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For other persons named David Hume, see David Hume (disambiguation).
| Western Philosophy 18th-century philosophy | |
|---|---|
David Hume | |
| Name | David Hume |
| Birth | April 26, 1711 (Edinburgh, Scotland) |
| Death | August 25, 1776 (Edinburgh, Scotland) |
| School/tradition | Naturalism, Scepticism, Empiricism, Scottish Enlightenment |
| Main interests | Epistemology, Metaphysics, Philosophy of Mind, Ethics, Political Philosophy, Aesthetics, Philosophy of Religion |
| Notable ideas | Problem of causation, Induction, Is-ought problem |
| Influenced by | Locke, Berkeley, Thomas Hobbes, Hutcheson, Newton, Cicero, Malebranche |
| Influenced | Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, Immanuel Kant, Jeremy Bentham, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, Arthur Schopenhauer, Auguste Comte, John Stuart Mill, Baron d\'Holbach, Darwin, Thomas Huxley, William James, Bertrand Russell, Einstein, Karl Popper, Alfred Ayer, J. L. Mackie, Noam Chomsky, Simon Blackburn, Iain King |
David Hume (April 26, 1711 – August 25, 1776)April 26 is Hume\'s birthdate in the Old Style Julian calendar, it is May 7 in New Style (Gregorian). was an 18th-century Scottish philosopher, economist, and historian, considered among the most important figures in the history of Western philosophy and the Scottish Enlightenment.
He first gained recognition and respect as a historian; but interest in Hume\'s work in academia has in recent years centred on his philosophical writing. His History of England6 vols., (London: Andrew Millar, 1754-1762). was the standard work on English history for sixty or seventy years until Macaulay\'s.Thomas Babington Macaulay, The History of England from the Accession of James II, 5 vols. (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1849-1861) [1], [2], [3], [4], [5] ; ed. David Fate Norton, The Cambridge Companion to Hume (Cambridge: CUP, 1993), p.211.
Hume was the first great philosopher of the modern era to carve out a thoroughly naturalistic philosophy. This philosophy partly consisted in the rejection of the historically prevalent conception of human minds as being miniature versions of the divine mind.See E. J. Craig\'s The Mind of God and the Works of Man, (Oxford, 1987), Ch.1 & 2. This doctrine was associated with a trust in the powers of human reason and insight into reality, which possessed God’s certification. Hume’s scepticism came in his rejection of this ‘insight ideal’,Term due to E. J. Craig; see previous fn. and the (usually rationalistic) confidence derived from it that the world is as we represent it. Instead, the best we can do is to apply the strongest explanatory and empirical principles available to the investigation of human mental phenomena, issuing in a quasi-Newtonian project, Hume\'s ‘Science of Man’.
Hume was heavily influenced by empiricists John Locke and George Berkeley, along with various Francophone writers such as Pierre Bayle, and various figures on the Anglophone intellectual landscape such as Isaac Newton, Samuel Clarke, Francis Hutcheson, Adam Smith, and Joseph Butler.In the Introduction to his A Treatise of Human Nature, (New York: Dover, 2003 edition), p.xi.fn., Hume mentions "Mr Locke, Lord Shaftesbury, Dr Mandeville, Mr Hutcheson, Dr Butler, etc." as philosophers "who have begun to put the science of man on a new footing, and have engaged the attention, and excited the curiosity of the public".
David Home (later Hume), son of Joseph Home of Chirnside, advocate, and Katherine Lady Falconer, was born on 26 April 1711 (Old style) in a tenement on the North side of the Lawnmarket in Edinburgh. Throughout his life Hume, who never married, was to spend time occasionally at his family home at Ninewells by Chirnside, Berwickshire. (He changed his name to Hume in 1734 because the English had difficulty in pronouncing Home in the Scottish manner.) He was sent by his family to the University of Edinburgh at the unusually early age of twelve, perhaps as young as ten (fourteen would have been more normal). At first he considered a career in law, but came to have, in his words, "an insurmountable aversion to everything but the pursuits of Philosophy and general Learning; and while [my family] fanceyed I was poring over Voet and Vinnius, Cicero and Vergil were the Authors which I was secretly devouring."David Hume, My Own Life, in The Cambridge Companion to Hume, op.cit., p.351. He had little respect for professors, telling a friend in 1735 "there is nothing to be learned from a Professor, which is not to be met with in Books." At the age of eighteen Hume made a philosophical discovery that opened up to him "a new Scene of Thought" which inspired him "to throw up every other Pleasure or Business to apply entirely to it".David Hume, A Kind of History of My Life, in The Cambridge Companion to Hume, ibid., p.346. He did not recount what this "Scene" was, and, indeed, commentators have offered widely diverging speculations.See Oliver A. Johnson, The Mind of David Hume, (University of Illinois Press, 1995), pp.8-9, for a useful presentation of varying interpretations of Hume\'s "scene of thought" remark.
