David Hume | Biography

The Scottish philosopher David Hume developed the concept of "mitigated skepticism," which remains a viable alternative to the systems of rationalism, empiricism, and idealism. Hume raised relevant issues and arguments that remain central to contemporary thought, but his philosophical writings went unnoticed during his lifetime. The considerable fame he achieved derived from his work as an essayist and historian.

Hume was born on April 26, 1711, near Edinburgh. A second son, he was not entitled to a large inheritance, and he failed careers in law and business because of his "aversion to everything but the pursuits of Philosophy and general learning." Until he was past forty, Hume was employed only twice.

The first two volumes of his major philosophic work A Treatise of Human Nature were published in 1739 and the third appeared in the following year. Book I of the Treatise was recast as An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding and published in 1748. The third volume slightly revised appeared in 1751 as An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals. The second volume of the Treatise was republished as Part II of Four Dissertations in 1757. Hume's other important work, the controversial Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, complete by the mid-1750s, was published posthumously.

During his lifetime Hume's reputation derived from the publication of his Political Discourses (1751) and six-volume History of England (1754-1762). When he went to France in 1763 as secretary to the English ambassador, Hume discovered that he was a literary celebrity. He retired to Edinburgh in 1769 and died there on August 25, 1776.

Skepticism is concerned with the truthfulness of human perceptions and ideas. Hume was the first thinker to point out the disastrous implications of the representative theory of perception. Hume suggested that a position of complete skepticism is neither serious nor useful. Academic skepticism states that one can never know the truth or falsity of any statement (except, of course, this one). It is, however, a self-refuting theory and is confounded by life itself because "we make inferences on the basis of our impressions whether they be true or false, real or imaginary." Hume, therefore, advanced what he called "mitigated skepticism." This approach attempts to limit philosophical inquiries to topics that are adapted to the capacities of human intelligence. It thus excludes all metaphysical questions concerning the origin of either mind or object as being incapable of demonstration.

Even though an ultimate explanation of the subject or object of knowledge is impossible, Hume provided a description of how man senses and understands. He emphasized the utility of knowledge as opposed to its correctness and suggested that experience begins with feeling rather than thought. He used the term "perception" in its traditional sense--that is, whatever can be present to the mind from the senses, passions, thought, or reflection. Nonetheless he distinguished between impressions which are felt and ideas which are thought. In this he stressed the difference between feeling a toothache and thinking about such a pain.

Hume distinguished the various mental operations in a descriptive psychology, or "mental geography." For example, impressions are described as vivacious and lively, whereas ideas are less vivid and, in fact, derived from original impressions. This thesis leads to the conclusion that "we can never think of any thing which we have not seen without us or felt in our own minds." Hume stressed that the criterion for judging ideas is to remove every philosophical ambiguity by identifying the impression from which a supposed idea is derived. If there is no corresponding impression, the idea may be dismissed as meaningless. This assumption that all ideas are reducible, in principle, to some impression is central to Hume's empiricism.

Hume accepted the Cartesian doctrine of the distinct idea--conceivability subject only to the principle of contradiction--as both the unit of reasoning and the criterion of truth. But the doctrine of the distinct idea means that every noncontradictory idea expresses an a priori logical possibility. And the speculative freedom of the imagination to conceive opposites without contradiction makes it impossible to demonstrate any matter of fact or existence. For Hume, since truth is posterior to fact, the ideas of reason only express what the mind thinks about reality. On the level of ideas, Hume believed that the meaning of ideas is more important than their truth. What separates meaningful propositions from mere concepts is the subjective impression of belief.

Belief, or the vivacity with which the mind conceives certain ideas and associations, results from the reciprocal relationship between experience and imagination. The cumulative experience of the past and present--for example, the relational factors of constancy, conjunction, and resemblance--gives a bias to the imagination. But it is man's imaginative anticipations of the future that give meaning to his experience.

The most celebrated example of this argument is Hume's analysis of the causal relation. Every statement which points beyond what is immediately available to the senses and memory rests on an assumption and/or extension of the cause and effect relation. For example, we may note that certain events occur in sequence and we may assume that the first causes the second, as lightning causes thunder, or one moving billiard ball causes another to move when the make contact. But even if the first always is followed by the second we cannot assume causality. It is not necessary that the sun will rise tomorrow because it has always risen in the past. The future cannot be deduced from the past; it remains logically possible that the sun will not rise tomorrow, that the next billiard ball we hit will not cause another one to move, or that the next lightning bolt will not bring about a roll of thunder. Thus, there is no justifiable knowledge of causal connections in nature, although this is not a denial that there are real causes. Man's supposed knowledge results from repeated associations of the supposed cause and effect, to the point where imagination makes its customary transition from one object to its usual attendant and presumes a causal relationship. This is considered Hume's critique of induction. Causality cannot be determined by deductive logic, relying instead of the uniformity of nature, and the tendency that today will be like tomorrow. While Hume does not deny that inductions are necessary for humans to live normally, he argues that they cannot be adequately justified.

Because of his skeptical attitude toward the truths of reason Hume attempted to base his moral theory on the certainty of feeling--"Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions." While this is often taken to be an amoralist attitude, Hume emphasized that reason can only tell us how to accomplish moral actions. It cannot determine what moral actions are. For this, we must rely on our emotions, both strong and weak. A change in moral character, then, cannot be accomplished by reason, but can and should be transformed by the passions. In this, Hume followed the "moral sense" school and, especially, the thought of Francis Hutcheson. Moreover, Hume anticipated Jeremy Bentham's utilitarianism, a debt which the latter acknowledged.