David Hume

Birth Date

Birth Year

1711

Death Date

Death Year

1776

Era

Enlightenment

Hook

Hume is the philosopher who followed empiricist commitments to their corrosive conclusions — no necessary connection in causation, no continuous self, no rational basis for induction — and accepted them.

Influenced By

Influences

Key Concepts

Learning

Pillar

Philosophy

Publications

Region

Scotland

Slug

hume

Status

Draft

Stories

Summary

The Scottish empiricist whose analysis of causation, induction, and the self produced some of the most consequential skeptical arguments in modern philosophy.

Tradition

Empiricism

Wiki URL

Year Notes

Dates well attested.

Introduction

David Hume is the most rigorous and influential figure in the British empiricist tradition and one of the central philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment. His major philosophical works — A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–1740) and the two Enquiries (1748, 1751) — take empiricist principles to their logical conclusions and arrive at startling results: there is no rational basis for inductive inference, no impression of necessary connection in causation, no continuous self underlying the bundle of perceptions, no demonstrative knowledge of God or the external world. The arguments have organized the philosophical agenda since.

Hume was also a major historian (his History of England, 1754–1762, was the standard English history for nearly a century), a working political economist, and the closest friend and intellectual companion of Adam Smith. The philosophical legacy is now central; the historical legacy is largely forgotten.

Life

Hume was born in 1711 in Edinburgh, the son of a modest Scottish landed family. He was raised at the family estate at Ninewells in the Borders and attended the University of Edinburgh from age twelve (the standard age for matriculation at that time) without taking a degree. He spent his late teens and twenties in unhappy intellectual struggle, eventually moving to La Flèche in France, where he spent three years drafting his first major work in austere monastic surroundings at the same Jesuit college Descartes had attended a century earlier.

A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–1740) — the work he had finished in his late twenties — fell stillborn from the press, in his own famous phrase, and Hume spent much of the rest of his career rewriting parts of it more accessibly. He held a number of secretarial and tutoring positions, was rejected from chairs at Edinburgh (1745) and Glasgow (1751) on grounds of his suspected atheism, and supported himself through writing.

His fortune turned with the Essays Moral and Political (1741–1742) and especially the History of England, which became the standard history of England for over a century and made him wealthy and famous. He served as secretary to the British embassy in Paris (1763–1766), where he was lionized in the salons and befriended Rousseau (whose subsequent fallout with Hume became a European cause célèbre). He died in Edinburgh in 1776 of intestinal cancer, with the equanimity recorded by James Boswell and Adam Smith.

His posthumous Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779), which he had kept unpublished out of concern for the controversy it would cause, is widely considered his most polished work and the most powerful critique of natural theology in the philosophical tradition.

The problem he worked on

Hume's project, announced in the Introduction to the Treatise, was to apply the experimental method of the natural sciences to the human mind — to do for the science of human nature what Newton had done for physics. The investigation begins from the inventory of mental contents (impressions and ideas) and proceeds to ask what we can establish about the operations of the mind, the foundations of knowledge, the springs of action, and the social and moral order.

The results were corrosive. When empiricist principles were applied with rigor — every legitimate idea must be traceable to an antecedent impression — a great many concepts at the heart of philosophy and science turned out to lack adequate experiential warrant. Hume's response was not to abandon the principles but to follow them: if causation, the self, induction, and the external world cannot be rationally grounded, then we must understand them as features of human nature rather than of reason. The mind has natural propensities (custom, habit, sympathy) that lead it to form beliefs that reason cannot justify. Naturalism, not rationalism, is the right framework.

Contributions

The analysis of causation

Hume's most famous philosophical contribution. When we say one event causes another, what we actually observe is constant conjunction (this kind of event is regularly followed by that kind), temporal succession, and contiguity. We do not observe a necessary connection between the events. The idea of necessary connection, on Hume's analysis, derives not from anything in the events themselves but from the mental habit produced by repeated observation. We project the felt expectation onto the world.

The analysis is not merely skeptical; it is constructive. Hume offers a two-definition account of causation — one in terms of constant conjunction, one in terms of the mental determination produced — and notes that both definitions are required, neither alone is sufficient. The Humean theory of causation remains a major position in contemporary metaphysics; the more sophisticated regularity theories, counterfactual theories, and interventionist theories of causation all develop in conversation with Hume.

The problem of induction

Hume's deepest negative result. Induction — the inference from observed cases to unobserved ones, or from past regularity to future continuation — underlies most of what we count as empirical knowledge. But induction cannot itself be justified by experience without circularity (we would need to assume that past success of induction predicts future success, which is precisely what is at issue). Nor can it be justified a priori, since it is not a logical truth. The result is the problem of induction: our most pervasive form of inference has no rational foundation.

Hume's response is again naturalistic. We are not justified in our inductive inferences by argument; we are caused to make them by custom, a feature of human nature. Most of human and animal life proceeds by inductive habit, and the alternative is paralysis. The honest philosopher accepts the situation and stops pretending to a rational foundation that does not exist. The problem has been one of the central topics of philosophy of science since; Karl Popper's falsificationism and Bayesian responses are among the most developed contemporary engagements.