The careers open to a poor Scottish gentleman in those days were very few. As Hume\'s options lay between a travelling tutorship and a stool in a merchant\'s office, he chose the latter. In 1734, after a few months in commerce in Bristol, he went to La Flèche in Anjou, France. He had frequent discourses with the Jesuits of the famous college in which Descartes was educated. During his four years there, he laid out his life plan, resolving "to make a very rigid frugality supply my deficiency of fortune, to maintain unimpaired my independency, and to regard every object as contemptible except the improvements of my talents in literature."A Kind of History of My Life, op. cit., p.352 Whilst there, he completed A Treatise of Human Nature at the age of twenty-six. Although many scholars today consider the Treatise to be Hume\'s most important work and one of the most important books in the history of philosophy, the public in Great Britain did not agree at first. Hume himself described the (lack of) public reaction to the publication of the Treatise in 1739–40 by writing that it "fell dead-born from the press, without reaching such distinction as even to excite a murmur among the zealots. But being naturally of a cheerful and sanguine temper, I soon recovered from the blow and prosecuted with great ardour my studies in the country".Ibid., p.352. There he wrote the Abstract.An Abstract of a Book lately Published; Entitled, A Treatise of Human Nature, &c. Wherein the Chief Argument of that Book is farther Illustrated and Explained, (London, 1740). Without revealing his authorship, he aimed to make his larger work more intelligible by shortening it.
After the publication of Essays Moral and Political in 1744, he applied for the Chair of Pneumatics and Moral Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. However, the position was given to William Cleghorn, after the majority of Edinburgh ministers petitioned the town council not to appoint Hume because of his atheism.Douglas Nobbs, \'The Political Ideas of William Cleghorn, Hume\'s Academic Rival\', in Journal of the History of Ideas, (1965), Vol. 26, No. 4: 575-586 During the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745 he tutored the Marquise of Annandale (1720-92) officially described as a "lunatic".Grant, Old and New Edinburgh in the 18th Century, (Glasgow, 1883), p.7. This engagement ended in disarray after about a year. But it was then that he started his great historical work The History of Great BritainDavid Hume, The History of Great Britain, (London, 1754 -56). which would take fifteen years and run to over a million words, to be published in six volumes in the period 1754 to 1762. During this period he was involved with the Canongate Theatre and in this context associated with Lord Monboddo and other Scottish Enlightenment luminaries in Edinburgh. From 1746 he served for three years as Secretary to Lieutenant-General St Clair writing his Philosophical Essays Concerning Human Understanding, later published as An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. The Enquiry proved little more successful than the Treatise.
Hume was charged with heresy, but he was defended by his young clerical friends who argued that as an atheist he lay outside the jurisdiction of the Church. Despite his acquittal—and possibly due to the opposition of Thomas Reid of Aberdeen, who that year launched a Christian critique of his metaphysics—Hume failed to gain the Chair of Philosophy at the University of Glasgow. It was after returning to Edinburgh in 1752, as he wrote in My Own Life, that "the Faculty of Advocates chose me their Librarian, an office from which I received little or no emolument, but which gave me the command of a large library."Op. cit., p.353. It was this resource that enabled him to continue his historical research for his book The History of Great Britain.
Hume achieved great literary fame as a historian. His enormous History of Great Britain, tracing events from the Saxon kingdoms to the Glorious Revolution, was a best-seller in its day. In it, Hume presented political man as a creature of habit, with a disposition to submit quietly to established government unless confronted by uncertain circumstances. In his view, only religious difference could deflect men from their everyday lives to think about political matters.
Tomb of David Hume in Edinburgh
Hume\'s early essay Of Superstition and Religion laid the foundations for nearly all subsequent secular thinking about the history of religion. Critics of religion during Hume\'s time were required to express themselves cautiously. Less than 15 years before Hume was born, 18-year-old college student Thomas Aikenhead was put on trial for saying openly that he thought Christianity was nonsense; he was later convicted and hanged for blasphemy. Hume followed the common practice of expressing his views obliquely, through characters in dialogues. Hume did not acknowledge authorship of Treatise until the year of his death, in 1776. His essays[6] On Suicide, and On the Immortality of the Soul and his Dialogues concerning Natural Religion were held from publication until after his death (published 1778 and 1779, respectively), and they still bore neither author\'s nor publisher\'s name. So masterly was Hume in disguising his own views that debate continues to this day over whether Hume was actually a deist or an atheist. Regardless, in his own time Hume\'s alleged atheism caused him to be passed over for many positions.
Hume told his friend Mure of Caldwell of an incident which occasioned his "conversion" to Christianity. Passing across the recently drained Nor’ Loch to the New Town of Edinburgh to supervise the masons building his new house, soon to become No. 1 St. David Street, he slipped and fell into the mire. Hume, being then of great bulk, could not regain his feet. Some passing Newhaven fishwives seeing his plight, but recognising him as the well-known atheist, refused to rescue him until he became a Christian and had recited The Lord’s Prayer and the Creed. This he did, and was rewarded by being set again on his feet by these brawny women. Hume asserted thereafter that Edinburgh fishwives were the "most acute theologians he had ever met".Maitland Club, Caldwell Papers II, p.177n.
