DAVID HUME BY DAVID FURGUSSON.mpg

David Hume his dates are 17 11 to 76 he is the leading figure of the Scottish enlightenment in the 18th century and in many ways the the leading British philosopher of that period and some would say of any period he is usually classified with Locke and Berkeley as belonging to the British empiricists but Hume develops empiricist philosophy in a more skeptical and naturalist direction than either of his predecessors and this is what is distinctive and important in humans work Hume is not just a philosopher however as a scholar of the Enlightenment he's very much a man of letters who is well versed and in several fields he was fluent in economics he writes as a social scientist as well as a philosopher and in many ways he he made his fortune as a historian producing a multi-volume history of England in his mid to late career that proving very successful and going through several editions Hume was born near 9 wells and scottie borders he came from quite a wealthy family his father being a landowner but you must the second son required to earn an income he and his brother came to Edinburgh University at a very early age Hume would only have been about 10 years old when he first studied at the University coming with his elder brother he was a student here in the city for a number of years and he would have been trained in what we would today call the liberal arts doing some classics ancient history and philosophy humans ambition was really to make his way in the world as an independent man of letters as a publisher of books and essays although it took him some time to become successful in that respect his first unproblematic was the three-volume treatise of human nature which was written when Hume was still in his 20s an astonishingly brilliant work for someone so young but it did not enjoy a great deal of commercial success Hume later said it had fallen stillborn from the press in a famous expression he did however manage to distill the ideas of the treatise into later essays and over the years these collections of essays sold well Hume became established as one of the the leading intellectuals of his day he held a number of posts government posts and attachments to military personnel in in France and in in London in particular so he he was something of a civil servant and was able to earn an income by that means and in doing so he was able to finance his his work as a writer he held a post in Edinburgh as librarian at the Faculty of advocates something of an honorary position but it gave him a very central place and Edinburgh society and provided him of course with access to the best library in the city at later became the National Library of Scotland which is one of four copywrite libraries in the United Kingdom Hume was for a number of years the the librarian to the Faculty of advocates and during this time he he wrote what his best-selling work the history of England from Julius Caesar to the Glorious Revolution by the history of England he more or less intense a history of the United Kingdom rather than England as we would understand that today and it's it's one of the finest historical works of the 18th century human ranking alongside Gibbon and William Robertson here in Scotland as amongst the leading historians of the day so although we think of Hume primarily as a philosopher we should remember that he was it was a great historian the the different aspects of his thought tend to to hang together he tries to see the human person in social context rather than offering the the grander more metaphysical and rationalist explanations of earlier thinkers there is this cutting down of Reason in in humans scope is more modest it's more firmly rooted in social life in the historical context and which human lives are lived and that gives humans thought a tenner that is one sceptical and also naturalist and if we understand humors as a skeptical naturalist then I think we can position him in relation to earlier empiricists and the the rationalist tradition of Descartes and Leibniz against which he is is reacting quite quite fiercely in many respects Hulme as an empiricist wants to insist that all our ideas only the ideas that provide the elements for imagination memory and belief are derived from Sense experience from the the strong impressions that we receive from the five senses and that's from these raw materials that we build up our beliefs we build up an understanding of the world we are able to recall the past and to reflect and hypothesize about the future and about the the world we live in so to that extent he's an empiricist and in terms of his theory of ideas and that's something that he shares with Locke Berkeley and other thinkers of the period Hume however reaches more skeptical conclusions as a result of this empiricist theory of ideas he wants to tell us that many of our most deeply held beliefs are not amenable to the kind of rationalist or theological explanations that earlier philosophers had attempted we don't strictly speaking have a proof of the existence of the external world we don't have a proof of the existence of the self as a thinking thing in the carts language we don't have proof of the causal link between events or we can observe through experiences is the constant conjunction of similar types of event so that there's a sceptical strain at war throughout humans philosophy but he describes it as a mitigated skepticism because of course he he doesn't think for one minute that we can abandon those beliefs or or live without them and what we have to realize is that it is by force of custom and habit that we are committed to thinking and to acting in particular ways and we can't justify these and older rationalist ways we simply have to accept them with equanimity as part and parcel of what's been given us by nature or who we are by virtue of our social condition and this is then extended into his value theory when he speaks about ethics and aesthetics the these are largely human constructs that have been developed over successive generations and by civilizations to negotiate life in the world there's no sense in which they're written into the fabric of the universe or given to us by God our moral values are our human conventions or functions of our natural condition we need them of course to live well in the world but we shouldn't think of them as as more than sentiments that we bring to the world he speaks about staining and gilding the world with the colours of the mind very nice phrase that describes this moral anti-realism you might say or moral subjectivism that's at the root of human value theory whether that be ethics or or aesthetics and all this of course is is very important for the topic of religion because in humans broader philosophy we don't need the concept of God or the the beliefs and practices of faith in order to make sense of of the world or our place within it these can all be understood and in natural terms without reference to the the transcendent and to that extent neither God nor religion plays any useful explanatory role in in humans wider philosophy and when he comes to write about religion which he does frequently throughout his career he tends to write in a very skeptical vein about some of the the most fundamental tenets of Christian belief and this gave Hume the the reputation of being a skeptic even an infidel James Basel and a famous phrase describes him as as the great infidel and that's a phrase that has been much used in this Terra centenary year of his birth as we've we've revisited human and celebrated his legacy when he writes about religion of course he he does make an effort to conceal his views from his 18th century audience he doesn't write as an outright atheist there's a certain amount of [Music] rhetorical deception at work and in humans writings on religion in