David Hume: The Philosopher as Historian

In this book—a new and revised edition of his classic—Nicholas Phillipson shows how Hume freed history from religion and politics. As a philosopher.
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In the 20th century it was Hume again who inspired first Bertrand Russell's influential reaction against Kantian idealism leading to the development of modern analytical philosophy and then the logical positivists of the Vienna Circle and associates such as A. Ayer and Karl Popper. Now in the 21st century Hume remains the most fertile and provocative of all the great thinkers, his theories regularly cited by contemporary philosophers, and his name appropriated for enduring fundamental ideas in epistemology, ethics, metaphysics, philosophy of action, language, religion, and even mathematics.

David Hume's primary project was to develop a science of human nature, a science stripped of dogma and based on observable fact and careful argument. He thus paved the way for cognitive science, a vibrant interdisciplinary enterprise combining philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence.

David Hume: The Philosopher as Historian

But Hume's "science of man" extends well beyond the individual mind, into fundamental questions about morals, society, political and economic behaviour, and religious belief. In particular his moral theory, grounded on empathy and the emotions rather than theology or logic, continues to exert a profound influence. Hume's philosophy is uniquely relevant to the fostering of cross-collaborative and interdisciplinary approaches to current global challenges.

With the world in disarray, facing economic, religious and environmental crises, more than at any time since the 18th century, we need enlightened visionary thought to facilitate measured responses to these threats to human cultural, social, economic and political well-being. How much can we know, and how far can we trust our natural cognitive faculties?

What are the roots of human behaviour, including moral and economic behaviour? David Hume , born May 7 [April 26, Old Style], , Edinburgh , Scotland—died August 25, , Edinburgh , Scottish philosopher, historian, economist, and essayist known especially for his philosophical empiricism and skepticism.

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Hume conceived of philosophy as the inductive, experimental science of human nature. Taking the scientific method of the English physicist Sir Isaac Newton as his model and building on the epistemology of the English philosopher John Locke , Hume tried to describe how the mind works in acquiring what is called knowledge. He concluded that no theory of reality is possible; there can be no knowledge of anything beyond experience. Despite the enduring impact of his theory of knowledge, Hume seems to have considered himself chiefly as a moralist.

The moral sense school reached its fullest development in the works of two Scottish philosophers, Francis Hutcheson — and David Hume — Hutcheson was concerned with showing, against the intuitionists, that moral judgment cannot be based on reason and therefore must be a matter…. Hume was the younger son of Joseph Hume , the modestly circumstanced laird, or lord, of Ninewells, a small estate adjoining the village of Chirnside, about nine miles distant from Berwick-upon-Tweed on the Scottish side of the border.

In his third year his father died. He entered Edinburgh University when he was about 12 years old and left it at 14 or 15, as was then usual. Pressed a little later to study law in the family tradition on both sides , he found it distasteful and instead read voraciously in the wider sphere of letters. Because of the intensity and excitement of his intellectual discovery, he had a nervous breakdown in , from which it took him a few years to recover. It is divided into three books: For those reasons his mature condemnation of it was perhaps not entirely misplaced.

Book I, nevertheless, has been more read among academic philosophers than any other of his writings. Returning to England in , he set about publishing the Treatise. Perhaps encouraged by this, he became a candidate for the chair of moral philosophy at Edinburgh in Unsuccessful, Hume left the city, where he had been living since , and began a period of wandering: Albans as tutor to the mad marquess of Annandale —46 ; a few months as secretary to Gen.

Clair a member of a prominent Scottish family , with whom he saw military action during an abortive expedition to Brittany ; a little tarrying in London and at Ninewells; and then some further months with General St. Clair on an embassy to the courts of Vienna and Turin — During his years of wandering Hume was earning the money that he needed to gain leisure for his studies.