From 1763 to 1765 Hume was Secretary to Lord Hertford in Paris, where he was admired by Voltaire and lionised by the ladies in society. He made friends, and later fell out, with Rousseau. He wrote of his Paris life "I really wish often for the plain roughness of the The Poker Club of Edinburgh . . . to correct and qualify so much lusciousness." For a year from 1767, Hume held the appointment of Under Secretary of State for the Northern Department. In 1768 he settled in Edinburgh. Attention to Hume\'s philosophical works grew after the German philosopher Immanuel Kant credited Hume with awakening him from "dogmatic slumbers" (circa 1770) and from then onwards he gained the recognition that he had craved all his life.
James Boswell visited Hume a few weeks before his death. Hume told him that he sincerely believed it a "most unreasonable fancy" that there might be life after death.Boswell, J. Boswell in Extremes, 1776-1778 This meeting was also dramatized in semi-fictional form for the BBC by Michael Ignatieff as Dialogue in the Dark. Hume wrote his own epitaph:"Born 1711, Died [----]. Leaving it to posterity to add the rest." It is engraved with the year of his death 1776 on the "simple Roman tomb" which he prescribed, and which stands, as he wished it, on the Eastern slope of the Calton Hill overlooking his home in the New Town of Edinburgh at No. 1 St. David Street.
Statue of David Hume in Edinburgh, Scotland
In the introduction to A Treatise of Human Nature, Hume writes that “the science of man is the only solid foundation for the other sciences”, and that the correct method for this science is “experience and observation”;David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, op.cit., p.xi. i.e. the empirical method.
However, there has been wide disagreement amongst commentators on the precise form of Hume’s enterprise, and, in particular, what sort of empiricism Hume favoured. The Logical Positivists took Hume’s project to be one of analysing sentences to find out the empirical conditions that make those sentences meaningful. According to the Logical Positivists, unless a statement could be verified or falsified by experience, or else was true or false by definition (i.e. either tautological or contradictory), then it was meaningless (this is their famous Verification Principle). Hume, on this view, was a proto-Positivist, who, in his philosophical writings, took to showing how ordinary sentences about objects, causal relations, the self, etc., were semantically equivalent to sentences about one’s experiences.Such a view of Hume is standardly presented in A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic, (Penguin, 2001 edition), pp.40.ff.
However, not all critics agree with Logical Positivist interpretation. A standard argument against it is that, whereas the Logical Positivists took the Verification Principle to lead to anti-Sceptical conclusions,For example, here is Moritz Schlick, one of the founders of the movement: "[N]o meaningful problem can be insoluble in principle... This is one of the most characteristic results of our empiricism. It means that in principle there are no limits to our knowledge." \'Meaning and Verification\', (http://www.geocities.jp/mickindex/schlick/schlick_MV_en.html) Hume described himself as a mitigated Sceptic.David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Tom L. Beauchamp, (Oxford: OUP, 1999), pp.207-8. Instead it has been argued that, rather than exploring the experiential conditions of the meaningfulness of sentences, Hume was giving an account of conditions under which we come to form certain ideas and beliefs; that is to say, he was giving a causal account of the origin of general concepts of the external world, causation, the self, and so on. On this view, our forming and using such concepts is the result of an in-built, natural disposition to deploy faculties of the mind such as custom, habit, and the imagination. Another way of expressing this is to say that he was not concerned with advancing a theory of semantics — i.e. what we mean when we talk about, say, physical objects or causal relations — but rather was carrying out an epistemological enquiry, asking in effect how the stimuli of the senses and our conceptual apparatus work together to compel us to form various sorts of judgements and to make claims to knowledge.Such an account of Hume\'s views is presented in Chapter 2 of E. J. Craig\'s The Mind of God and the Works of Man, op.cit.
In what follows, central philosophical concepts that Hume wrote about, and different interpretations that have been offered of his arguments, will be explored.
In An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Hume spends the first two sections developing a framework that accounts for the contents within the human mind. That is, Hume is interested as to how we come to form ideas. He describes our perceptions as falling into two categories: impressions and ideas. Impressions and ideas can be distinguished in two ways. Firstly, impressions are more vivid, because they appeal directly to the senses (e.g. placing one\'s hand on a hot stove top). Ideas are dull in comparison to impressions, because they "recall" impressions, while lacking their intensity and strength. The thought being that calling upon the idea of becoming burning is insignificantly as intense (painful) as actually being burnt. Secondly, ideas are always copies of impressions. It is important to note, as Hume does, that because of this every idea must have a root impressions. In other words, for an idea to be intelligible and have meaningfulness it must have an originating impression (or impressions) that it can be traced back to.