The bundle theory of the self

In one of the Treatise's most-quoted passages (Book I, Part IV, Section VI), Hume reports that when he enters most intimately into what he calls himself, he finds only some particular perception or other — a bundle of perceptions — and never the perceiver. The continuous, substantial self of Cartesian and Lockean philosophy is, on Hume's analysis, an illusion produced by the relations of resemblance and causation among successive perceptions. Personal identity is a fiction we impose on a temporally extended bundle.

The doctrine is one of the most striking in modern philosophy. Hume himself, in the Appendix to the Treatise, expressed dissatisfaction with his own account, and the doctrine has been a continuing topic of debate ever since. Derek Parfit's Reasons and Persons (1984) is the most influential contemporary development of a broadly Humean position on personal identity.

Is and ought

In a famous paragraph at the end of Treatise III.I.I, Hume notes that moral writers regularly slide from is claims to ought claims without any apparent justification of the inference. The observation, sometimes called Hume's Law or the is-ought gap, has been the foundation of much subsequent metaethics, including G.E. Moore's analysis of the naturalistic fallacy and the broader twentieth-century debate about the relation between facts and values.

Sentimentalism in ethics

Hume argues that moral judgments are not products of reason but of moral sentiments — the felt approval or disapproval that arises in a spectator contemplating an action or character. Reason is the slave of the passions; it cannot motivate action by itself; ethics is grounded in human nature's affective responses rather than in rational demonstration. The position is the foundation of the sentimentalist tradition in ethics, recovered in the twentieth century by R.M. Hare, Allan Gibbard, and Simon Blackburn's quasi-realism.

The critique of natural religion

The Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion presents the most rigorous critique of arguments for God's existence based on reason alone, especially the design argument. Through the characters Cleanthes (the defender of natural religion), Demea (the orthodox theist), and Philo (Hume's primary mouthpiece), Hume develops objections to the design argument from analogy that remain canonical: the universe is unique and not relevantly analogous to manufactured artifacts; even if some intelligence were inferred, it would be vastly less than the traditional God; the existence of evil is difficult to reconcile with an all-good, all-powerful designer.

Key works

A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–1740). Three books: Of the Understanding; Of the Passions; Of Morals.
Essays, Moral and Political (1741–1742, expanded in later editions).
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748). Hume's accessible reformulation of Treatise Book I.
An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751). The reformulation of Treatise Book III; Hume's own favorite of his works.
Political Discourses (1752).
The History of England (1754–1762). Six volumes covering Roman Britain to the Glorious Revolution.
Four Dissertations (1757), including The Natural History of Religion.
Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (composed over decades; published posthumously, 1779).

Influences and influenced

Influenced by: Locke and the British empiricist tradition; the Newtonian model of experimental method; Bayle's Dictionary; the French moralists (Montaigne especially) and the Scottish moral sense tradition (Francis Hutcheson); Cicero (whose dialogues are the literary model for the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion).

Influenced: Kant (who said the Treatise had interrupted his dogmatic slumber and prompted the Critical philosophy); Adam Smith (close friend and intellectual companion; both The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations are recognizably Humean); Jeremy Bentham and the utilitarian tradition; the logical positivists of the Vienna Circle, who claimed Hume as a primary predecessor; the entire contemporary analytic tradition in epistemology (Goldman, Plantinga), philosophy of science (Popper, Salmon), philosophy of mind (Parfit), and metaethics (Mackie, Blackburn, Gibbard); the contemporary revival of Humean naturalism in philosophy of mind (Galen Strawson, Helen Beebee).

Reception

Hume's contemporary reception was marked by hostility from the religious establishment and admiration from the heterodox. The chair rejections at Edinburgh and Glasgow reflected the orthodox view that he was an atheist whose works should not be taught. He was beloved in the Edinburgh literary circles (the Select Society he co-founded with Smith and others was a major venue of Scottish Enlightenment thought) and lionized in Paris, but theologically suspect everywhere.

The nineteenth-century reception in Britain was substantial. T.H. Green and the British Idealists organized a critical edition of Hume's works (1874–1875) to attack him, but the edition itself made serious Hume scholarship possible. The twentieth century saw a complete reversal of his fortunes. Logical positivism in the 1920s and 30s claimed him as a founder; the post-war analytic tradition has treated him as a continuing reference. The Hume Studies journal, founded 1975, documents ongoing scholarship; the Hume Society holds annual conferences.

Continuing engagement

Contemporary Hume scholarship is unusually active. The standard critical edition (Beauchamp et al., the Clarendon Hume) has been appearing in stages since 1998. Major recent monographs include Don Garrett's Cognition and Commitment in Hume's Philosophy (1997) and Hume (2015), Helen Beebee's Hume on Causation (2006), Annette Baier's A Progress of Sentiments (1991), and James A. Harris's Hume: An Intellectual Biography (2015). Active scholarly disputes concern the New Hume debate (was Hume a skeptical realist about causation or a strict regularity theorist?), the unity of his philosophical and historical work, and the relation between his ethical sentimentalism and contemporary expressivist metaethics.