David+Hume

María José Herrera Quesada, HyunChang Jeong

**David Hume**


 * Biography
 * o 1711-1776
 * o Born in Edinburgh, Scotland
 * o Wake-minded” at an early age
 * § Followed his brother to Edinburgh University at age 12
 * o Known as “Saint David”
 * § The Edinburgh Street in which he lived was named after him “St. David´s Street”
 * o Key figure in the Scottish Enlightenment
 * o Lived in France for several years as a secretary to the British ambassador
 * § Known as “le bon David”
 * o Related to the Skeptic school of philosophy
 * o He worked as an economist (close friend to Adam Smith, father of economics) and as an essayist.
 * o Works never fully recognized until after his death


 * Main Works
 * o //A Treatise of Human Nature//(1739)
 * § Central Text of British Empiricism
 * Experimental Method of reasoning into moral subjects:
 * o Process of knowing, Emotional order of man, and goodness: feelings of disapproval or approval
 * § Masterpiece
 * § Better explained in two pieces:
 * //An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding// (1748)
 * //An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals// (1751)
 * o His philosophical works were not recognized so he wrote
 * o Political Discourses (1752)
 * § Advance beyond an industrial economy (less agricultural) is a precondition of civilization
 * o //History of England// (1754),
 * o After his death, in 1779, his //Dialogues concerning Natural Religion//, made him famous
 * § Deals with the existence of God in the form of a dialogue between three characters
 * § Undermined arguments for the existence of God
 * § Atheism
 * § Posthumously published
 * Evidence of the design of the universe (Cleanthes)
 * Human reasoning is too inadequate to claim the existence of divinity (Philo) – closest to Hume’s own thinking
 * Nature of God should be based on fideism (Demea)
 * o Fideism- Faith vs Reason; Faith overpowers Reason in determining certain “truths”


 * Previous Ideas
 * o Skepticism
 * § True knowledge is unattainable
 * o Very influenced by John Locke
 * § Basic Empiricism:
 * Knowledge only comes from experience rather than reason
 * o Berkeley
 * § We can never know that a material world exists externally to ourselves
 * “Beauty in things exists in the mind which contemplates them” Hume
 * o Very fan of the Scientific Method by Galileo
 * § But he had difficulties with the Problem of Induction
 * All science is based on a logical fallacy:
 * If A comes before B it does not mean that A caused B even if there are invariable results every time A happens, like day and night.
 * Just because something happened in the past, it doesn´t mean it will happen again, no matter how many times you observe the phenomena
 * “Custom, then, is the great guide of Human Life” Hume
 * o We can expect something to happen; but we do not //know// it will
 * He ended up just accepting it


 * Main Ideas
 * o Empiricism
 * § All knowledge is derived from the senses
 * Senses are the center of reality
 * o Modified Skepticism
 * § Mitigated Skepticism:
 * Proofs in human affairs do not exist except for mathematics
 * “Apart from mathematics we know nothing for certain”
 * § True knowledge is completely unattainable
 * § Only statements about the world are those derived from human experience
 * Human experience is as close as we can get to the truth
 * § “Reason is the slave of the passions” Hume
 * Even reason will adopt the form of our desires and emotions
 * o Bundle Theory
 * § Features of objects are all there exist, there is no actual object of which they are the features
 * Imagine the object without its properties
 * You don´t exist either
 * o Therefore there is no such thing as the self
 * § Senses mixing with the brain gives the fake perception of existence
 * § “Just a bundle of sensations”
 * o Atheism
 * § He didn´t make it aloud because it was punished by death
 * § Idea of God was nonsensical
 * Never perceived by the senses therefore not real
 * Oder in universe could be a manifestation of a designing intelligence analogue, but not the definite proof of God´s existence


 * Influence
 * o His ideas influenced many other philosophers:
 * § Kant—awakened from his “dogmatic slumbers”—, Jeremy Bentbam, John Stuart Mill, Darwin…
 * o Hume’s Law
 * § The is-ought problem
 * Distinction between what //ought to be// and what //is//


 * Who cares?
 * o How is Science possible if it is all based on a logical fallacy?
 * o Solution to the problem of induction?
 * o People will tolerate more one another because no one is completely right and therefore there are no wrong ways of thinking }

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 * Sources
 * § Three Minute Philosophy- David Hume []
 * § The Great Empiricists: Hume []
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 * Gamble's Endnotes:**

Key concept: Certainty or "proof" of even basic causal connections between even commonly connected events is nearly impossible to arrive at. Therefore, like the Greek Sceptics, "certainty" is not available. He spent much time trying to show that Augistine's "design" argument for the existence of God, may indeed point to the existence of God, but cannot prove such. This idea underminesa ll of science which depends on beig able to prove causes and results in a systematic way. Hume would say that even if A preceeds B a thousand times, that regularity does NOT prove that A causes B. Hume does propose that we not give up because of this, however. "Custom is the guide of human life..." That is, we live as best we can according to patterns (customs) even though absolute [prove is unavailable. This highlights "The ought - is problem." We can only really say what is, not what ought to be our what should be, because those terms imply a real causation, which is not really possible to be proven.

"Reason is the slave of the passions..." Reason is unreliable. We are very vulnerable or susceptible to rationalization, that is, using reason, not to arrive at what is genuinely best or most reasonable, but to arrive at what we want (passions) to be true.