David Hume

Born: 1711

Died: 1776, at the age of 65

Country of origin: Scotland

Major Books written by David Hume:

• "A Treatise of Human Nature" (1740)
  
• "An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding" (1748)
  
• "My Own Life" (1776) (His auto-biography)
  
• "Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion" (1779, published posthumously)

Cocktail summary of David Hume's main ideas:

Hume is noteworthy for 2 reasons: he wrote in English, and he almost killed Philosophy.

Regarding his use of English:

Until the 18th century, few philosophers wrote in English. Most of the "real" philosphers throughout history had written in either Greek, Latin, French, or German. Perhaps the weather in England was responsible for the dearth of deep thoughts coming out of the British Isles for thousands of years, but this changed with the writings of John Locke, George Berkeley, and David Hume, all of whom used their native tongue to write down their thoughts. Once the low-rent language of beer-drinking hillbillies, the English language had come of age in the halls of Philosophy.

The 2 kinds of Philosophy:

These 3 English writers all shared a common outlook in their ideas: all knowledge is a result of physical sensation. There is no such thing as a "naked idea", formed inside the mind without some reference to the world of the senses. No matter how abstract the idea, it had to have come through at least one of the 5 senses. Our minds are a "blank slate", and knowledge only reaches it through the senses. No knowledge is born inside of our minds, on it's own.

This approach to Philosophy was inherited from the scientific method, which had recently been born during the Enlightenment. The scientific method argued that no claim to knowledge should be immune from scientific experiment. Proof was required for all facts, and scientific proof involved the senses. In the past, knowledge was defended by referring to some earlier authority or text or religious doctrine, and the modern era sought to abandon this legacy. This approach to ideas is called "Empiricism", and a lot of it first occured in England. Therefore, this period of Philosophy is often called "English Empiricism".

This is opposed to the discipline practiced throughout most of the rest of Europe, where people argued that there is, indeed, such a thing as a "naked idea", independent of the senses. Ideas such as numbers and mathematical relationships between them come to us "from within", prior to using our senses. An example of this is Descartes' famous statement "I think, therefore I am". He argued that our senses can deceieve, and it's only through pure reason - "Rationalism" - that we can reach certainty. This approach to ideas was developed mostly in France and the German-speaking countries, which obviously lie on the continent of Europe. Therefore, this period of Philosophy is often called "Continental Rationalism".

Another way to describe it is the difference between Deduction and Induction. The Rationalist starts with a self-evident fact and then deduces other facts from that. Since Descartes was certain that he existed, he tried to logically deduce other facts from that starting-point. The Empiricist works in the opposite direction: observations of some event are collected and studied, and the underlying fact is induced from them. Isaac Newton watched an apple fall from a tree, and watched the moon circle the earth, and he inductively arrived at the law of gravity from these starting-points. He didn't start with the idea of gravity: he ended up there from observation.

The difference between these 2 approaches to figuring out where knowledge comes from wasn't black and white. Each discipline recognized the influence of the other, but the differences lay in their focus. One approach focused more heavily on one side or the other, with Empiricism stressing the scientific method, and with Rationalism realizing that our senses can deceive us. Hume focused his thoughts on the limits of the scientific method: how much trust can we place on knowledge that reaches us through the 5 senses?

Hume represents the peak of this approach to ideas, and he applied these methods to try and define the nature of the human mind. How does the mind receive knowledge, how does it interpret it, and what are its limits? How reliable are our interpretations of the results of our scientific method? Can we trust what we think we learn? He was one of several people who were obsessed with these questions at the time, and he developed these ideas to their fullest extent, and he brought it all to a giant dead-end.

His conclusion was that we can't trust ourselves. Here's why:

Our minds sit "behind" our senses. We can't really do anything more than see, hear, touch, taste, or smell anything. These senses are all that we can really ever know. We can never get behind these senses to the actual things themselves.

We can describe a rose as being red, prickly, sweet-smelling, and strange-tasting, but we can't get any further than this and actually know it's true "roseness". Our minds are like couch-potatos and our senses are like TV remote-controls. We're unable to get off of our sensory couches and truly "know" what's out there. It's enough to depress even the most cheery Philosopher, and may cause him to get in with the wrong crowd and take up Backgammon.

