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David Hume (26 April 1711 – 25 August 1776) was a Scottish philosopher, economist, historian and a key figure in the history of Western philosophy and the Scottish Enlightenment. Hume is often grouped with John Locke, George Berkeley, and a handful of others as a British Empiricist.
During Hume's lifetime, he was more famous as a historian; his six-volume History of England was a bestseller well into the nineteenth century and the standard work on English history for many years.
Hume was the first philosopher of the modern era to develop a systematically naturalistic philosophy.
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Quotations
A propensity to hope and joy is real riches: One to fear and sorrow, real poverty.
Essay 18 : The Sceptic
Art may make a suit of clothes; but nature must produce a man.
Essay 15 : The Epicurean
Generally speaking, the errors in religion are dangerous; those in philosophy only ridiculous.
Part 4 Of the sceptical and other systems of philosophy, Sect. 7 Conclusion of this book
Morals excite passions, and produce or prevent actions. Reason of itself is utterly impotent in this particular. The rules of morality, therefore, are not conclusions of our reason.
Part 1 Of virtue and vice in general, Sect. 1 Moral distinctions not deriv'd from reason
Though experience be our only guide in reasoning concerning matters of fact; it must be acknowledged, that this guide is not altogether infallible, but in some cases is apt to lead us into errors.
Section 10 : Of Miracles Pt. 1
In our reasonings concerning matter of fact, there are all imaginable degrees of assurance, from the highest certainty to the lowest species of moral evidence. A wise man, therefore, proportions his belief to the evidence.
Encyclopedia
David Hume (26 April 1711 – 25 August 1776) was a Scottish philosopher, economist, historian and a key figure in the history of Western philosophy and the Scottish Enlightenment. Hume is often grouped with John Locke, George Berkeley, and a handful of others as a British Empiricist.
During Hume's lifetime, he was more famous as a historian; his six-volume History of England was a bestseller well into the nineteenth century and the standard work on English history for many years.
Hume was the first philosopher of the modern era to develop a systematically naturalistic philosophy. The philosophical tradition at the time held that human minds operated on principles analogous to those of God: the human mind was simply a miniature version of the divine mind. However, Hume rejected this notion, and the related view that we are imbued with a faculty of reason that guides us to the truth. Eschewing religion, he studied human nature scientifically, looking for the principles structuring the content of the human mind. Hume called his quasi-Newtonian project the "science of man".
Hume was heavily influenced by empiricists John Locke and George Berkeley, along with various French-speaking writers such as Pierre Bayle, and various figures on the English-speaking intellectual landscape such as Isaac Newton, Samuel Clarke, Francis Hutcheson (his teacher), and Joseph Butler (to whom he sent his first work for feedback).
In the twentieth century, Hume has increasingly become a source of inspiration for those in political philosophy and economics as an early and subtle thinker in the liberal tradition, as well as an early innovator in the genre of the essay in his Essays Moral, Political, and Literary.
Life
David Hume, originally David Home, 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. He changed his name in 1734 because the English had difficulty pronouncing 'Home' in the Scottish manner. Throughout his life Hume, who never married, spent time occasionally at his family home at Ninewells by Chirnside, Berwickshire. Hume was politically a Whig.
Education
Hume attended the University of Edinburgh at the unusually early age of twelve (possibly as young as ten) at a time when fourteen was 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." 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 within 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". He did not recount what this "Scene" was, and commentators have offered a variety of speculations. Due to this inspiration, Hume set out to spend a minimum of ten years reading and writing. He came on the verge of nervous breakdown, after which he decided to have a more active life to better continue his learning.
Career
As Hume's options lay between a traveling 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. There he had frequent discourses with the Jesuits of the College of La Flèche. As he spent most of his savings during his four years there while writing A Treatise of Human Nature, he resolved "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." He completed the Treatise 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 western philosophy, the critics in Great Britain at the time did not agree, describing it as "abstract and unintelligible".
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, he wrote the Abstract. 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, 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 due to his atheism.
