David Hume (
7 May 1711
NS (26 April 1711 OS) – 25 August 1776) (born
David Home)
was a Scottish philosopher, historian, economist, and essayist, who is
best known today for his highly influential system of radical
philosophical
empiricism,
skepticism, and
naturalism.
Hume's empiricist approach to philosophy places him with
John Locke,
George Berkeley,
Francis Bacon, and
Thomas Hobbes as a
British Empiricist. Beginning with his
A Treatise of Human Nature (1739), Hume strove to create a total
naturalistic science of man that examined the psychological basis of human nature. Against philosophical
rationalists, Hume held that passion rather than reason governs human behaviour and argued against the existence of
innate ideas, positing that all human knowledge is ultimately founded solely in
Experience;
Hume thus held that genuine knowledge must either be directly traceable
to objects perceived in experience, or result from abstract reasoning
about
relations between ideas which are derived from experience, calling the rest "nothing but sophistry and illusion", a dichotomy later given the name
Hume's fork. In what is sometimes referred to as
Hume's problem of induction, he argued that
inductive reasoning, and belief in
causality,
cannot, ultimately, be justified rationally; our trust in causality and
induction instead results from custom and mental habit, and are
attributable to only the experience of "
constant conjunction" rather than
logic:
for we can never, in experience, perceive that one event causes
another, but only that the two are always conjoined, and to draw any
inductive causal inferences from past experience first requires the
presupposition that the future will be like the past, a presupposition
which cannot be grounded in prior experience without already being
presupposed.
Hume's anti-teleological opposition to the argument for God's existence
from design is generally regarded as the most intellectually
significant such attempt to rebut the
Teleological Argument prior to Darwin.
Hume was also a
sentimentalist who held that ethics are based on emotion or sentiment rather than abstract moral principle, famously proclaiming that
"Reason Is and Ought Only to Be the Slave of the Passions".
Some contemporary scholars view Hume's moral theory as a unique attempt
to synthesize the modern sentimentalist moral tradition to which Hume
belonged, with the
virtue ethics tradition of
ancient philosophy, with which Hume concurred in regarding traits of character, rather than
acts or their
consequences, as ultimately the proper objects of moral evaluation.
Hume's moral theory maintained an early commitment to naturalistic
explanations of moral phenomena, and is usually taken to have first
clearly expounded the
is–ought problem, or the idea that a statement of fact alone can never give rise to a
normative conclusion of what
ought to be done.
Hume also influentially denied that humans have an actual conception of the self, positing that we experience only a
bundle of sensations, and that the self is nothing more than this bundle of causally-connected perceptions. Hume's
compatibilist theory of
free will takes
causal determinism as fully compatible with human freedom, and has proved extremely influential on subsequent
moral philosophy.
[6]
While Hume was derailed in his attempts to start a university career
by protests over his "atheism," and bemoaned that his literary debut,
A Treatise of Human Nature 'fell dead-born from the press', Hume nevertheless found literary success in his lifetime as an essayist, and a career as a librarian at the
University of Edinburgh.
His tenure there, and the access to research materials it provided,
ultimately resulted in Hume's writing the massive six-volume
The History of England,
which became a bestseller and the standard history of England in its
day. Hume described his "love for literary fame" as his "ruling passion" and judged his two late works, the so-called "first" and "second" enquiries,
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding and
An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, respectively, as his greatest literary and philosophical achievements,
asking his contemporaries to judge him on the merits of the later texts
alone, rather than the more radical formulations of his early, youthful
work, dismissing his philosophical debut as
juvenilia: "A work which the Author had projected before he left College."
[9]
Nevertheless, despite Hume's protestations, a general consensus exists
today that Hume's strongest and most important arguments, and most
philosophically distinctive doctrines, are found in the original form
they take in the
Treatise, begun when Hume was just 23 years old, and now regarded as one of the most important works in the history of
Western Philosophy.
Hume has proved extremely influential on subsequent
Western thought, especially on
utilitarianism,
logical positivism,
William James,
Immanuel Kant, the
philosophy of science, early
analytic philosophy,
cognitive science,
theology and other movements and thinkers. Kant himself famously
credited Hume as the spur to his philosophical thought who had awakened
him from his "dogmatic slumbers;" contemporary philosophers have opined
that "Hume, rivaled only by Darwin, [who] has done the most to undermine
in principle our confidence in arguments from design;" that "No man has
influenced the history of philosophy to a deeper or more disturbing
degree, and that Hume's Treatise is "the founding document of Cognitive
Science" and the "most important philosophical work written in English";
no less a philosophical authority than Arthur Schopenhauer once
declared that "there is more to be learned from each page of David Hume
than from the collected philosophical works of Hegel, Herbart and
Schleiermacher taken together." Hume is thus widely regarded as a
pivotal figure in the history of philosophical thought.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hume