Hume’s views on the concept of causation are a subject of much dispute, and there are at least three different interpretations represented in the literature. These are:
(i) The logical positivist interpretation
(ii) The sceptical realist interpretation
(iii) The quasi-realist and projectivist interpretation
This has been rejected, however, by Sceptical Realists, who argue that Hume was not discussing the meaning of causal terms, but rather their source, or their causal origin, in our experience. The major disagreement with the Positivist view is over Hume’s take on the idea of Necessary Connexion. According to the Positivists, as we have seen, causality consists only in regularities in perceptions, but the Sceptical Realists point out that Hume also thought there to be a Necessary Connexion between causes and effects that goes unperceived.See A Treatise of Human Nature, op.cit., p.56: “Shall we rest contented with these two relations of contiguity and succession? By no means… there is a NECESSARY CONNEXION to be taken into consideration”. The reason Hume is called a Sceptical Realist on this take is that he did not think we could have perceptual access to the necessary connexion, and thus we have no reason to believe in it (hence Scepticism);“When we look about us towards external objects, and consider the operation of causes, we are never able… to discover any power or necessary connexion…”, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, op.cit., p.136. but at the same time we are compelled by natural instinct to believe there to be a necessary connexion when we observe a regularity or constancy in our perceptions, and this natural belief is of an external causal necessity (hence Realism).Proponents of the Sceptical Realist view are numerous: see, e.g., E. J. Craig, op.cit., Ch.2; Galen Strawson, The Secret Connexion, (Oxford: OUP, 1989); John Wright, The Sceptical Realism of David Hume, (Manchester: MUP, 1983).
However, the Sceptical Realist reading has been rejected by Simon Blackburn, who instead proposes a Projectivist and Quasi-Realist interpretation.See S. Blackburn, ‘Hume and Thick Connexions’, in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 50, Supplement. (Autumn, 1990), pp. 237-250. According to this position, Hume was not arguing that we have a concept of a Real necessary connexion, where "Real" means that our idea represents something in the world, external to human minds. Instead, our concept of causation is composed of two elements (corresponding to Hume\'s two famous "definitions" of causation),For the two definitions see the first Enquiry, op.cit., p.146. the first of which is the regular succession given in perception, but the second of which, the necessary connexion, is actually a product of a functional change in the human mind which allows us to anticipate and predict future events based on past regularities. So the Quasi-Realist denies that the necessary connexion is a property existing in the world (hence he denies straightforward Realism), and instead sees it as representative of a change in our mental states and practical attitudes. However, this does not amount to a full-on Anti-Realism about Causation, because the Quasi-Realist is also a Projectivist, who holds that it is perfectly legitimate to "project" our predictions by making statements which express the belief in a necessary connexion. It is not that we talk "as-if" there were a necessary connexion, when really there is not: rather, our talk of there being a necessary connexion is a way of voicing a distinctive mental set, which allows us to explain and predict the behaviour of objects, and hopefully come to control them too. Thus when Hume says that “nothing is more usual than to apply to external bodies every internal sensation which they occasion”,Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, op.cit., p.147, fn.17. he is not diagnosing an error in human thought, but merely giving a scientific explanation of how our concepts arise.
The Problem of Induction has received a great deal of critical attention, and though Hume offered his own solution to the problem, many have since queried whether he was in fact successful.For example, Nelson Goodman argues in Fact, Fiction and Forecast, (Bobbs-Merrill, 1973), that Hume did not solve the problem, and goes on to offer a solution himself. However, late Oxford philosopher P. F. Strawson has said of Hume\'s solution: "[e]ver since the facts were made clear by Hume, people have been resisting acceptance of them"[7], and in Strawson\'s book Scepticism and Naturalism, (London: Routledge, 1985), he defends a broadly Humean view of inductive belief-formation. As a result, many modern commentators have themselves attempted solutions, and in this section some of them will be explored.
Inductive inference is the ability to infer from past regularities - e.g. from the fact that B has always followed A - to future and presently unobserved instances of that regularity - e.g. that if A occurs, B will follow. For example, the fact that fire has always burnt us in the past leads us to believe that fire will continue to burn us in the future, and that if any person is currently touching fire, it is burning them. The problem of induction is the problem of explaining this ability: how can we know the way things will behave when they go "beyond the present testimony of the senses, and the records of our memory"?Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, op.cit., p.108.
Hume argues that induction is founded on the persistence of regularities (sometimes called the Uniformity of Nature) and that we cannot know nature is uniform through Reason, because reason only comes in two sorts, and both of these are inadequate. The two sorts are:
(i) Demonstrative reasoning (effectively, deductive reasoning)
(ii) Probable reasoning (effectively, inductive reasoning)Dr. Peter J. R. Millican has argued that (roughly speaking) demonstration = deduction, and probability = induction, in his Ph.D. thesis, Hume, Induction and Probability.[8]
With regards to (i), Hume argues that we cannot prove a priori that regularities will continue, as it is "consistent and conceivable" that the course of nature might change.See Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, op.cit., p.111. Coming to (ii), Hume argues that founding a regularity on the fact that regularity has always operated in the past (inductive reasoning) is arguing in a circle, because induction was the very process we were trying to explain in the first place. Hence no form of reason will sponsor inductive inference.
