Lecture: Hume

NCTU Graduate

David Hume (1711-1776) Born in Edinburg, Scotland. He is revered as one of the greatest of modern philosophers although his contribution consists largely of one single work, The Treatise of Human Nature. (Analytic philosopher A. J. Ayer called him “The greatest of British philosophers”.) He never married although he counted many women friends. The Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Hume describes him as “deservedly popular…sociable, witty, kind, ingenuous in his friendships, innocently vain, and devoid of envy.” In his native Scotland he was known as “Saint David”. He spent some years in France, once befriended and gave sanctuary to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and became known in France as “le bon David”. His closest friend was economist Adam Smith. In addition to smaller works on religion and morals, Hume wrote A History of Great Britain and he did achieve literary fame as a man of letters although his philosophy, for the most part only superficially understood, was treated with suspicion. Hume was twice denied a chair in philosophy at universities. Hume’s atheism or agnosticism is transparent in his philosophy and did not help him become popular among thinkers of the time. He was ridiculed by clerics and believers. Indeed, Immanuel Kant was probably the only of his contemporaries who understood Hume’s thought. (Kant made the famous statement that it was Hume who “woke him from his dogmatic slumbers”.)


The kernel ideas for the Treatise are said to have been conceived of when Hume was only 18 years old, after about three years of intense self-study in philosophy and classical literature. The book was published anonymously in 1739. He expected it to cause controversy and learned debate, but the book instead was treated with mockery and incomprehension. Physically exhausted from the ordeal of producing the work, Hume moved to France and took up light duties in business. Hume later wrote An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding in which he restated the central ideas of the neglected Treatise. Even this did not earn him a reputation as philosopher, so entrenched were the religious sentiments (and the metaphysical arguments they rested upon) of the day.

Hume comes after the great generation of rationalists that include Descartes, Hobbes, Leibniz, and Spinoza—on the one hand—and on the other just after the new British empiricists including Berkeley and Locke. Historically, he lives just at the end of the hideous religious wars between Catholics and Protestants throughout Europe. He may be described as an empiricist philosopher haunted by skepticism or as a skeptical philosopher inspired by empiricism. Both traits are present in his work. Like Descartes he feels that good thought is threatened by error, bad reasoning. He is concerned with good thought in all human affairs (especially religion), however, not just philosophy, which he did not hold in especially high esteem. Just months before his death he wrote: “Generally speaking, the errors in religion are dangerous: those in philosophy only ridiculous.” He saw philosophy as a tool to examine thinking in general, thinking as it may apply to any field of human endeavor whatsoever. He died the same year as the Americans declared their independence from Britain.

The Treatise is divided into three parts concerning: Understanding, the Passions, and Morals. The purpose of the Treatise to articulate what has come to be called ‘the human sciences’: “Human Nature is the only science of man; and yet has hitherto been the most neglected” (I, VII, 273). With Hume, philosophy is transformed into the most human of sciences. Philosophy need not any more look for first causes or final ends; philosophy’s genius consists in analysis and argument from analysis. The Treatise is a kind of analysis of the “natural history of the mind’s experiences”. I read Hume as saying that the answer to skepticism, to any thoroughgoing doubt (as in Descartes), is not to be found in a certainty but in our nature, and in our specifically human nature which includes, as he discusses at length in other portions of the Treatise, habits, customs, egoism, sympathy, and institutions. Human nature is distinct: birds in China and birds in Canada build their nests in the same way; but houses, buildings, cities, etc are culturally varied. Thus the science of human nature must study the susceptibility of both instinct and mind to reason, habit, imagination, difference.