David Hume

David Hume (; born David Home; 7 May 1711 NS (26 April 1711 OS) – 25 August 1776) Cranston, Maurice, and Thomas Edmund Jessop. 2020 999br>David Hume
" ''Encyclopædia Britannica''. Retrieved 18 May 2020. was a Scottish Enlightenment philosopher, historian, economist, librarian, and essayist, who is best known today for his highly influential system of philosophical empiricism, scepticism, and naturalism. Beginning with ''A Treatise of Human Nature'' (1739–40), Hume strove to create a naturalistic science of man that examined the psychological basis of human nature. Hume argued against the existence of innate ideas, positing that all human knowledge derives solely from experience. This places him with Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and George Berkeley as an Empiricist.

Hume argued that inductive reasoning and belief in causality cannot be justified rationally; instead, they result from custom and mental habit. We never actually perceive that one event causes another but only experience the "constant conjunction" of events. This problem of induction means that to draw any causal inferences from past experience, it is necessary to presuppose that the future will resemble the past, a presupposition which cannot itself be grounded in prior experience.

An opponent of philosophical rationalists, Hume held that passions rather than reason govern human behaviour, famously proclaiming that " Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions." Hume was also a sentimentalist who held that ethics are based on emotion or sentiment rather than abstract moral principle. He 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 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. His views on philosophy of religion, including his rejection of miracles and the argument from design for God's existence, were especially controversial for their time.

Hume influenced utilitarianism, logical positivism, the philosophy of science, early analytic philosophy, cognitive science, theology, and many other fields and thinkers. Immanuel Kant credited Hume as the inspiration who had awakened him from his "dogmatic slumbers."

Early life

Hume was born on 26 April 1711 (Old Style), as David Home, in a tenement on the north side of Edinburgh's Lawnmarket. He was the second of two sons born to Catherine Home (née Falconer), daughter of Sir David Falconer of Newton and wife Mary Falconer (née Norvell),Hume, David. 1778 776
My Own Life
" In ''The History of England, from the Invasion of Julius Cæsar to the Revolution in 1688'' 1. London. Archived from th

on 13 August 2015. Also availabl

Retrieved 18 May 2020. and Joseph Home of Chirnside in the County of Berwick, an advocate of Ninewells. Joseph died just after David's second birthday. Catherine, who never remarried, raised the two brothers and their sister on her own.

Hume changed his family name's spelling in 1734, as the surname 'Home' (pronounced as 'Hume') was not well-known in England. Hume never married and lived partly at his Chirnside family home in Berwickshire, which had belonged to the family since the 16th century. His finances as a young man were very "slender", as his family was not rich and, as a younger son, he had little patrimony to live on.

Hume attended the University of Edinburgh at an unusually early ageeither 12 or possibly as young as 10at a time when 14 was the typical age. Initially, Hume considered a career in law, because of his family. However, in his words, he came to have:

…an insurmountable aversion to everything but the pursuits of Philosophy and general Learning; and while y familyfanceyed I was poring over Voet and Vinnius, Cicero and Virgil were the Authors which I was secretly devouring.

He had little respect for the professors of his time, telling a friend in 1735 that "there is nothing to be learnt from a Professor, which is not to be met with in Books". He did not graduate.

"Disease of the learned"

Aged 18 or so, Hume made a philosophical discovery that opened up to him "a new Scene of Thought", inspiring him "to throw up every other Pleasure or Business to apply entirely to it". As he did not recount what this scene exactly was, commentators have offered a variety of speculations. One prominent interpretation among contemporary Humean scholarship is that this new "scene of thought" was Hume's realisation that Francis Hutcheson's theory of ''moral sense'' could be applied to the understanding of morality as well.

From this inspiration, Hume set out to spend a minimum of 10 years reading and writing. He soon came to the verge of a mental breakdown, first starting with a coldnesswhich he attributed to a "Laziness of Temper"that lasted about nine months. Later, some scurvy spots broke out on his fingers, persuading Hume's physician to diagnose Hume as suffering from the "Disease of the Learned".