During the 1745 Jacobite Rebellion, Hume tutored the Marquise of Annandale (1720–92), who was officially described as a "lunatic". This engagement ended in disarray after about a year. But it was then that Hume started his great historical work The History of Great Britain, which would take fifteen years and run to over a million words, to be published in six volumes in the period between 1754 and 1762. During this period, he was involved with the Canongate Theatre. In this context, he associated with Lord Monboddo and other Scottish Enlightenment luminaries in Edinburgh. From 1746, Hume served for three years as Secretary to Lieutenant-General St Clair, and wrote 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 was outside the Church's jurisdiction. 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." This resource enabled him to continue historical research for The History of Great Britain.
Hume achieved great literary fame as a historian. His enormous The 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.
However, Hume's volume of Political Discourses (1752) was the only work he considered successful on first publication.
Religion
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 had to express themselves cautiously. Less than 15 years before Hume's birth, an 18-year-old University student named Thomas Aikenhead was tried, convicted, and hanged in Edinburgh for blasphemy for saying Christianity was nonsense. Hume followed the common practice of expressing his views obliquely, through characters in dialogues. He did not acknowledge authorship of Treatise until the year of his death, in 1776.
Hume's essays On Suicide, On the Immortality of the Soul, and Dialogues concerning Natural Religion were not published until after his death, and even then bore neither author's nor publisher's name. Hume's supposed atheism caused him to be passed over for many positions.
Later life
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 Jean-Jacques Rousseau. 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." For a year from 1767, Hume held the appointment of Under Secretary of State for the Northern Department. In 1768, he settled in Edinburgh.
James Boswell visited Hume a few weeks before his death (most likely of either bowel or liver cancer). Hume told him he sincerely believed it a "most unreasonable fancy" that there might be life after death. This meeting was 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" 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.
Science of Man
In the introduction to A Treatise of Human Nature, Hume writes “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”; i.e. the empirical method. Because of this, Hume is broadly characterised as a champion of empiricism. But the form Hume’s empiricism takes is contested amongst scholars.
Until quite recently, Hume was seen as a forerunner of the logical positivist movement; a form of anti-metaphysical empiricism. 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 a summary statement of their infamous verification principle). Hume, on this view, was a proto-positivist, who, in his philosophical writings, attempted to demonstrate how ordinary propositions about objects, causal relations, the self, and so on, are semantically equivalent to propositions about one’s experiences.
However, many commentators have since rejected this understanding of Humean empiricism, stressing an epistemological, rather than a semantic reading of his project. According to this 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. To be sure, 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.
Induction
The cornerstone of Hume’s epistemology is the so-called Problem of Induction: it has been argued that it is in this area of Hume’s thought that his scepticism about human powers of reason is the most pronounced. Understanding the problem of induction, then, is central to grasping Hume’s general philosophical system.
The problem concerns the explanation of how we are able to make inductive inferences. Inductive inference is reasoning from the observed behaviour of objects to their behaviour when unobserved; as Hume says, it is a question of how things behave when they go “beyond the present testimony of the senses, and the records of our memory”. Hume notices that we tend to believe that things behave in a regular manner; i.e. that patterns in the behaviour of objects will persist into the future, and the unobserved present (this persistence of regularities is sometimes called the Principle of the Uniformity of Nature).
Hume’s argument is now that we cannot rationally justify the claim that nature will continue to be uniform, as justification comes in only two varieties, and both of these are inadequate. The two sorts are: (1) demonstrative reasoning, and (2) probable reasoning. With regard to (1), Hume argues that the uniformity principle cannot be demonstrated, as it is “consistent and conceivable” that nature might stop being regular. Turning to (2), Hume argues that we cannot hold that nature will continue to be uniform because it has been in the past, as this is using the very sort of reasoning (induction) that is under question: it would be circular reasoning. Thus no form of justification will rationally warrant our inductive inferences.
