David Hume (; born David Home; – 25 August 1776) was a Scottish philosopher, historian, economist and essayist who is known for his highly influential system of empiricism, philosophical scepticism and metaphysical naturalism.Morris, William Edward, and Charlotte R. Brown. 2019 . "David Hume." Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Stanford: Metaphysics Research Lab. Retrieved 18 May 2020. 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. Following John Locke, Hume rejected the existence of innate ideas, holding that all our ideas derive ultimately from impressions, but in his fork he distinguished relations of ideas, known a priori, from matters of fact, whose knowledge rests on experience. This places him in the empiricist tradition of Locke and George Berkeley, while drawing his experimental method from Francis Bacon.Cranston, Maurice, and Thomas Edmund Jessop. 2020 "David Hume." Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved 18 May 2020.Harris, M.H. 1966. "David Hume". Library Quarterly 36 (April): 88–98.
Hume argued that inductive reasoning and belief in causality cannot be justified empirically; instead, they result from custom and mental habit. People never actually perceive that one event causes another but experience only 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; this metaphysical presupposition cannot itself be grounded in prior experience.
An opponent of philosophical rationalists, Hume held that passions rather than reason govern human behaviour, 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 accepted by historians of European philosophy 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 denied that people have an actual conception of the self, positing that they experience only a bundle of sensations and that the self is nothing more than this bundle of perceptions connected by an association of ideas. Hume's compatibilist theory of free will takes causal determinism as fully compatible with human freedom. His philosophy of religion, including his rejection of miracles and critique of the argument from design, was especially controversial.
During his lifetime, Hume was chiefly known as a historian and essayist, as his History of England became a bestseller, while his Treatise initially received little notice and his supposed atheism saw him passed over for university chairs. Hume left a legacy that affected 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 that had awakened him from his "dogmatic slumbers".
Biography Early life and education David Hume was born on 7 May 1711 [OS 26 April 1711] 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, Midlothian, and his wife Mary Falconer (née Norvell)),Hume, David. 1778 . "My Own Life." In The History of England, from the Invasion of Julius Cæsar to the Revolution in 1688 1. London. Archived from the original on 13 August 2015. Also available via Rutgers University. 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 re-married, raised the two brothers and their sister on her own.Morris, Ted. 2018 . "David Hume Biography." The Hume Society. Retrieved 18 May 2020. David's uncle George Home was minister at the parish in Chirnside where he likely attended during his youth.
Hume changed his family name's spelling in 1734 because the surname 'Home' (pronounced '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; 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 [my family] fanceyed 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" At around age 18, 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. Scurvy spots later broke out on his fingers, persuading Hume's physician to diagnose him with 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. After eating well for a time, he went from being "tall, lean and raw-bon'd" to being "sturdy, robust [and] healthful-like."Hume, David. 1932 "Letter to a [Dr George Cheyne]". pp. 13–15 in The Letters of David Hume 1, edited by J. Y. T. Greig. Oxford: Oxford University Press. . .Wright, John P. 2003. "Dr. George Cheyne, Chevalier Ramsay, and Hume's Letter to a Physician." Hume Studies 29(1):125–141. – via Project MUSE. . Indeed, Hume would become well known for being obese and having a fondness for good port and cheese, often using them as philosophical metaphors for his conjectures.
Career Despite having noble ancestry, Hume had no source of income and no learned profession by age 25. 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 and is likely to have used the college's extensive library.
Hume was derailed in his attempts to start a university career by protests over his alleged "atheism",Hume, David. 2007 . An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, edited by P. Millican. Oxford: Oxford University Press. . . pp. lxiii–lxiv. 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 historian, and a career as a librarian at the Advocates Library for the Faculty of Advocates. These successes provided him much needed income at the time. 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 definitive history of England. 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."Hume, David. 1777. Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects 2. London. Archived from the original on 13 August 2015. Retrieved 18 May 2020. 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 age 27. Books 1 and 2 of his treatise were intended to "try the taste of the public", leading to Book 3 Of Morals being published after his feeling that he had "met with success".Hume, D., "Advertisement to Books I and II" in
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 [his] deficiency of fortune, to maintain unimpaired [his] independency, and to regard every object as contemptible except the improvements of [his] talents in literature".Hume, David. 1993 . "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. This work contained the same ideas, but with a shorter and clearer explanation. Although there has been some academic speculation as to the pamphlet's true author, it is generally regarded as Hume's creation.
1740s The Essays Moral and Political was published in 1741, included in the later edition as Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary. In 1745, Hume applied for the Chair of Pneumatics and Moral Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. However, the position was given to William CleghornNobbs, Douglas. 1965. "The Political Ideas of William Cleghorn, Hume's Academic Rival." Journal of the History of Ideas 26(4):575–586. . . p. 575. after Edinburgh ministers petitioned the town council not to appoint Hume because he was seen as an atheist.Lorkowski, C.M. "David Hume: Religion." Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.