Hume wrote that he "went under a Course of Bitters and Anti-Hysteric Pills", taken along with a pint of claret every day. He also decided to have a more active life to better continue his learning. His health improved somewhat, but in 1731 he was afflicted with a ravenous appetite and palpitations of the heart. After eating well for a time, he went from being "tall, lean and raw-bon'd" to being "sturdy, robust ndhealthful-like." Indeed, Hume would become well known for being obese and having a fondness for good port and cheese.

Career

Although having noble ancestry, at 25 years of age, Hume had no source of income and no learned profession. As was common at his time, he became a merchant's assistant, despite having to leave his native Scotland. He travelled via Bristol to La Flèche in Anjou, France. There he had frequent discourse with the Jesuits of the College of La Flèche.

Hume was derailed in his attempts to start a university career by protests over his alleged "atheism", also lamenting that his literary debut, ''A Treatise of Human Nature'', "fell dead-born from the press." However, he 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, 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. For over 60 years, Hume was the dominant interpreter of English history. He 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'', as his greatest literary and philosophical achievements. He would ask of his contemporaries to judge him on the merits of the later texts alone, rather than on 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." Despite Hume's protestations, a consensus exists today that his most important arguments and philosophically distinctive doctrines are found in the original form they take in the ''Treatise''. Though he was only 23 years old when starting this work, it is now regarded as one of the most important in the history of Western philosophy.

1730s

Hume worked for four years on his first major work, ''A Treatise of Human Nature'', subtitled "Being an Attempt to Introduce the Experimental Method of Reasoning into Moral Subjects", completing it in 1738 at the age of 28. Although many scholars today consider the ''Treatise'' to be Hume's most important work and one of the most important books in Western philosophy, critics in Great Britain at the time described it as "abstract and unintelligible". As Hume had spent most of his savings during those four years, he resolved "to make a very rigid frugality supply isdeficiency of fortune, to maintain unimpaired my independency, and to regard every object as contemptible except the improvements of my talents in literature".Hume, David. 1993 734 " A Kind of History of My Life." In ''The Cambridge Companion to Hume'', edited by D. F. Norton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. .

Despite the disappointment, Hume later wrote: "Being naturally of a cheerful and sanguine temper, I soon recovered from the blow and prosecuted with great ardour my studies in the country." There, in an attempt to make his larger work better known and more intelligible, he published the '' An Abstract of a Book lately Published'' as a summary of the main doctrines of the ''Treatise'', without revealing its authorship. Although there has been some academic speculation as to who actually wrote this pamphlet, it is generally regarded as Hume's creation.

1740s

After the publication of ''Essays Moral and Political'' in 1741included in the later edition as '' Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary''Hume applied for the Chair of Pneumatics and Moral Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. However, the position was given to William Cleghorn after Edinburgh ministers petitioned the town council not to appoint Hume because he was seen as an atheist.

In 1745, during the Jacobite risings, Hume tutored the Marquess of Annandale (1720–92), an engagement that ended in disarray after about a year. Hume then started his great historical work, '' The History of England'', taking fifteen years and running to over a million words. During this time he was also involved with the Canongate Theatre through his friend John Home, a preacher.

In this context, he associated with Lord Monboddo and other thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment in Edinburgh. From 1746, Hume served for three years as secretary to General James St Clair, who was envoy to the courts of Turin and Vienna. At that time Hume also wrote ''Philosophical Essays Concerning Human Understanding'', later published as '' An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding''. Often called the ''First Enquiry'', it proved little more successful than the ''Treatise'', perhaps because of the publication of his short autobiography ''My Own Life'', which "made friends difficult for the first Enquiry". By the end of this period Hume had attained his well-known corpulent stature; "the good table of the General and the prolonged inactive life had done their work", leaving him "a man of tremendous bulk".

In 1749 he went to live with his brother in the countryside, although he continued to associate with the aforementioned Scottish Enlightenment figures.