Hume’s solution to this sceptical problem is to argue that, rather than reason, it is natural instinct that explains our ability to make inductive inferences. He asserts that “Nature, by an absolute and uncountroulable necessity has determin'd us to judge as well as to breathe and feel”. Although many modern commentators have demurred from Hume’s solution, some have concurred with it, seeing his analysis of our epistemic predicament as a major contribution to the theory of knowledge: here, for example, is the Oxford Professor John D. Kenyon: “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.”
Causation
The notion of causation is closely linked to the problem of induction. According to Hume, we reason inductively by associating constantly conjoined events, and it is the mental act of association that is the basis of our concept of causation. There are three main interpretations of Hume's theory of causation represented in the literature: (1) the logical positivist; (2) the sceptical realist; and (3) the quasi-realist.
The logical positivist interpretation is that Hume analyses causal propositions, such as "A caused B", in terms of regularities in perception: "A caused B" is equivalent to "Whenever A-type events happen, B-type ones follow", where "whenever" refers to all possible perceptions.
This view is rejected by sceptical realists, who argue that Hume thought that causation amounts to more than just the regular succession of events. When two events are causally conjoined, there is a necessary connection which underpins the conjunction:
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.
Hume held that we have no perceptual access to the necessary connection (hence scepticism), but we are naturally compelled to believe in its objective existence (hence realism).
It has been argued that, whilst Hume did not think causation is reducible to pure regularity, he was not a fully fledged realist either: Professor Simon Blackburn calls this a quasi-realist reading. On this view, talk about causal necessity is an expression of a functional change in the human mind, whereby certain events are predicted or anticipated on the basis of prior experience. The expression of causal necessity is a “projection” of the functional change onto the objects involved in the causal connection: in Hume’s words, “nothing is more usual than to apply to external bodies every internal sensation which they occasion”.
The Self
According to the standard interpretation of Hume on personal identity, he was a Bundle Theorist, who held that the self is nothing but a bundle of interconnected perceptions linked by relations of similarity and causality; or, more accurately, that our idea of the self is just the idea of such a bundle. This view is forwarded by, for example, positivist interpreters, who saw Hume as suggesting that terms such as “self”, “person”, or "mind" referred to collections of “sense-contents”. A modern-day version of the bundle theory of the mind has been advanced by Derek Parfit in his Reasons and Persons.
However, some philosophers have criticised the bundle-theory interpretation of Hume on personal identity. It is argued that distinct selves can have perceptions which stand in relations of similarity and causality with one another. Thus perceptions must already come parcelled into distinct "bundles" before they can be associated according to the relations of similarity and causality: in other words, the mind must already possess a unity that cannot be generated, or constituted, by these relations alone. Since the bundle-theory interpretation attributes Hume with answering an ontological or conceptual question, philosophers who see Hume as not very concerned with such questions have queried whether the view is really Hume's, or "only a decoy". Instead, it is suggested, Hume might have been answering an epistemological question, about the causal origin of our concept of the self.
Practical Reason
Hume's anti-rationalism informed much of his theory of belief and knowledge, in his treatment of the notions of induction, causation, and the external world. But it was not confined to this sphere, and permeated just as strongly his theories of motivation, action, and morality. In a famous sentence in the Treatise, Hume circumscribes reason's role in the production of action:
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.
It has been suggested that this position can be lucidly brought out through the metaphor of "direction of fit": beliefs — the paradigmatic products of reason — are propositional attitudes that aim to have their content fit the world; conversely, desires — or what Hume calls passions, or sentiments — are states that aim to fit the world to their contents. Though a metaphor, it has been argued that this intuitive way of understanding Hume's theory that desires are necessary for motivation "captures something quite deep in our thought about their nature".
Hume's anti-rationalism has been very influential, and defended in contemporary philosophy of action by neo-Humeans such as Michael Smith and Simon Blackburn The major opponents of the Humean view are cognitivists about what it is to act for a reason, such as John McDowell, and Kantians, such as Christine Korsgaard.
