David Hume

Biography

David Hume was born in Edinburgh in 1711, the younger son of a minor laird of modest means in the Scottish Borders. His father died when he was an infant, and he was raised by his mother, Katherine Falconer, who came from a legal family and was reputed for her piety. Hume attended the University of Edinburgh from the age of twelve, studying the standard curriculum of classics, philosophy, and the sciences, but he left without taking a degree and never returned to formal academic study. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes that the intellectual culture of Edinburgh in the 1720s was unusually lively, and the young Hume was exposed to currents of Newtonian science, moral philosophy, and classical literature that would shape his entire career.

After leaving the university, Hume attempted the study of law at his family's insistence, found it intolerable, and devoted himself instead to philosophy and literature. A period of intense private study in France, first at Reims and then at La Flèche — the Jesuit college where Descartes had been educated a century earlier — produced the manuscript of the Treatise of Human Nature. Hume returned to England in 1737 and published the first two books of the Treatise anonymously in 1739, with the third following in 1740. The work fell, as he famously put it, "dead-born from the press," and its failure was a lasting disappointment.

Hume spent the next decades seeking a livelihood that would allow him to continue his writing. He accompanied General St Clair on diplomatic missions to Vienna and Turin, tutored the Marquess of Annandale, served as secretary to the British ambassador in Paris, and finally secured a position as keeper of the Advocates' Library in Edinburgh, which gave him access to the books he needed for his historical work. His History of England, published in successive volumes between 1754 and 1761, became the work by which he was best known to his contemporaries and brought him the financial security he had long sought. He served as under-secretary of state for the Northern Department in 1767–1768 and then retired to Edinburgh, where he lived as a celebrated figure of the Scottish Enlightenment until his death in 1776.

Historical Context

Hume wrote in the intellectual ferment of eighteenth-century Britain and France. The received framework of early modern philosophy had been shaped by the great rationalist systems of the continent — Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz — and by the empiricist tradition that developed in Britain through Locke and Berkeley. Both traditions claimed to ground knowledge in a secure foundation: the rationalists in the deliverances of pure reason, the empiricists in the data of sense experience. Both encountered difficulties that their successors struggled to resolve.

The British context added distinctive elements. Newton's achievements in physics suggested a model of investigation that began from observation and experiment rather than from a priori principles, and the question of whether philosophy could imitate this method shaped much eighteenth-century thought. The Scottish universities, especially Edinburgh and Glasgow, had become centers of moral philosophy, where questions about virtue, obligation, and the foundations of civil society were pursued with a seriousness that combined classical learning with contemporary science. Hume's philosophy emerged from this context and is unintelligible without it.

The Stanford Encyclopedia notes that Hume's religious skepticism placed him in tension with the Calvinist orthodoxy that still shaped Scottish public life. He was denied chairs at Edinburgh and Glasgow on account of his reputation as an unbeliever, and the controversy over his religious views shadowed his entire career. The Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, his most sustained treatment of religious questions, was withheld from publication during his lifetime and appeared only posthumously in 1779. Hume's confrontation with the religious assumptions of his age was not a side issue; it was central to his philosophical project, and his arguments against the rational credentials of religious belief remain among the most influential in the tradition.

Key Ideas

Empiricism and the Limits of Reason

Hume's empiricism begins from a distinction that organizes the entire Treatise: the distinction between impressions and ideas. Impressions are the vivid perceptions of sense, feeling, and reflection that we have when we see, hear, feel, or desire. Ideas are the fainter copies of these impressions that occur in thinking, remembering, and imagining. The distinction allows Hume to pose a question that runs through all his philosophy: what are the sources of our ideas, and what credentials do they have?

The answer is the copy principle: every simple idea is derived from a corresponding impression. Where an idea cannot be traced to an impression, it is suspect. This principle is not a metaphysical thesis about the nature of the mind; it is a methodological rule for sorting genuine ideas from confused or empty ones. Hume uses it to investigate a wide range of philosophical concepts — substance, self, cause, necessary connection, moral good — and to ask, in each case, what impression the idea is derived from. Where no impression can be found, the idea is revealed as philosophical imposture rather than genuine thought.

The consequences of this method are radical. The concept of a necessary connection between cause and effect, central to our understanding of nature, turns out to have no impression as its source. We observe one event followed by another; we do not observe a necessary tie between them. The Internet Encyclopedia notes that this result, which Hume develops in the Treatise and again in the Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, undermines the rationalist confidence that the operations of nature can be known through reason alone, and it forces a reexamination of what we can claim to know about the world.

Causation and Induction

Hume's treatment of causation is his most famous and most influential contribution. We believe that the future will resemble the past, that the sun will rise tomorrow because it has risen every day before, that bread will nourish because it has nourished. Hume asks what grounds this belief. The answer cannot be reason, since there is no contradiction in supposing that the course of nature might change. It cannot be experience, since experience can only show us what has happened, not what must happen. The belief that the future will resemble the past is, strictly speaking, unwarranted by either reason or experience.

Hume's resolution is not skeptical in the sense of recommending that we abandon the belief. He argues that the belief arises from custom or habit: the repetition of conjunctions produces a psychological expectation, and this expectation is what we call the belief in causal connection. We cannot help forming these expectations, and practical life requires them, but we should recognize that they are products of habit rather than deliverances of reason. The Stanford Encyclopedia notes that this account has been read both as a devastating skeptical result and as a naturalistic explanation of how the mind actually works, and that the relation between these readings remains a subject of debate.