1750s–1760s

Hume's religious views were often suspect and, in the 1750s, it was necessary for his friends to avert a trial against him on the charge of heresy, specifically in an ecclesiastical court. However, he "would not have come and could not be forced to attend if he said he was not a member of the Established Church". Hume failed to gain the chair of philosophy at the University of Glasgow due to his religious views. By this time, he had published the ''Philosophical Essays'', which were decidedly anti-religious. Even Adam Smith, his personal friend who had vacated the Glasgow philosophy chair, was against his appointment out of concern that public opinion would be against it. In 1761 all his works were banned on the ''Index Librorum Prohibitorum''.

Hume returned to Edinburgh in 1751. In the following year, the Faculty of Advocates hired him to be their Librarian, a job in which he would receive little to no pay, but which nonetheless gave him "the command of a large library"."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." ( Hume 1776:11). This resource enabled him to continue historical research for ''The History of England''. Hume's volume of ''Political Discourses'', written in 1749 and published by Kincaid & Donaldson in 1752, was the only work he considered successful on first publication.

Eventually, with the publication of his six-volume ''The History of England'' between 1754 and 1762, Hume achieved the fame that he coveted. The volumes traced events from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution of 1688, and was a bestseller in its day. Hume was also a longtime friend of bookseller Andrew Millar, who sold Hume's ''History'' (after acquiring the rights from Scottish bookseller Gavin Hamilton), although the relationship was sometimes complicated. Letters between them illuminate both men's interest in the success of the ''History''. In 1762 Hume moved from Jack's Land on the Canongate to James Court on the Lawnmarket. He sold the house to James Boswell in 1766.

Later life

From 1763 to 1765, Hume was invited to attend Lord Hertford in Paris, where he became secretary to the British embassy. Hume was well received in Paris, and while there he met with Isaac de Pinto.

In 1765, Hume served as British Chargé d'affaires, writing "despatches to the British Secretary of State". He wrote of his Paris life, "I really wish often for the plain roughness of The Poker Club of Edinburgh…to correct and qualify so much lusciousness." In 1766, upon returning to Britain, Hume encouraged his patron Lord Hertford to invest in a number of slave plantations, acquired by George Colebrooke and others in the Windward Islands. In June 1766 Hume facilitated the purchase of the slave plantation by writing to Victor-Thérèse Charpentier, marquis d'Ennery, the French governor of Martinique, on behalf of his friend, John Stewart, a wine merchant and lent Stewart £400 earlier in the same year. According to Dr. Felix Waldmann, a former Hume Fellow at the University of Edinburgh, Hume's "puckish scepticism about the existence of religious miracles played a significant part in defining the critical outlook which underpins the practice of modern science. But his views served to reinforce the institution of racialised slavery in the later 18th century."

In 1766, Hume left Paris to accompany Jean-Jacques Rousseau to England. Once there, he and Rousseau fell out, Scurr, Ruth. 4 November 2017. "An Enlightened Friendship." ''Wall Street Journal''. leaving Hume sufficiently worried about the damage to his reputation from the quarrel with Rousseau. So much so, that Hume would author an account of the dispute, titling it ''"A concise and genuine account of the dispute between Mr. Hume and Mr. Rousseau''".

In 1767, Hume was appointed Under Secretary of State for the Northern Department. Here, he wrote that he was given "all the secrets of the Kingdom". In 1769 he returned to James' Court in Edinburgh, where he would live from 1771 until his death in 1776.

Hume's nephew and namesake, David Hume of Ninewells (1757–1838), was a co-founder of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1783. He was a Professor of Scots Law at Edinburgh University and rose to be Principal Clerk of Session in the Scottish High Court and Baron of the Exchequer. He is buried with his uncle in Old Calton Cemetery.