Ethics
Hume's views on human motivation and action formed the cornerstone of his ethical theory: he conceived moral or ethical sentiments to be intrinsically motivating, or the providers of reasons for action. Given that one cannot be motivated by reason alone, requiring the input of the passions, Hume argued that reason cannot be behind morality
Morals excite passions, and produce or prevent actions. Reason itself is utterly impotent in this particular. The rules of morality, therefore, are not conclusions of our reason.
(See also is-ought problem.)
Hume's sentimentalism about morality was shared by his close friend Adam Smith, and Hume and Smith were mutually influenced by the moral reflections of Francis Hutcheson.
Hume's theory of ethics has been incredibly influential in modern day ethical theory, inspiring various forms of emotivism (see the work of A. J. Ayer and C. L. Stevenson), error theory (see John Mackie's Ethics) and ethical expressivism and non-cognitivism (see the work of Simon Blackburn and Alan Gibbard).
Free Will, Determinism, and Responsibility
Hume, along with Thomas Hobbes, is cited as a classical compatibilist about the notions of freedom and determinism. The thesis of compatibilism seeks to reconcile human freedom with the fact that human beings are part of a deterministic universe, whose happenings are governed by the laws of physics.
Hume argued that the dispute about the compatibility of freedom and determinism has been kept afloat by ambiguous terminology:
From this circumstance alone, that a controversy has been long kept on foot... we may presume, that there is some ambiguity in the expression.
Hume defines the concepts of "necessity" and "liberty" as follows:
Necessity: "the uniformity, observable in the operations of nature; where similar objects are constantly conjoined together..."
Liberty: "a power of acting or not acting, according to the determinations of the will..."
Hume then argues that, according to these definitions, not only are the two compatible, but Liberty requires Necessity. For if our actions were not necessitated in the above sense, they would "have so little in connexion [sic] with motives, inclinations and circumstances, that one does not follow with a certain degree of uniformity from the other". But if our actions are not thus hooked up to the will, then our actions can never be free: they would be matters of "chance; which is universally allowed not to exist."
Moreover, Hume goes on to argue that in order to be held morally responsible, it is required that our behaviour be caused, i.e. necessitated, for
Actions are, by their very nature, temporary and perishing; and where they proceed not from some cause in the character and disposition of the person who performed them, they can neither redound to his honour, if good; nor infamy, if evil."
This argument has inspired modern day commentators. However, it has been argued that the issue of whether or not we hold one another morally responsible does not ultimately depend on the truth or falsity of a metaphysical thesis such as determinism, for our so holding one another is a non-rational human sentiment that is not predicated on such theses. For this influential argument, which is still made in a Humean vein, see P. F. Strawson's essay, Freedom and Resentment.
The problem of miracles
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 labelled 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, 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 we 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:
- People often lie, and they have good reasons to lie about miracles occurring either because they believe they are doing so for the benefit of their religion or because of the fame that results.
- People by nature enjoy relating miracles they have heard without caring for their veracity and thus miracles are easily transmitted even where false.
- Hume notes that miracles seem to occur mostly in "ignorant" and "barbarous" nations and times, and the reason they don't occur in the "civilized" societies is such societies aren't awed by what they know to be natural events.
- The miracles of each religion argue against all other religions and their miracles, and so even if a proportion of all reported miracles across the world fit Hume's requirement for belief, the miracles of each religion make the other less likely.
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).
The design argument
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. 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:
- For the design argument to be feasible, it must be true that order and purpose are observed only when they result from design. But order is observed regularly, resulting from presumably mindless processes like snowflake or crystal generation. Design accounts for only a tiny part of our experience with order and "purpose".
- Furthermore, the design argument is based on an incomplete analogy: because of our experience with objects, we can recognise human-designed ones, comparing for example a pile of stones and a brick wall. But to point to a designed Universe, we would need to have an experience of a range of different universes. As we only experience one, the analogy cannot be applied. We must ask therefore if it is right to compare the world to a machine — as in Paley's watchmaker argument — when perhaps it would be better described as a giant inert animal.
