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- This article discusses the skepticism of philosopher David Hume based on the philosophy contained in his A Treatise of Human Nature and An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. It investigates how the various ways in which forms of skepticism can differ and characterizes the general tendencies of Hume's skeptical thinking.
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Mar 21, 2018 · Hume asks on what grounds we come to our beliefs about the unobserved on the basis of inductive inferences. He presents an argument in the form of a dilemma which appears to rule out the possibility of any reasoning from the premises to the conclusion of an inductive inference.
- Overview
- Early life and works
- Mature works
David Hume was born on May 7 [April 26, Old Style], 1711.
When did David Hume die?
David Hume died on August 25, 1776.
What did David Hume write?
David Hume’s philosophical works included A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751), An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1758), and Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (posthumously published in 1779). He also wrote on political economy (the Political Discourses, 1752) and history (the multivolume History of England, 1754–62).
Why is David Hume famous?
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. David’s mother, Catherine, a daughter of Sir David Falconer, president of the Scottish court of session, was in Edinburgh when he was born. 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 1729, from which it took him a few years to recover.
In 1734, after trying his hand in a merchant’s office in Bristol, he came to the turning point of his life and retired to France for three years. Most of this time he spent at La Flèche on the Loire, in the old Anjou, studying and writing A Treatise of Human Nature. The Treatise was Hume’s attempt to formulate a full-fledged philosophical system. It is divided into three books: Book I, “Of the Understanding,” discusses, in order, the origin of ideas; the ideas of space and time; knowledge and probability, including the nature of causality; and the skeptical implications of those theories. Book II, “Of the Passions,” describes an elaborate psychological machinery to explain the affective, or emotional, order in humans and assigns a subordinate role to reason in this mechanism. Book III, on morals, characterizes moral goodness in terms of “feelings” of approval or disapproval that people have when they consider human behaviour in the light of agreeable or disagreeable consequences, either to themselves or to others.
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Although the Treatise is Hume’s most thorough exposition of his thought, at the end of his life he vehemently repudiated it as juvenile, avowing that only his later writings presented his considered views. The Treatise is not well constructed, in parts oversubtle, confusing because of ambiguity in important terms (especially “reason”), and marred by willful extravagance of statement and rather theatrical personal avowals. 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 1737, he set about publishing the Treatise. Books I and II were published in two volumes in 1739; Book III appeared the following year. The poor reception of this, his first and very ambitious work, depressed him; he later said, in his Autobiography, that “it fell dead-born from the press, without reaching such distinction, as even to excite a murmur among the zealots.” But his next venture, Essays, Moral and Political (1741–42), won some success. Perhaps encouraged by this, he became a candidate for the chair of moral philosophy at Edinburgh in 1744. Objectors alleged heresy and even atheism, pointing to the Treatise as evidence (Hume’s Autobiography notwithstanding, the work had not gone unnoticed). Unsuccessful, Hume left the city, where he had been living since 1740, and began a period of wandering: a sorry year near St. Albans as tutor to the mad marquess of Annandale (1745–46); a few months as secretary to Gen. James St. Clair (a member of a prominent Scottish family), with whom he saw military action during an abortive expedition to Brittany (1746); 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 (1748–49).
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., a further Three Essays, Moral and Political (1748) and Philosophical Essays Concerning Human Understanding (1748). The latter is a rewriting of Book I of the Treatise (with the addition of his essay “On Miracles,” which became notorious for its denial that a miracle can be proved by any amount or kind of evidence); it is better known as An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, the title Hume gave to it in a revision of 1758. The Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751) was a rewriting of Book III of the Treatise. 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. The basis of Hume’s exposition is a twofold classification of objects of awareness. In the first place, all such objects are either “impressions,” data of sensation or of internal consciousness, or “ideas,” derived from such data by compounding, transposing, augmenting, or diminishing. 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: an analytical one, which concentrates on the “relations of ideas,” and an empirical one, which focuses on “matters of fact.” Ideas can be held before the mind simply as meanings, and their logical relations to one another can then be detected by rational inspection. 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: the contradictory of every matter of fact is conceivable. Therefore, there can be no logically demonstrative science of fact.
Sep 21, 2016 · Hume’s epistemology is based on empiricism and on its basic principle that all knowledge is derived from experience and must not go beyond experience.
- Zuzana Parusniková
- 2016
Hume’s Skepticism and Hume on Skepticism. Above we have presented what can perhaps best be called ‘Humean skepticism’. It is a central part of his philosophy and it also rendered him the reputation of being a skeptic among his contemporaries.
Summary. By all that has been said the reader will easily perceive, that the philosophy contained in this book is very sceptical, and tends to give us a notion of the imperfections and narrow limits of human understanding.
Feb 25, 2022 · Hume’s new and open references to a “mitigated skepticism” or “Academic philosophy” is, for him, no small indicator that the mature Hume may have adopted this type of skepticism to avoid the psychological suffering that he described in the Conclusion to the first book of the Treatise.
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