We are, Hume concluded, nothing "but a bundle of sensation". True knowledge was impossible. Therefore, talking about any ideas was little more than a guessing-game, and was ultimately a waste of time. Philosophy and all human knowledge was doomed to eternal uncertainty. If Descartes represented the mid-wife of Philosophy's re-birth, Hume came close to representing it's grave-digger.

Hume represents both the end of an era and the beginning of a new one. His career marked the peak of English Empiricism. But he was also the father of modern Skepticism, questioning many things that are usually taken for granted, like cause-and-effect and assumptions underlying ideologies and religious faith. He is famous for bringing Philosophy up to the point of Nihilism, but then getting spooked and instead playing a good game of Backgammon to cheer him up.

Hume spent most of his life in relative anonymity, until he was credited with waking up a certain napping German Rationalist. Immanuel Kant famously said that it was in reading David Hume that Kant was "awoken from his dogmatic slumbers". Suddenly Hume was the talk of the town.

Hume based a lot of his ideas on his argument that there is no such thing as cause-and-effect. When someone plays a game of billiards, they may see the cue-ball hitting the 8-ball and making the 8-ball move, but this doesn't really mean that we know that one ball caused the other ball to move. We just saw the first event followed by the second event. The fact that one always precedes the other produces an assumption that one event caused the other, but we don't actually see any true cause-and-effect mechanism, just a series of predictable events.

This may seem like a weak idea to base a career on, but it was an application of the scientific method in its strictest form. A true scientist must point to the actual mechanism of cause-and-effect, not just the symptoms.

Primary Qualities - ideas of texture, bulk, number, motion - all produce our ideas of them in our minds. They are inseperable from the objects themselves. Secondary qualities - color, sound, smells - are relative qualities and are not fixed. Our ideas of Secondary qualities do not resemble the objects themselves. #####


Hume's System:


Hume's goal was basically to discover the scientific laws of the human mind. He wanted to analyse how humans receive knowledge and how they process information. How do facts enter our mind, and how does our mind process these factoids? And how can this be described systematically?

One way to think of his task is to imagine a computer becoming aware of itself and trying to figure out how it works. It doesn't know how it processes information, so it figures out that it can receive info from its keyboard and mouse, and that it can save this info as files. Info doesn't come from anywhere else, only from its input-devices: files don't create themselves. (Even a virus that might create files comes from "outside").

This computer then figures out that it can move files around, merge them, copy them, combine them, etc. It can build a database of conclusions from these steps, but it can *only* draw conclusions from these exact steps, and not from any kind of magic. No "knowledge" is born inside of the computer without some reference to external input. Prior to connecting the keyboard and mouse and installing software, the computer is a "blank slate".

Once these steps are all layed out, the computer can then draw a diagram of how it processes info and arrives at conclusions, and then can write a book about it.

Hume did the same thing with his own mind: What is the exact sequence of steps our minds use when processing stuff? He wanted to clear away the clutter of assumptions and taking things on faith. He wanted to draw a schematic diagram of exactly how the mind operates.

Hume considered himself something of an Isaac Newton of the mind, trying to use the same kind of scientific methods as Newton did to discover the laws of gravity, to discover the scientific laws that govern the mind. (Hume was never accused of being modest).

Hume considered the science of the mind to be the most fundamental of all the sciences, since it's the mind that conducts all of the other sciences. If something can be learned about how the mind works, this could refine our understanding of all the other sciences. In one sense, he was one of the original psychologists.

Hume agreed with John Locke who said that the mind was a blank slate, and all knowledge and all ideas are a result of perceptions reaching it through the 5 senses. Hume divided these perceptions into 2 broad categories: "Impressions" and "Ideas".

The difference between an Impression and an Idea in Hume's system is basically the difference between direct experience and the abstract idea of that experience. Such as, if you stick your finger into a candle's flame it will hurt. This is an Impression, which was Hume's word for physical sensations, "passions", and emotional reactions. But when we think about the experience weeks later, our memory of burning our finger is an Idea. The experience has become abstracted. It has, in a sense, been encoded, sort of like how a file is saved on a computer.