This argument has been criticised in more than one area. For example, some have maintained that Kantian arguments can establish that nature is uniform.See e.g. Martin Hollis, \'Reason and Reality\', in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Vol. 68 (1968), pp. 271-286. It has been countered, however, that even if Kantian arguments can prove a priori that nature is uniform in general, this does not make inductive inference rational, because there is still the problem of working out which particular regularities will continue.For this counter, see John D. Kenyon, \'Doubts about the Concept of Reason\', in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume, Vol. 59, (1985), 249-267, p.255.
A further criticism is that there are more types of reasoning than Hume allows (the two types of demonstrative and probabilistic), for one can give deductive reasons for probability distributions, and it might be that a demonstration of the high probability of success of an inductive policy can succeed in showing induction to be rational.Such attempts are advanced by Roy Harrod, Foundations of Inductive Logic (London: Macmillan, 1956); Simon Blackburn, Reason and Prediction, (Cambridge: CUP, 1973). However, it could be argued that Nelson Goodman has shown that no purely formal treatment can work. Goodman identified certain regularities that cannot be successfully \'projected\' into the future: for example, if we define a new predicate "grue", such that something is grue if it is green until the year 3000, and blue thereafter, we know that all emeralds thus far have been "grue", but we do not assume they will continue to be grue after 3000 AD, because that would be to assume they will turn blue at a random point in time.See Goodman, Fact, Fiction and Forecast, op.cit. Thus a non-formal distinction must be made between those predicates which can, and those which can\'t, be projected: Simon Blackburn, for example, has argued that the distinction is between observational predicates and non-observational predicates.Blackburn, Reason and Prediction, op.cit. This seems to counter the idea that purely formal a priori probabilistic reasoning can show induction to be rational.
Turning from Hume\'s problem, we will exhibit different solutions that have been given to the problem. There are three main categories of contemporary response to the problem, as follows:
(i) The Analytic Solution
(ii) The Inductive Solution
(iii) The Pragmatic Solution
The first analytic solution was argued for by P. F. Strawson.P. F. Strawson, Introduction to Logical Theory, (New York: Wiley, 1953). Strawson later came to accept Hume\'s own solution to the problem (see a previous fn. referring to this). Essentially, it contends that the question of whether induction is rational is nonsense, as when we say something is rational, we just mean it is inductive (or deductive). That is, any inductive inference is a ‘rational’ inference, because inductive inferences are the sort of things we take as defining the concept of ‘reason’, or ‘rational’ argumentation: “to call a particular belief reasonable or unreasonable is to apply inductive standards”.Ibid. The question, “is induction rational?” is, says Strawson, akin to the question, “is the law legal?” That is to say, induction is analytically a rational policy: to ask after its rationality is to misunderstand the definition of the concept.
However, the analytic solution has been opposed on the grounds that the question now transfers to one of whether we should prefer to be \'rational\' as defined. Brian Skyrms imagines a tribe who use a Shaman to make their predictions about the future, and calls this method \'brational\'. The question is now, why should we prefer \'rationality\' to \'brationality\'?For this argument, see Brian Skyrms, Choice and Chance: An Introduction to Inductive Logic, (Belmont, Dickinson, 1966).
A possible answer might be found in the inductive solution, proposed by Max Black.Max Black, Self-supporting Inductive Arguments, Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 55, (1958), pp. 718-25. It might be thought that, as Hume argued, we cannot use induction to legitimate induction, for that would be circular. But Black argues that our justification of induction is a second-order appeal to the success not of individual predictions, but to rules of prediction. The question comes, what justifies the use of the rules of induction? Again, Black maintains, we must appeal to our past success. Furthermore, (and pre-empting anymore aimless probing), this third level of justification is justified by its past success, and so on, ad infinitum.
Skyrms has, again, argued against this.Skyrms, op.cit. He asserts that we can imagine an Anti-Inductive policy which is just as justifiable as the Inductive one, according to Black\'s defence. An anti-inductive argument goes something like this: the sun has always risen in the past, therefore it will not rise tomorrow. When we ask what justifies making such an inference, the anti-inductivist appeals to a second-order anti-inductive rule: “Well, anti-inductive arguments have never worked in the past; therefore they will work this time”. If the anti-inductivist is pushed, he will respond in a like manner again and again: “The rules of anti-inductive arguments have never worked for me before, so they are sure to work this time”. Essentially the anti-inductivist is able to generate precisely the same chain of ‘justification’ as the inductivist, and there is no way now of choosing between an inductive and an anti-inductive policy: they are equally ‘justified’. Skyrms takes this as a reductio of Black\'s proposed solution.
The pragmatist hopes to justify induction by appeal to its tendency to be right if any policy will, because induction can factor in the successes of other predictive policies.See Wesley Salmon, \'The Pragmatic Justification of Induction\', in The Justification of Induction, ed. R. Swinburne, (Oxford: OUP, 1974). However, it has been argued that the fact that an inductive policy of prediction is as successful as, or more successful than any other does not show which particular regularities will persist, and this is what we need if we are to explain our ability to project the right regularities.This is again posed by Skyrms, op.cit.