Autobiography

In the last year of his life, Hume wrote an extremely brief autobiographical essay titled "My Own Life", summing up his entire life in "fewer than 5 pages"; it contains many interesting judgments that have been of enduring interest to subsequent readers of Hume.Siebert, Donald T. 1984.
David Hume's Last Words: The Importance of My Own Life
" ''Studies in Scottish Literature'' 19(1):132–147. Retrieved 18 May 2020. Donald Seibert (1984), a scholar of 18th-century literature, judged it a "remarkable autobiography, even though it may lack the usual attractions of that genre. Anyone hankering for startling revelations or amusing anecdotes had better look elsewhere."

Despite condemning vanity as a dangerous passion, in his autobiography Hume confesses his belief that the "love of literary fame" had served as his "ruling passion" in life, and claims that this desire "never soured my temper, notwithstanding my frequent disappointments". One such disappointment Hume discusses in this account is in the initial literary reception of the ''Treatise'', which he claims to have overcome by means of the success of the ''Essays'': "the work was favourably received, and soon made me entirely forget my former disappointment". Hume, in his own retrospective judgment, argues that his philosophical debut's apparent failure "had proceeded more from the manner than the matter". He thus suggests that "I had been guilty of a very usual indiscretion, in going to the press too early."

Hume also provides an unambiguous self-assessment of the relative value of his works: that "my Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals; which, in my own opinion (who ought not to judge on that subject) is of all my writings, historical, philosophical, or literary, incomparably the best." He also wrote of his social relations: "My company was not unacceptable to the young and careless, as well as to the studious and literary", noting of his complex relation to religion, as well as to the state, that "though I wantonly exposed myself to the rage of both civil and religious factions, they seemed to be disarmed in my behalf of their wonted fury". He goes on to profess of his character: "My friends never had occasion to vindicate any one circumstance of my character and conduct." Hume concludes the essay with a frank admission:

I cannot say there is no vanity in making this funeral oration of myself, but I hope it is not a misplaced one; and this is a matter of fact which is easily cleared and ascertained.

Death

Diarist and biographer James Boswell saw Hume a few weeks before his death from a form of abdominal cancer. Hume told him that he sincerely believed it a "most unreasonable fancy" that there might be life after death. Hume asked that his body be interred in a "simple Roman tomb", requesting in his will that it be inscribed only with his name and the year of his birth and death, "leaving it to Posterity to add the Rest".

David Hume died at the southwest corner of St. Andrew's Square in Edinburgh's New Town, at what is now 21 Saint David Street. A popular story, consistent with some historical evidence, suggests that the street was named after Hume.

His tomb stands, as he wished it, on the southwestern slope of Calton Hill, in the Old Calton Cemetery. Adam Smith later recounted Hume's amusing speculation that he might ask Charon, Hades' ferryman, to allow him a few more years of life in order to see "the downfall of some of the prevailing systems of superstition". The ferryman replied, "You loitering rogue, that will not happen these many hundred years.… Get into the boat this instant."

Writings

''A Treatise of Human Nature'' begins with the introduction: "'Tis evident, that all the sciences have a relation, more or less, to human nature.… Even Mathematics, Natural Philosophy, and Natural Religion, are in some measure dependent on the science of Man." The science of man, as Hume explains, is the "only solid foundation for the other sciences" and that the method for this science requires both experience and observation as the foundations of a logical argument. In regards to this, philosophical historian Frederick Copleston (1999) suggests that it was Hume's aim to apply to the science of man the method of experimental philosophy (the term that was current at the time to imply natural philosophy), and that "Hume's plan is to extend to philosophy in general the methodological limitations of Newtonian physics."

Until recently, Hume was seen as a forerunner of logical positivism, a form of anti-metaphysical empiricism. According to the logical positivists (in summary of their verification principle), unless a statement could be verified by experience, or else was true or false by definition (i.e. either tautological or contradictory), then it was meaningless. Hume, on this view, was a proto-positivist, who, in his philosophical writings, attempted to demonstrate the ways in which ordinary propositions about objects, causal relations, the self, and so on, are semantically equivalent to propositions about one's experiences.