Hume developed his scientific study of the mind along these two broad categories. The mind functions similar to how computer software gets input from a keyboard, then processes that input and stores it as a file. These two broad categories of activity are similar to Hume's division of the human mind into two modes of operation, and all of Hume's ideas flow from these 2 basic concepts.

In addition to these 2 broad categories, Hume argued that the mind operates according to 3 broad principles: the "Copy Principle", the "Separability Principle", and the "Principle of the Association of Ideas". All of his analysis of the mind's 2 modes of operation are applied to one or more of these 3 principles. Got that? 2 kinds of Perception, analyzed according to 3 Principles. The 5 P's.

The 3 principles work like this:


• The Copy Principle: This is his term for how the mind "copies" an experience into a memory. Putting your finger in the candle flame was an emotional experience, and the mind copied this experience into a memory. Thinking about the memory later is a form of processing the "file" that was "copied" from the original input. All ideas we have of anything - no matter how abstract - is a copy of a direct experience.
  
  
• The Separability Principle: This means that the mind can isolate complex ideas into separate categories. Such, as a red, prickly, pretty rose can be isolated into 3 sub-ideas: redness, prickliness, and prettiness. It simply means that the mind can categorize multiple input.
  
  
• Principle of the Association of Ideas: This is the mind's ability to make connections between ideas. Hume actually compared this principle to Newton's laws of gravity. Newton said he didn't know what gravity was, but it was a force that attracted neighboring objects. Hume said ideas in the mind that are associated with each other are like particles that are moved closer to each other by gravity. Just as gravity causes the Earth to pull on the Moon, this 3rd principle causes the mind to associate one idea with another. (Since gravity is now known to be warped space, does this mean that Hume's mind was warped...?)
  
  This last principle led to his conclusion that we can never talk about cause and effect. Just because we see one billiard ball hitting another billiard ball doesn't mean that the first one caused the second one to move. All we can say with any confidence is that we saw 2 isolated events and our mind "gravitationally" associated them with each other.
  
  

David Hume praised & criticized:

• ####
  
  However, Hume has been criticized for ignoring some holes in his arguments. One of the better-known holes is the so-called "missing shade of blue" problem. If you imagine a person who has seen dark blue and has seen light blue, but never seen a shade of blue inbetween these, they should have no idea of what this middle-shade of blue looks like. But if you show them a dark blue piece of paper next to a light blue piece of paper they will probably be able to visualize what the missing shade of inbetween blue looks like. The problem is that the idea of this missing shade of blue has never been "copied" from any direct experience. It's like a "naked idea" that formed in the mind all by itself, which should not be allowed.
  
  Hume brushed off this problem by arguing that it would be a rare exception, and doesn't break his argument. But his peers felt otherwise. Since he viewed himself as an Isaac Newton of the mind he needed to follow the same rules as his hero. If Newton found an exception to his laws of gravity he would be forced to incorporate any and all exceptions into his general conclusions. But Hume didn't do this in his study. So he was something of a Newton-lite...
  
  Also, Hume's argument that there can be no such thing as miracles, because we never observe them, has been criticized as being similar to memorizing a bus-schedule and therefore concluding that there can be no such thing as bus-accidents. Miracles are, by definition, exceptions to normal physical laws, just like bus-accidents are exceptions to the norm. Exceptions aren't, by definition, impossible. So this argument has struck some as a bit weak.

Notable Facts about David Hume:

• Religious affiliation:
  Hume was deeply interested in religion, but from the perspective of a critic. He was often accused of being a godless atheist, but he kept his comments vague enough to make room for the occasional spiritual sensitivity. Yet the accusation is pretty accurate, since he argued that miracles are impossible, the supernatural doesn't exist in the way that it's usually understood, and there is no such thing as a personal God, in the traditional Christian sense.
  
  Shortly before he died, when asked about life after death, he said "It is possible that a piece of coal put upon the fire will not burn... it is a most unreasonable fancy that I should live forever". Apparently he considered the afterlife about as likely as a coal remaining unburned in a fire, which his more religious contemporaries saw as an appropriate analogy for somone peering into the fires of hell...!
  