Turning from contemporary attempts to justify induction, we can look at Hume\'s own response to the problem. Hume argued in effect that although Reason cannot explain our ability to make correct inductive inference, natural instinct can. Hume says that "Nature, by an absolute and uncountroulable necessity has determin\'d us to judge as well as to breathe and feel".A Treatise of Human Nature, op.cit., p.131. Some modern commentators agree with Hume\'s solution; for example, Oxford Professor John Kenyon, who has argued: "Reason might manage to raise a doubt about the truth of a conclusion of natural inductive inference just for a moment in the study, but the forces of nature will soon overcome that artificial scepticism, and the sheer agreeableness of animal faith will protect us from excessive caution and sterile suspension of belief."Doubts about the Concept of Reason, op.cit., p.254.
There are at least two broadly different ways of interpreting Hume’s views on personal identity, and these will be presented here. According to the first view, Hume was a bundle theorist, who held that the self is nothing but a bundle of interconnected perceptions. This view is forwarded by, for example, Positivist interpreters, who saw Hume as attempting to specify the “sense-contents” (roughly, bits of sensory-experience) that we refer to when we talk about the self.See, e.g., A. J. Ayer’s account of Hume on the self, in Language, Truth and Logic, op.cit., p.135-6. This account draws on Hume’s remarks that a person is “a bundle or collection of different perceptions”.Treatise, op.cit., p.180.Georges Dicker (Routledge). Hume\'s Epistemology & Metaphysics. 1998, 31. A modern day version of the bundle theory of the mind has been advanced by Derek Parfit See his Reasons and Persons at Oxford Scholarship Online. and finds echoes in the Buddhist philosophical concept of skandhas (aggregates).
However, some have criticised the bundle theory interpretation of Hume on personal identity. Some account for Hume’s talk of people being bundles of perceptions as figurative, and raise the problem for such a view (at least in its basic form) that it is difficult to specify what it is that makes a bundle of perceptions the perceptions of a distinct person; for it seems that we can have similar perceptions to one another, and that the interconnections between our own perceptions (such as causal connections) can be shared with others’ perceptual states too.See E. J. Craig, op.cit, Ch.2., for this criticism.
An alternative theory is that Hume is answering an epistemological question about the cause of people forming judgements or beliefs about the existence of the self.This view is forwarded by Craig, ibid. In support of this interpretation we can point to passages that use causal terminology: “What then gives us so great a propension to ascribe an identity to these successive perceptions, and to suppose ourselves possest of an invariable and uninterrupted existence thro\' the whole course of our lives?”Treatise, p.181.
The problem on this way of reading Hume, then, is that experience is interrupted and ever-changing, but somehow causes us to form a concept of a constant self which is the subject of these experiences. And Hume’s answer on this account is that it is the same interconnections and relations between perceptions that force the imagination to believe in the existence of mind-independent objects. He effectively argues, we cannot make sense of the notion of objects existing independently of ourselves unless we have an idea of \'ourself\' as something that occasionally becomes aware of these objects. So the human mind, or consciousness, is thus conceived of as a field of experience into which various different objects appear and then disappear: "the true idea of the human mind, is to consider it as a system of different perceptions or different existences, which are link\'d together by the relation of cause and effect, and mutually produce, destroy, influence, and modify each other."Ibid., p.186.
Hume\'s most famous sentence occurs at Treatise, II, III, iii, Of the influencing motives of the will: "Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them." Hume here extends his anti-rationalism from the epistemological sphere into that of the theory of action, and demonstrates that the faculty of reason cannot, of itself, move the will. He starts the section by going over the by now familiar distinction between demonstrative and probable reasoning (roughly, deductive and inductive reasoning). He then argues that neither can influence the will, as both simply provide information — deductive reasoning about correct mathematical or logical inference and inductive reasoning about causal connections — and it is always open to us as to how to act on this information. Hume then argues that in order to be moved to act on the information provided us by reason, my passions, desires and inclinations must play a role. To take a simple example: using causal reasoning I can discern that if I drink a lot of wine, I will get drunk, but the truth of this conditional will not motivate me to do anything unless I have some desire, in this case the desire to be drunk. As such, Hume forwards the basic folk psychological action-theory that a motive to action requires both a belief (ascertained by the understanding) and a desire (provided by the passions). This theory is still hotly contested, with Humean philosophers such as Simon Blackburn and Michael Smith on one side, and moral cognitivists, like John McDowell, and Kantians, like Christine Korsgaard, on the other.