Some fruits of those studies had already appeared before the end of his travels, viz. It was in those later works that Hume expressed his mature thought. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding is an attempt to define the principles of human knowledge. It poses in logical form significant questions about the nature of reasoning in regard to matters of fact and experience, and it answers them by recourse to the principle of association. That is to say, the mind does not create any ideas but derives them from impressions.

From this Hume develops a theory of linguistic meaning. A word that does not stand directly for an impression has meaning only if it brings before the mind an object that can be gathered from an impression by one of the mental processes just mentioned. In the second place, there are two approaches to construing meaning: The idea of a plane triangle, for example, entails the equality of its internal angles to two right angles, and the idea of motion entails the ideas of space and time, irrespective of whether there really are such things as triangles and motion.

Only on that level of mere meanings, Hume asserts, is there room for demonstrative knowledge. Matters of fact, on the other hand, come before the mind merely as they are, revealing no logical relations; their properties and connections must be accepted as they are given. That primroses are yellow, that lead is heavy, and that fire burns things are facts, each shut up in itself, logically barren.

Each, so far as reason is concerned, could be different: Therefore, there can be no logically demonstrative science of fact. From this basis Hume develops his doctrine about causality. From what impression, then, is it derived? Hume states that no causal relation among the data of the senses can be observed, for, when people regard any events as causally connected, all that they do and can observe is that they frequently and uniformly go together.

In this sort of togetherness it is a fact that the impression or idea of the one event brings with it the idea of the other. A habitual association is set up in the mind; and, as in other forms of habit, so in this one, the working of the association is felt as compulsion. This feeling , Hume concludes, is the only discoverable impressional source of the idea of causality.

Who Was David Hume? (Famous Philosophers)

Hume then considers the process of causal inference , and in so doing he introduces the concept of belief. When people see a glass fall, they not only think of its breaking but expect and believe that it will break. Or, starting from an effect, when they see the ground to be generally wet, they not only think of rain but believe that there has been rain. Thus belief is a significant component in the process of causal inference. Hume then proceeds to investigate the nature of belief, claiming that he was the first to do so. He uses the term, however, in the narrow sense of belief regarding matters of fact.

He defines belief as a sort of liveliness or vividness that accompanies the perception of an idea. A belief, in other words, is a vivid or lively idea. This vividness is originally possessed by some of the objects of awareness—by impressions and by the simple memory-images of them. By association it comes to belong to certain ideas as well.

David Hume | Biography, Philosophy, Works, & Facts | leondumoulin.nl

In the process of causal inference, then, an observer passes from an impression to an idea regularly associated with it. In the process the aspect of liveliness proper to the impression infects the idea, Hume asserts. And it is this aspect of liveliness that Hume defines as the essence of belief.

Hume does not claim to prove that events themselves are not causally related or that they will not be related in the future in the same ways as they were in the past. Indeed, he firmly believes the contrary and insists that everybody else does as well.

Belief in causality and in the resemblance of the future to the past are natural beliefs, inextinguishable propensities of human nature madness apart , and even necessary for human survival. Rather, what Hume claims to prove is that such natural beliefs are not obtained from, and cannot be demonstrated by, either empirical observation or reason, whether intuitive or inferential.

Although reflection shows that there is no evidence for them, it also shows that humans are bound to have them and that it is sensible and sane to do so. Defining morality as those qualities that are approved 1 in whomsoever they happen to be and 2 by virtually everybody, he sets himself to discover the broadest grounds of the approvals. Qualities are valued either for their utility or for their agreeableness, in each case either to their owners or to others.

But regard for others accounts for the greater part of morality. His emphasis is on altruism: He here writes as a man having the same commitment to duty as his fellows.

Early life and works

The traditional view that he was a detached scoffer is deeply wrong: Following the publication of these works, Hume spent several years —63 in Edinburgh, with two breaks in London. An attempt was made to get him appointed as successor to Adam Smith , the Scottish economist later to be his close friend , in the chair of logic at Glasgow, but the rumour of atheism prevailed again.

His recent writings had begun to make him known, but these two brought him fame, abroad as well as at home.