- Even if the design argument is completely successful, it could not (in and of itself) establish a robust theism; one could easily reach the conclusion that the universe's configuration is the result of some morally ambiguous, possibly unintelligent agent or agents whose method bears only a remote similarity to human design. In this way it could be asked if the designer was God, or further still, who designed the designer?
- If a well-ordered natural world requires a special designer, then God's mind (being so well-ordered) also requires a special designer. And then this designer would likewise need a designer, and so on ad infinitum. We could respond by resting content with an inexplicably self-ordered divine mind but then why not rest content with an inexplicably self-ordered natural world?
- Often, what appears to be purpose, where it looks like object X has feature F in order to secure outcome O, is better explained by a filtering process: that is, object X wouldn't be around did it not possess feature F, and outcome O is only interesting to us as a human projection of goals onto nature. This mechanical explanation of teleology anticipated natural selection. (see also Anthropic principle)
- The design argument does not explain pain, suffering, and natural disasters. See Problem of evil.
Political theory
Many regard David Hume as a political conservative, sometimes calling him the first conservative philosopher . This is not strictly 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. This outlook needs to be seen within the historical context of eighteenth century Scotland, where the legacy of religious civil war, combined with the relatively recent memory of the 1715 and 1745 Jacobite risings, fostered in a historian such as Hume a distaste for enthusiasm and factionalism that appeared to threaten the fragile and nascent political and social stability of a country that was deeply politically and religiously divided. 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 , 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.
Contributions to economic thought
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.
As historian of England
Between Hume's death and 1894, there were at least 50 editions of his 6-volume History of England, a work of immense sweep. The subtitle tells us as much, "From the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution in 1688."
There was also an often-reprinted abridgement, The Student’s Hume (1859).
Hume's history was that of a Tory, in sharp contrast to the Whiggish works then prevailing.
Another remarkable feature of the series was that it widened the focus of history, away from merely Kings, Parliaments, and armies, including literature and science as well.
Works
- A Kind of History of My Life (1734) Mss 23159 National Library of Scotland.
- A letter to an unnamed physician, asking for advice about "the Disease of the Learned" that then afflicted him. Here he reports that at the age of eighteen "there seem'd to be open'd up to me a new Scene of Thought… " which made him "throw up every other Pleasure or Business" and turned him to scholarship.
- Hume intended to see whether the Treatise met with success, and if so to complete it with books devoted to Politics and Criticism. However, it did not meet with success (as Hume himself said, "It fell dead-born from the press, without reaching such distinction as even to excite a murmur among the zealots"), and so was not completed.
- An Abstract of a Book lately Published: Entitled A Treatise of Human Nature etc. (1740)
- Anonymously published, but almost certainly written by Hume in an attempt to popularise his Treatise. Of considerable philosophical interest, because it spells out what he considered "The Chief Argument" of the Treatise, in a way that seems to anticipate the structure of the Enquiry concerning Human Understanding.
- Essays Moral and Political (first ed. 1741–2)
- A collection of pieces written and published over many years, though most were collected together in 1753–4. Many of the essays are focused on topics in politics and economics, though they also range over questions of aesthetic judgement, love, marriage and polygamy, and the demographics of ancient Greece and Rome, to name just a few of the topics considered. The Essays show some influence from Addison's Tatler and The Spectator, which Hume read avidly in his youth.
- A Letter from a Gentleman to His Friend in Edinburgh: Containing Some Observations on a Specimen of the Principles concerning Religion and Morality, said to be maintain'd in a Book lately publish'd, intituled A Treatise of Human Nature etc. Edinburgh (1745).
- Contains a letter written by Hume to defend himself against charges of atheism and scepticism, while applying for a Chair at Edinburgh University.