Hume first discusses ethics in A Treatise of Human Nature. He later extracts and expounds upon the ideas he proposed in Treatise in a shorter essay entitled An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals. Hume\'s approach in Enquiry is fundamentally an empirical one. Instead of telling us how morality ought to operate, he tells us how we actually make moral judgments. After providing us with various examples, he comes to the conclusion that most, though not all, of the behaviors we approve of increase public utility. Does this mean then that we make moral judgments to serve self-interest alone? Unlike his fellow empiricist Thomas Hobbes, Hume argues that this is not the case, abandoning Hobbes\' attachment to psychological egoism. In addition to considerations of self-interest, Hume maintains that we can be moved by our sympathy for others, which can provide a person with thoroughly non-selfish concerns and motivations; indeed, what contemporary theorists would call altruistic concern. Hume defends his sympathy-based, moral sentimentalism by claiming that we could never make moral judgments based on reason alone. Our reason deals with facts and draws conclusions from them, but, Ceteris paribus, it could not lead us to choose one option over the other; only our sentiments can do this. Also, our sympathy-based sentiments can motivate us towards the pursuit of non-selfish ends, like the utility of others. For Hume, and for fellow sympathy-theorist Adam Smith, the term "sympathy" is meant to capture much more than concern for the suffering of others. Sympathy, for Hume, is a principle for the communication and sharing of sentiments, both positive and negative. In this sense, it is akin to what contemporary psychologists and philosophers call empathy. In developing this sympathy-based moral sentimentalism, Hume surpasses the divinely implanted moral sense theory of his predecessor, Francis Hutcheson, by elaborating a naturalistic, moral psychological basis for the moral sense, in terms of the operation of sympathy. Hume\'s arguments against founding morality on reason are often now included in the arsenal of moral anti-realist arguments. As Humean-inspired philosopher John Mackie suggests, for there to exist moral facts about the world, recognizable by reason and intrinsically motivating, they would have to be very queer facts. Still, there is considerable debate among scholars as to Hume\'s status as a realist versus anti-realist.
Hume advocated a moral theory based on the freedom of the human will and its relation to the individual\'s character. Hume believed that effects follow necessarily from their causes, and that this principle of determinism applies equally to people and their actions. In addition, Hume held that a person enjoyed free will, or what he often termed liberty, as long as their will wasn\'t constrained (for example a person would not be at liberty to give charity if they are locked up in a cell). Given such definitions of determinism and free will, Hume wrote that the two concepts are compatible, a theory known as compatibilism.
In opposition to Christian thinkers (e.g. Samuel Clarke) who argued that in order for a person to be morally responsible, his actions must not be determined by any physical cause, Hume wrote that moral responsibility requires determinism: Hume argued that if effects are not determined by their causes then they\'re random, and similarly if actions aren\'t caused by the character then they\'re random and not the responsibility of the person who committed them.
Beyond saying that a person is only responsible when they enjoy free will, and that free will is when one gets to act according to one\'s character, Hume also offers a psychological evaluation of why we judge people. Hume says that we hold people to blame or approbation when we judge their character as being respectively harmful or beneficial to society. Following from Hume\'s ideas on experience and causation, this means that when, for example, we experience a person\'s character (the cause) as resulting in a bad action (the effect), we apply the principle that similar causes result in similar effects, judge that the character will result in future bad actions, and decide that it is important to blame that person for the good of the society.
Hume noted that many writers talk about what ought to be on the basis of statements about what is (is-ought problem). But there seems to be a big difference between descriptive statements (what is) and prescriptive statements (what ought to be). Hume calls for writers to be on their guard against changing the subject in this way without giving an explanation of how the ought-statements are supposed to follow from the is-statements. But how exactly can you derive an "ought" from an "is"? That question, prompted by Hume\'s small paragraph, has become one of the central questions of ethical theory, and Hume is usually assigned the position that such a derivation is impossible. (Others interpret Hume as saying not that one cannot go from a factual statement to an ethical statement, but that one cannot do so without going through human nature, that is, without paying attention to human sentiments.) Hume is probably one of the first writers to make the distinction between normative (what ought to be) and positive (what is) statements, which is so prevalent in social science and moral philosophy. G. E. Moore defended a similar position with his "open question argument", intending to refute any identification of moral properties with natural properties ("naturalistic fallacy").
It was probably Hume who, along with his fellow members of the Scottish Enlightenment, first advanced the idea that the explanation of moral principles is to be sought in the utility they tend to promote. Hume\'s role is not to be overstated; it was the Irish-born Francis Hutcheson who coined the utilitarian slogan "greatest happiness for the greatest number". But it was from reading Hume\'s Treatise that Jeremy Bentham first felt the force of a utilitarian system: he "felt as if scales had fallen from [his] eyes". Nevertheless, Hume\'s proto-utilitarianism is a peculiar one from our perspective. He doesn\'t think that the aggregation of cardinal units of utility provides a formula for arriving at moral truth. On the contrary, Hume was a moral sentimentalist and, as such, thought that moral principles could not be intellectually justified. Some principles simply appeal to us and others don\'t; and the reason utilitarian moral principles do appeal to us is that they promote our interests and those of our fellows, with whom we sympathize. Humans are hard-wired to approve of things that help society – public utility. Hume used this insight to explain how we evaluate a wide array of phenomena, ranging from social institutions and government policies to character traits and talents.
In his discussion of miracles in An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding (Section 10) Hume defines a miracle as "a transgression of a law of nature by a particular volition of the Deity, or by the interposition of some invisible agent". Given that Hume argues that it is impossible to deduce the existence of a Deity from the existence of the world (for he says that causes cannot be determined from effects), miracles (including prophesy) are the only possible support he would conceivably allow for theistic religions.
