's not even to speak of the unobservable nature of these forms. Frankly, we have no reason to believe they even exist, since we've only had experience with particular women. Why would we assume an "average" woman truly exists?

This entire step isn't even necessary to have your argument of what a woman is work. You can attach it to the average chromosome make-up of females just fine, without appealing to some mythical nature. When there's exceptions to it, like there are to any and all categories, then that doesn't mean our categories are useless, it's just the nature of categories.