places he will say that reason we can't tell us anything very much about God so we have to depend on revelation but of course he's equally skeptical about revelation when you read what he says about miracles for example so it's it's pretty clear that that Hume is is largely religious skeptic although I think it's it's better to think of him as an agnostic rather than an atheist to use more recent labels the term agnostic was not around at the time what humors is telling us is that our our experience is simply not adequate to theological matters we we we don't know enough to be able to pronounce with any degree of confidence or probability on on whether or not God exists there there might be a God of sorts at the far end of the universe but as far as we can tell this God has no interest in us and is not remotely connected to to human affairs and that I think is about the sum total of humans theology he's at the end of the the spectrum of deism shading into a kind of wholesale agnosticism but he's not a self-confident atheist and the way in which say Richard Dawkins is today or others amongst the new atheists who seem to pronounce with almost total confidence that there is no God that according to humid take us beyond the evidence just as much as as theism or or Christianity in particular so humors is a mitigated skeptic and on the whole he is broadly skeptical of of religion in much of what he writes particularly in the natural history of religion he he's clearly very critical of the actual prank of of religion and the the function of religious institutions and society so it's not just that he's a skeptic with respect to religious belief but he is very critical of the the the social effects of religion he writes in a famous essay about superstition and enthusiasm he sees superstition attaching to the rites of pagan Greece and Rome that's a superstitious form of religion that's more about external ceremonies and sacrifices and anthropomorphic beliefs that people don't to such a great extent internalized but regulates their lives in some ways no human describes that as as a superstition and on the whole it's useless as far as he can tell but he's he's even more hostile to what he calls enthusiasm or fanaticism which he tends to identify with Christianity where there's an internal izing of belief to the the point of people believing themselves to be elected by God to be recipients of a special revelation to having peculiar access to privileged information about the deity that he thinks leads to high levels of intolerance in society it leads to violence to hypocrisy and dissembling to the the monkeys virtues as he calls them as well as to the the the bonita ee f-- that he finds in presbyterian scotland particularly with its doctrine of double predestination so human when you read between the lines and look at the footnotes is is highly critical of of the religion of his day and equally of the Roman Catholicism that the the Reformation succeeded so he's not just a skeptic but he's actually a critic of religious practice and it's it's clear that he saw religion as as having a particularly positive social contribution although he recognizes in his history of England that it has an important and indispensable place in the life of the nation and and maybe the best we can do is to try to ameliorate its worst effects and uncreate a more benign and unsanitized form of state religion so that there is that commitment coming through in history of England but it's set within this wider context of hostility to to religious faith Humes most celebrated work on religion as is the dialogues concerning natural religion it's one of the greatest philosophical works in the English language beautifully written very entertaining to see the exchanges between the the various protagonists and you have to work quite hard to discern exactly how humans position emerges at the end of these dialogues although most commentators would regard Philo the skeptic in the dialogues as as being for the most part the the mouthpiece of Hume we know that these dialogues were very important to Hume he wrote them in in mid-career he didn't publish them he realized I think that they would have been too explosive in the context of 18th century Edinburgh Hume was probably at a stage where he was enjoying a quiet life but he did make provision for the publication of the dialogues and his will we know that he made some changes to them in the the final weeks of his life adding some more negative sections to the final part part 12 and clearly this is an important work for Hume and one that he had cherished over many years and had revised that at different times and including at the time of his terminal illness in 1776 there are some big questions around how a theologian might react to David Humes skeptical philosophy and I have several thoughts on that and what one is simply to note that Hugh makes an abiding contribution to debates that have continued since that the debates have not been closed and people have sought to rehabilitate the design argument as well as other arguments for the existence of God but at the very least I we can agree I think that one can't do that without addressing the types of criticism that human leveled against a design argument and even if we are still of the view that there is something in the design argument Anna and I think that that would be my own position following people like Richard Swinburne and it clearly can't do as much as 18th century writers believed it could largely on account of the the sorts of criticism that Hugh made and a similar argument be true mutatis mutandis with respect to the office of miracles or reported miracles with the in the justification of Revelation I don't think that there are those external proofs for for Revelation in the way in which 18th century writers believed we're more into the realm here of a personal faith commitment that is based upon a wide variety of factors rather than a single argument from historical testimony and it's also worth noting I think that most of the leading philosophers before and after Hume have agonized to a much greater extent about God and religion than Hume himself did Hume it appears had little personal or temperamental inclination towards religion he practiced faith of a sort until his maybe his earlier mid-teens but at that point he appears to have abandoned it and never once been attracted to to any form of religious belief in practice and in later life but if we look at the the work of of later philosophers Kant Hegel kioku Gore the the British idealists Pitkin Stein even Heidegger that there is some an openness through the transcendent a willingness to consider seriously forms of aesthetic and religious experience and need to use religious categories if not in terms of an orthodox theology then in some revisionary way to describe adequately the the way we know and experience the world and have to live in it so Humes is is very much a minority voice even in the context of the subsequent history of philosophy and that's not always been recognized and the way in which human has been taught and the philosophy syllabus it's as if the the matter was was closed by human ever since when there's been no need to reopen it except on the part of obscurantists and those are still in the grip of earlier prejudices and superstitions what humans work also shows to me is that a theological account of the world needs to be based on on a broad description of reality and not simply hung on the peg of one or two arguments that reside in the philosophy of religion you

Channel: Timeline Theological Videos

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Keywords: DAVID, HUME, BY, FURGUSSON

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Length: 24min 36sec (1476 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 20 2011