1711
(26 April Julian) David Hume ^top^
Born in Edinburgh, he died on 25 August 1776 in Edinburgh. Scottish philosopher, historian, economist, and essayist, known especially for his philosophical empiricism and skepticism. 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.
[click on image for portrait of Hume by Ramsay >]
During three years in France, he wrote A Treatise of Human Nature, his attempt to formulate a full-fledged philosophical system. It is divided into three books:
book I, on understanding, aims at explaining man's process of knowing, describing in order the origin of ideas, the ideas of space and time, causality, and the testimony of the senses;
book II, on the "passions" of man, gives an elaborate psychological machinery to explain the affective, or emotional, order in man and assigns a subordinate role to reason in this mechanism;
book III, on morals, describes moral goodness in terms of "feelings" of approval or disapproval that a person has when he considers human behaviour in the light of the agreeable or disagreeable consequences either to himself or to others.
At the end of his life he repudiated it as juvenile. The Treatise is not well constructed, in parts oversubtle, confusing because of ambiguity in important terms (especially "reason"). Book I, nevertheless, has been more read than any other of his writings.
His next venture, Essays, Moral and Political (1741-42), won some success.
During years of wandering Hume produced 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); 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.
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding is an attempt to define the principles of human knowledge. It poses 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 his 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 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 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, whether there really are such things as triangles. Only on this 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 lead is heavy, and that fire burns things are facts, logically barren. Each, so far as reason is concerned, could be different: the contradictory of every matter of fact is conceivable. Therefore, any demonstrative science of fact is impossible.
From this basis Hume develops his doctrine about causality. The idea of causality is alleged to assert a necessary connection among matters of fact. From what impression, then, is it derived? Hume states that no causal relation among the data of the senses can be observed, for, when a person regards any events as causally connected, all that he does 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.
The Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals is a refinement of Hume's thinking on morality, in which he views sympathy as the fact of human nature lying at the basis of all social life and personal happiness. 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. He finds them, as he found the grounds of belief, in "feelings," not in "knowings." Moral decisions are grounded in moral sentiment. Qualities are valued either for their utility or for their agreeableness, in each case either to their owners or to others. Hume's moral system aims at the happiness of others and at the happiness of self. His emphasis is on altruism: the moral sentiments that he claims to find in human beings, he traces, for the most part, to a sentiment for and a sympathy with one's fellows.
His History of England,
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He published A Concise and Genuine Account of the Dispute Between Mr. Hume and Mr. Rousseau in 1766. He issued eight editions of his collected writings (omitting the Treatise, History, and ephemera) under the title Essays and Treatises between 1753 and 1772, and Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, held back until 1779. His curiously detached autobiography, The Life of David Hume, Esquire, Written by Himself is dated April 18, 1776.
He did not formulate a complete system of economic theory, as did Adam Smith in his Wealth of Nations, but had some similar ideas.
Immanuel Kant conceived his critical philosophy in direct reaction to Hume. Hume was one of the influences that led Auguste Comte, the 19th-century French mathematician and sociologist, to positivism. In Britain his influence is seen in Jeremy Bentham, the early 19th-century jurist and philosopher, who was moved to utilitarianism (the moral theory that right conduct should be determined by the usefulness of its consequences) by book III of the Treatise, and more extensively in John Stuart Mill, the philosopher and economist who lived later in the 19th century.
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