Many commentators have since rejected this understanding of Humean empiricism, stressing an epistemological (rather than a semantic) reading of his project.For example, see ; ; and . According to this opposing view, Hume's empiricism consisted in the idea that it is our knowledge, and not our ability to conceive, that is restricted to what can be experienced. Hume thought that we can form beliefs about that which extends beyond any possible experience, through the operation of faculties such as custom and the imagination, but he was sceptical about claims to knowledge on this basis.

Impressions and ideas

A central doctrine of Hume's philosophy, stated in the very first lines of the '' Treatise of Human Nature'', is that the mind consists of perceptions, or the mental objects which are present to it, and which divide into two categories: "All the perceptions of the human mind resolve themselves into two distinct kinds, which I shall call and ." Hume believed that it would "not be very necessary to employ many words in explaining this distinction", which commentators have generally taken to mean the distinction between ''feeling'' and ''thinking''.Garrett, Don. 2002. ''Cognition and Commitment in Hume's Philosophy''. Oxford: Oxford University Press. . Controversially, Hume, in some sense, may regard the distinction as a matter of degree, as he takes ''impressions'' to be distinguished from ideas on the basis of their force, liveliness, and vivacitywhat Henry E. Allison (2008) calls the "FLV criterion." Allison, Henry E. 2008. ''Custom and Reason in Hume: A Kantian Reading of the First Book of the Treatise''. Oxford: Oxford University Press. . ''Ideas'' are therefore "faint" impressions. For example, experiencing the painful sensation of touching a hot pan's handle is more forceful than simply thinking about touching a hot pan. According to Hume, ''impressions'' are meant to be the original form of all our ideas. From this, Don Garrett (2002) has coined the term ''copy principle,'' referring to Hume's doctrine that all ideas are ultimately copied from some original impression, whether it be a passion or sensation, from which they derive.

Simple and complex

After establishing the forcefulness of impressions and ideas, these two categories are further broken down into ''simple'' and ''complex'': "simple perceptions or impressions and ideas are such as admit of no distinction nor separation", whereas "the complex are the contrary to these, and may be distinguished into parts".Hume, David. 1739
''A Treatise of Human Nature'' 1
London: John Noon. Retrieved 19 May 2020. When looking at an apple, a person experiences a variety of colour-sensationswhat Hume notes as a complex impression. Similarly, a person experiences a variety of taste-sensations, tactile-sensations, and smell-sensations when biting into an apple, with the overall sensationagain, a complex impression. Thinking about an apple allows a person to form complex ideas, which are made of similar parts as the complex impressions they were developed from, but which are also less forceful. Hume believes that complex perceptions can be broken down into smaller and smaller parts until perceptions are reached that have no parts of their own, and these perceptions are thus referred to as simple.

Principles of association

Regardless of how boundless it may seem, a person's imagination is confined to the mind's ability to recombine the information it has already acquired from the body's sensory experience (the ideas that have been derived from impressions). In addition, "as our imagination takes our most basic ideas and leads us to form new ones, it is directed by three principles of association, namely, resemblance, contiguity, and cause and effect":
* The principle of resemblance refers to the tendency of ideas to become associated if the objects they represent resemble one another. For example, someone looking at an illustration of a flower can conceive an idea of the physical flower because the idea of the illustrated object is associated with the physical object's idea.
* The principle of contiguity describes the tendency of ideas to become associated if the objects they represent are near to each other in time or space, such as when the thought of a crayon in a box leads one to think of the crayon contiguous to it.
* The principle of cause and effect refers to the tendency of ideas to become associated if the objects they represent are causally related, which explains how remembering a broken window can make someone think of a ball that had caused the window to shatter.

Hume elaborates more on the last principle, explaining that, when somebody observes that one object or event consistently produces the same object or event, that results in "an expectation that a particular event (a 'cause') will be followed by another event (an 'effect') previously and constantly associated with it".Norton, David Fate. 1999 993
Hume, David
" Pp. 398–403 in ''Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy'' (2nd ed.), edited by R. Audi. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Retrieved 18 May 2020. – via Gale

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