Hume discusses everyday belief as often resulted from probability, where we believe an event that has occurred most often as being most likely, but that we also subtract the weighting of the less common event from that of the more common event. In the context of miracles, this means that a miraculous event should be labeled a miracle only where it would be even more unbelievable (by principles of probability) for it not to be. Hume mostly discusses miracles as testimony, in context of which he writes that when a person reports a marvellous event we (need to) balance our belief in their veracity against our belief that such events do not occur. Following this rule, only where it is considered, as a result of experience, less likely that the testimony is false than that a miracle occur should be believe in miracles.
Although Hume leaves open the possibility for miracles to occur and be reported, he offers various arguments against this ever having happened in history:
Despite all this Hume observes that belief in miracles is popular, and that "The gazing populace receive greedily, without examination, whatever soothes superstition and promotes wonder."
Critics have argued that Hume\'s position assumes the character of miracles and natural laws prior to any specific examination of miracle claims, and thus it amounts to a subtle form of begging the question. They have also noted that it requires an appeal to inductive inference, as none have observed every part of nature or examined every possible miracle claim (e.g., those yet future to the observer), which in Hume\'s philosophy was especially problematic (see above).
One of the oldest and most popular arguments for the existence of God is the design argument – that all the order and \'purpose\' in the world bespeaks a divine origin. A modern manifestation of this belief is creationism. Hume gave the classic criticism of the design argument in Dialogues concerning Natural Religion and An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding. Here are some of his points:
Many regard David Hume as a political conservative, sometimes calling him the first conservative philosopher. This is not strictly speaking accurate, if the term conservative is understood in any modern sense. His thought contains elements that are, in modern terms, both conservative and liberal, as well as ones that are both contractarian and utilitarian, though these terms are all anachronistic. His central concern is to show the importance of the rule of law, and stresses throughout his political Essays the importance of moderation in politics. He thinks that society is best governed by a general and impartial system of laws, based principally on the "artifice" of contract; he is less concerned about the form of government that administers these laws, so long as it does so fairly (though he thought that republics were more likely to do so than monarchies).
Hume expressed suspicion of attempts to reform society in ways that departed from long-established custom, and he counselled people not to resist their governments except in cases of the most egregious tyranny. However, he resisted aligning himself with either of Britain\'s two political parties, the Whigs and the Tories, and he believed that we should try to balance our demands for liberty with the need for strong authority, without sacrificing either. He supported liberty of the press, and was sympathetic to democracy, when suitably constrained. It has been argued that he was a major inspiration for James Madison\'s writings, and the Federalist No. 10 in particular. He was also, in general, an optimist about social progress, believing that, thanks to the economic development that comes with the expansion of trade, societies progress from a state of "barbarism" to one of "civilisation". Civilised societies are open, peaceful and sociable, and their citizens are as a result much happier. It is therefore not fair to characterise him, as Leslie Stephen did, as favouring "that stagnation which is the natural ideal of a skeptic". (Leslie Stephen, History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, 2 vols. (London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1876), vol. 2, 185.)
Though it has been suggested Hume had no positive vision of the best society, he in fact produced an essay titled Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth, which lays out what he thought was the best form of government. His pragmatism shone through, however, in his caveat that we should only seek to implement such a system should an opportunity present itself which would not upset established structures. He defended a strict separation of powers, decentralisation, extending the franchise to anyone who held property of value and limiting the power of the clergy. The Swiss militia system was proposed as the best form of protection. Elections were to take place on an annual basis and representatives were to be unpaid.
Through his discussions on politics, Hume developed many ideas that are prevalent in the field of economics. This includes ideas on private property, inflation, and foreign trade.
Hume does not believe, as Locke does, that private property is a natural right, but he argues that it is justified since resources are limited. If all goods were unlimited and available freely, then private property would not be justified, but instead becomes an "idle ceremonial". Hume also believed in unequal distribution of property, since perfect equality would destroy the ideas of thrift and industry, which leads to impoverishment.
Hume did not believe that foreign trade produced specie, but considered trade a stimulus for a country’s economic growth. He did not consider the volume of world trade as fixed because countries can feed off their neighbors\' wealth, being part of a "prosperous community". The fall in foreign demand is not that fatal, because in the long run, a country cannot preserve a leading trading position.
Hume was among the first to develop automatic price-specie flow, an idea that contrasts with the mercantile system. Simply put, when a country increases its in-flow of gold, this in-flow of gold will result in price inflation, and then price inflation will force out countries from trading that would have traded before the inflation. This results in a decrease of the in-flow of gold in the long run.
Hume also proposed a theory of beneficial inflation. He believed that increasing the money supply would raise production in the short run. This phenomenon would be caused by a gap between the increase in the money supply and that of the price level. The result is that prices will not rise at first and may not rise at all. This theory was later developed by John Maynard Keynes.
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References
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