David Hume

Hume was born on April 26, 1711 in Edinburge. From time to time throughout his life, he was to spend time at his family home at Ninewells by Chirnside, Berwickshire. His family sent him to the University of Edinburgh at the unusually early age of twelve.

At first he considered a career in law, but came to have, in his words, "an insurmountable aversion to everything but the pursuits of Philosophy and general Learning." He had little respect for professors, telling a friend in 1735, "there is nothing to be learned from a Professor, which is not to be met with in Books."

At the age of eighteen, in 1729, Hume made a philosophical discovery that opened up to him "a new scene of thought." He did not recount what this was, but it seems likely to have been his theory of causality that our beliefs about cause and effect depend on sentiment, custom and habit, and not upon reason or abstract, timeless, general Laws of Nature.

In 1734, after a few months in commerce in Bristol, he retreated to do self-study and conduct thought experiments on himself at La Fleche in Anjou, France. During his four years there, he laid out his life plan, as he wrote in My Own Life.

Resolving "to make a very rigid frugality supply my deficiency of fortune, to maintain unimpaired my independency, and to regard every object as contemptible except the improvements of my talents in literature." While there, he completed A Treatise of Human Nature at the age of 26

Hume himself described the (lack of) public reaction to the publication of the Treatise in 1739–1740 by writing that it "fell dead-born from the press, without reaching such distinction as even to excite a murmur among the zealots."

After deciding that the Treatise had problems of style rather than of content, he reworked some of the material for more popular consumption in Philosophical Essays concerning Human Understanding, later published as An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. It did not prove extremely successful either but was better received than the Treatise.

Hume followed the common practice of expressing his views obliquely, through characters in dialogues. Hume did not acknowledge authorship of the Treatise until the year of his death, in 1776.

Theory of knowledge David Hume solved the problem of disagreement and speculations regarding “ abstruse questions” is to “enquire seriously into the nature of human understanding and show from an exact analysis of its power and capacity.

He begins with an account of the contents of the mind: He begins with an account of the contents of the mind: Hume says that nothing seems more unbounded than human thought. Our body is confined to one planet, our mind can roam instantly into the most distant regions of the universe. It is the mind bound by the limits of nature or reality, for without difficulty the imagination can conceive the most unnatural and incongruous appearances:

Example: flying horse or golden mountains…. - The contents of the mind can all be reduced to the materials given us by senses and experiences, those materials Hume called Perceptions. - The perceptions of the mind take two forms: impressions and ideas

Impressions and ideas make up the total content of the mind. The original stuff of thought is an impression, and an idea is merely a copy of an impression.

- The difference between an impression and an idea is only the degree of their vividness. The original perception is an impression as when we hear, see, feel, love, hate, or will.

These impressions are lively and clear when we have them. When we reflect upon these impressions we have ideas of them.. those ideas are less-lively versions of the original impressions. Example: to feel pain is an impression whereas the memory of this sensation is an idea.

- Hume argued that without impressions there can be no ideas. For if an idea is simply a copy of an impression, it follows that for every idea must be prior impression. Not every idea reflects an exact corresponding impression. Example: we have never seen the flying horse or a golden mountain even though we have idea of them.

Hume explained such ideas as being the product of mind’s faculty of compounding, transposing or diminishing the materials afforded us by the senses and experience.

Association of ideas: it is not by mere chance that our ideas are related to each other. There must be some bond of union, some associating quality by which one idea naturally introduces another. It is a gentle force which commonly prevail….point out to every one those simple ideas, which are most proper to be united in a complex one. It is not a special faculty of the mind that associates one idea with another.

For Hume, there is not impression of the structural equipment of the mind. By observing the actual patterns of our thinking and analyzing the groupings of our ideas, Hume thought he had discovered an explanation for associations of ideas: Wherever there are certain qualities in ideas, these ideas are associated with each other.

These qualities are three in number: + Resemblance + Contiguity in time or place + Cause and effect

Hume believed that the connections of all ideas to each other could be explained by these qualities and gave the following examples of how they work:

A picture naturally leads our thoughts to original (resemblance) The mention of one apartment in the building naturally introduces an enquire.. concerning the others (contiguity) If we think of wound, we can scarcely forbear reflecting on the pain which follows it. (cause and effect)

There are no operations of the mind that differ in principle from one of these three examples of the association of ideas. The notion of cause and effect was considered by Hume to be the central element in knowledge. He took the position that causal principle is the foundation upon which validity of all knowledge depends.

Causality Hume’s most original and influential ideas deal with the problem of causality. His intention was to look for cause of phenomena and therefore the predictable order of nature in God’s activity.

The very idea of causality is suspect, and he approaches the problem by asking question “what is the origin of the idea of causality?” Since ideas are copies of impressions, His answer is that there is no impression corresponding to this idea.

How does the idea of causality arise in the mind? It must be that idea of causality arises in the mind when we experience certain relations between objects. Example: When we speak of cause and effect, we mean to say that A causes B. What kind of a relation does this show between B and C? There are two relations:

+ First, there is the relation of contiguity, for A and B are always close together + Second, there is priori in time, for A, “cause” always precedes B, the “effect”. But there is other relation that the idea of causality suggests to common sense namely between A and B there is a necessary connection. But neither contiguity nor priority implies necessary connection between objects.

While we do have impressions of contiguity, priority and constant conjunction, we do not have any impression of necessary connections. Causality is not quality in the objects we observe but is rather a “habit of association” in the mind produced by the repetition of instances of A and B.

Hume assumed that the causal principle is central to all kinds of knowledge. He saw no reason for accepting the principle that whatever begins to exist must have a cause of existence.

Constancy and Coherence: Our belief that things exist external to us.Hume argued that is the product of our imagination as it deals with two special characteristics of our impressions. From impressions our imagination becomes aware of both constancy and coherence.

For example: I look out of my window, there are mountains, houses and trees. If I close my eyes or turn away and then later look at the same view again, the arrangement is still the same. And it is this constancy in the contents of my impression that leads my imagination to conclude that the house, the mountain and the trees exist whether I think of them or not.

For these reasons, the imagination leads us to believe that certain continue to have an independent existence external to us. This is a belief and not a rational proof, for assumption that our impressions are connected with things is “without any foundation in reasoning”. Hume extended this skeptical line of reasoning beyond objects or things to consider the existence of self’ substance and God.