- Contains reworking of the main points of the Treatise, Book 1, with the addition of material on free will (adapted from Book 2), miracles, the Design Argument, and mitigated scepticism.
section X of the Enquiry, often published separately
- A reworking of material from Book 3 of the Treatise, on morality, but with a significantly different emphasis. Hume regarded this as the best of all his philosophical works, both in its philosophical ideas and in its literary style.
- Included in Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects (1753–6) reprinted 1758–77.
- Included in reprints of Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects (above).
- The History of England (Originally titled The History of Great Britain) (1754–62) Freely available in six vols. from the On Line Library of Liberty.
- More a category of books than a single work, Hume's history spanned "from the invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution of 1688" and went through over 100 editions. Many considered it the standard history of England until Thomas Macaulay's History of England.
- The Natural History of Religion (1757)
- "My Own Life" (1776)
- Penned in April, shortly before his death, this autobiography was intended for inclusion in a new edition of "Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects". It was first published by Adam Smith who claimed that by doing so he had incurred "ten times more abuse than the very violent attack I had made upon the whole commercial system of Great Britain". (Ernest Campbell Mossner, The Life of David Hume)
- Published posthumously by his nephew, David Hume the Younger. Being a discussion among three fictional characters concerning the nature of God, and is an important portrayal of the argument from design. Despite some controversy, most scholars agree that the view of Philo, the most sceptical of the three, comes closest to Hume's own.
Hume's Influence
Attention to Hume's philosophical works grew after the German philosopher Immanuel Kant credited Hume with awakening him from "dogmatic slumbers" (circa 1770).
According to Schopenhauer, "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."
A. J. Ayer (1936), introducing his classic exposition of logical positivism, claimed: "the views which are put forward in this treatise derive from the logical outcome of the empiricism of Berkeley and Hume". Albert Einstein (1915) wrote that he was inspired by Hume's positivism when formulating his Special Theory of Relativity. Hume was called "the prophet of the Wittgensteinian revolution" by N. Phillipson, referring to his view that mathematics and logic are closed systems, disguised tautologies, and have no relation to the world of experience. David Fate Norton (1993) asserted that Hume was "the first post-sceptical philosopher of the early modern period".
See also
Further reading
- Ardal, Pall (1966). Passion and Value in Hume's Treatise. Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press.
- Beauchamp, Tom and Rosenberg, Alexander, Hume and the Problem of Causation New York, Oxford University Press, 1981.
- Ernest Campbell Mossner. The Life of David Hume. Oxford University Press, 1980. (The standard biography.)
- Peter Millican. Critical Survey of the Literature on Hume and his First Enquiry. (Surveys around 250 books and articles on Hume and related topics.)
- David Fate Norton. David Hume: Commonsense Moralist, Skeptical Metaphysician. Princeton University Press, 1978.
- Garrett, Don (1996). Cognition and Commitment in Hume's Philosophy. New York & Oxford, Oxford University Press.
- J.C.A. Gaskin. Hume's Philosophy of Religion. Humanities Press International, 1978.
- Norman Kemp Smith.The Philosophy of David Hume. Macmillan, 1941. (Still enormously valuable.)
- Frederick Rosen, Classical Utilitarianism from Hume to Mill (Routledge Studies in Ethics & Moral Theory), 2003. ISBN 0415220947
- Russell, Paul (1995). Freedom and Moral Sentiment: Hume's Way of Naturalizing Responsibility. New York & Oxford, Oxford University Press.
- Russell, Paul (2008). The Riddle of Hume's Treatise: Skepticism, Naturalism and Irreligion New York & Oxford, Oxford University Press.
- Stroud, B. (1977). Hume, Routledge, London & New York. (Complete study of Hume's work parting from the interpretation of Hume's naturalistic philosophical programme).
- Hesselberg, A. Kenneth (1961). Hume, Natural Law and Justice. Duquesne Review
- Gilles Deleuze, Empirisme et subjectivité. Essai sur la Nature Humaine selon Hume (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1953) trans. Empiricism and Subjectivity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991)
Footnotes and references
Footnotes
References
External links
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