The problem of induction, as it has come to be called, has shaped twentieth-century philosophy of science in profound ways. The question of whether inductive inference can be rationally justified, and if so how, became central to the work of Carnap, Reichenbach, Popper, and Goodman, and the terms in which they posed the question descend directly from Hume's treatment. Hume's own position — that induction rests on habit rather than reason — remains a live option, and the alternatives continue to be explored.

Morality and the Passions

Hume's moral philosophy is as distinctive as his epistemology and is in many ways more influential on the subsequent tradition. He argues that moral distinctions are not derived from reason but from sentiment. Reason can tell us what means will achieve a given end, and it can tell us what the facts of a situation are, but it cannot, by itself, tell us that one end is better than another. Moral judgment depends on the sentiments of approval and disapproval that we feel when we contemplate characters and actions, and these sentiments are the source of moral distinction.

The argument is developed at length in the Treatise and in the Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals. Hume observes that vice and virtue are not discovered by reason alone; they are felt rather than judged. The malicious person, the cruel tyrant, the treacherous friend evoke in us a sentiment of disapproval, and the benevolent person, the just ruler, the loyal friend evoke approval. These sentiments are not arbitrary; they are structured by the common features of human nature and by the conditions of social life. The Stanford Encyclopedia notes that Hume's account of the virtues — distinguishing natural abilities from moral virtues, and both from the artificial virtues of justice and promise-keeping — is one of the most sophisticated contributions to moral philosophy in the eighteenth century.

The artificial virtues are particularly important. Justice, fidelity to promises, and allegiance to government are not natural responses but conventions that arise because human beings, with their limited benevolence and their need for cooperation, find that rules of property and obligation serve the common interest. Hume's account of justice as an artificial virtue has shaped subsequent contractarian and conventionalist theories of morality and politics, and it remains a powerful alternative to theories that treat justice as a natural virtue or a deliverance of pure practical reason.

Religion and Miracles

Hume's critique of religion operates on several levels. The section "Of Miracles" in the Enquiry concerning Human Understanding argues that no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, since the evidence against a miracle — the uniform experience of the laws of nature — is always greater than any testimony in its favor. The argument has been much discussed and much criticized, but it remains one of the most influential treatments of the epistemic credentials of miracle claims.

The posthumous Dialogues concerning Natural Religion take up the argument from design, the most widely defended of the theistic proofs in Hume's day. The dialogue form allows Hume to develop objections without committing himself to a single position, but the cumulative effect is to undermine the claim that the order of nature supports rational belief in a benevolent deity. The Internet Encyclopedia notes that the Dialogues have been read as a defense of genuine theism, as concealed atheism, and as a skeptical refusal to settle the question, and that the interpretive debate continues.

Major Works

Hume's major philosophical works are the Treatise of Human Nature (1739–1740), the Enquiry concerning Human Understanding (1748, originally as Philosophical Essays concerning Human Understanding), the Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals (1751), the Dialogues concerning Natural Religion (published posthumously in 1779), and the Natural History of Religion (1757). The Treatise is the most ambitious, containing his accounts of the understanding, the passions, and morals in a single connected system. The two Enquiries are reworkings of the first and third books of the Treatise, and Hume expressed the wish that the Treatise be judged by them rather than by the original.

The History of England was for most of Hume's lifetime his most admired work. It ran from the Roman period through the Stuart revolution of 1688 and combined careful archival research with a distinctive narrative voice. Its importance for Hume's philosophy is sometimes overlooked: the practice of historical writing shaped his understanding of how human beings actually behave, and it reinforced his conviction that philosophical speculation must answer to the realities of human nature.

Influence

Hume's influence on the course of modern philosophy has been immense. The most famous response is Kant's. Kant wrote that it was Hume who first interrupted his "dogmatic slumber" and gave his investigations in the field of speculative philosophy a quite new direction. Hume's challenge to the rational credentials of causation and induction forced Kant to reconsider what reason could and could not accomplish, and the critical philosophy emerged from that reconsideration. The Stanford Encyclopedia notes that the relation between Hume's skepticism and Kant's transcendental idealism remains one of the most studied episodes in the history of philosophy.

In the empiricist tradition that developed in Britain and later in the analytic movement, Hume's influence was more direct. The logical positivists of the early twentieth century regarded Hume as a precursor, and his verificationist tendencies and his critique of metaphysics were read as anticipations of their own position. Twentieth-century philosophy of science, philosophy of mind, and metaethics have all drawn on Humean themes, and the questions he raised about induction, causation, personal identity, and the foundations of morality remain live.

The Internet Encyclopedia notes that contemporary moral philosophy continues to be shaped by Hume's insistence that moral judgment depends on sentiment as well as reason, and that his naturalism — his insistence that philosophy must answer to the realities of human nature and human psychology — has found new readers in cognitive science and empirical moral psychology. The most careful engagement with Hume reads him neither as a simple skeptic nor as a naive empiricist, but as a philosopher of remarkable subtlety whose arguments continue to challenge the assumptions of his readers.

Sources

1. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "David Hume." A comprehensive scholarly reference covering Hume's life, works, and central arguments in epistemology, metaphysics, moral philosophy, and philosophy of religion.
2. Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "David Hume." An accessible overview of Hume's philosophy, useful for orientation before approaching the primary texts.