  
• Hume once tried to take a break from Philosophy and get a real job. In 1734 he got a job in Bristol, England at a West Indies Sugar importer as an office clerk. But after only a few months he discovered that most Philosophers are pretty lousy office clerks, so he quit and moved down to France. He spent about 3 years there, reading, writing and developing his ideas. Most Philosophers do their best work while avoiding working for a living.
  
  
• It was during this time in France that he wrote his first major book, "A Treatise of Human Nature". But it didn't sell well. According to Hume, when it was published "It fell dead born from the press". Philosophers usually have a hard time becoming instant celebrities.
  
  
• Hume never married. Most philosophers find romance a distraction, and Hume was apparently never distracted enough to bother with dating.
  
  
• In 1745 Hume tried his luck at being a tutor, and he accepted an offer to tutor the Marquis Annandale in England. But this didn't last long, with Hume quitting and accusing the Marquis' estate of dishonesty and claiming that the Marquis had a few loose marbles.
  
  
• The next year, in 1746, Hume tried his luck in a different line of work, acceping an offer from an English General to serve as his secretary while fighting the French in Quebec. This didn't go so well, with the General instead trying to attack Brittany but failing. Hume later followed him on some more peaceful diplomatic missions to Vienna and Turin in 1748. In 1749 he quit and moved back home, to live with his brother and continue writing.
  
  
• In 1751 he wore out his welcome and moved to Edinburgh to live with his sister.
  
  
• Hume was friends with the famous economist Adam Smith (a fellow Scotsmam) and when Smith retired from his Chair in Logic n 1752 at the University of Glasgow Hume applied for the job. But he was turned down, probably due to his criticisms of religious faith, which wasn't a good idea at a time when most universities were affiliated with the Church. In fact, in 1761 the Roman Catholic church even placed Hume's books on its "List of Prohibited Books", which raises the street-credibility of any Philosopher.
  
  
• While Hume's many attempts at working for a living didn't go so well he didn't give up. After being turned down from the University of Glasgow he was offered a job as a librarian at the Edinburgh Faculty of Advocates, in 1752. He remained here for 9 years, until 1761, demonstrating that library work was probably what he was best suited for.
  
  
• Hume had intended to retire after his stint as a librarian, and actually managed to avoid real work for 2 whole years. But in 1763 he took on a new job as private secreatary to the English Amabassador to France, in Paris. He spent 3 years in Paris and discovered that his reputation had preceded him, with the Parisian intelligensia eagerly admitting him into their social circles. Hume was finally popular.
  
  
• While in Paris, Hume made friends with fellow-philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who was living in Paris as an exile, having been kicked out of Switzerland for his boat-rocking there. Hume took a liking to Rousseau and invited him back to England, and even managed to get King George III to appoint a lifetime pension to Rousseau, for the honor of having so great a philosopher living in the country. But Rousseau was already deeply paranoid by this time and had become convinced that Hume was the head of a vast conspiracy against him, and had invited him to England simply to make fun of him. He turned down the pension and he skipped town and moved back to France.
  
  
• Hume spent his later years in Edinburgh, back living with his sister Katherine. Their favorite pasttime was hosting dinner parties, and one of their guests was Benjamin Franklin, who was visiting Europe at the time as #### and stopped by to visit with the famous Scottish philosopher. The dinner party was a smashing success.
  
  
• Hume died of a "bowel disorder".
  
  

Quotes:

• "Philosophical decisions are nothing but the reflections of common life, methodized, and corrected."
  
  
• Hume explains how Philosophy caused him to become good at playing Backgammon:
  
  "Where am I, or what? From what causes do I derive my existence, and to what condition shall I return? ... I am confounded with all these questions, and begin to fancy myself in the most deplorable condition imaginable, environed with the deepest darkness, and utterly deprived of the use of every member and faculty.
  
  Most fortunately it happens, that since Reason is incapable of dispelling these clouds, Nature herself suffices to that purpose, and cures me of this philosophical melancholy and delirium, either by relaxing this bent of mind, or by some avocation, and lively impression of my senses, which obliterate all these chimeras. I dine, I play a game of backgammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends. And when, after three or four hours' amusement, I would return to these speculations, they appear so cold, and strained, and ridiculous, that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any farther."
  
  
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