David Hume - The Great Empiricist & Skeptic

hello in 18th century the city of Edinburgh became the center for an intellectual movement which has come to be known as the Scottish enlightenment had it's hard were a group of radical thinkers people like Adam Smith and James Hutton whose advances profoundly influenced fields ranging from economics to geology medicine to agriculture but perhaps the most significant figure of the Scottish enlightenment was David Hume in his lifetime Hume was best known as the author of a best-selling history of England but today he's acknowledged as one of the Giants of Western philosophy Hume wrote about a wide range of philosophical topics including religion and ethics and in his twenties produced a revolutionary account of human nature our reason and emotions Humes work was credited as an influence by Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein and is still the subject of intense debate today with me to discuss Davy - my Peter Milliken professor philosophy at Hartford College at the University of Oxford Helen BB professor of philosophy at the University of Birmingham and James Harris senior lecturer in philosophy at the University of st. Andrews Peter Milliken David Hume was born three hundred years ago in 1711 could you give us some sense of the intellectual landscape into which he was born yes certainly I'll focus mainly on the theoretical background which I think had a very major influence on him he's only about a century after Galileo had turned his telescope to the sky and refuted the Aristotelian view of the world and about fifty years after the formation of the Royal Society of London so it's quite early in the Scientific Revolution it's an age of scientific confidence especially in the wake of Newton as Oh Newton's Principia was 1687 and that was greatly admired so the predominant scientific view then was the so-called mechanical philosophy this is particularly associated with people like dick Hart and Boyle so the idea is that the physical world is getting better and better understood but the kind of picture of the physical world is Otherworld composed of inert particles of matter which act on each other through bumping into each other through mathematically calculated forces of the kind that Newton had been exploring now this gives it a kepta chol potential the world is very different in reality from how it appears to us we perceive it through our senses but we don't see all the little particles of which it's composed and that naturally raises epistemological worries how much can we know about it now John Locke in his essay concerning human understanding of 1690 tried to give an account of our place in the world how we can think about it how we can know about it on these sorts of principles but there was a big big concern about where we fit in because if the world is composed of mechanical particles like this it's hard to see a place for the human soul for God and so forth and we must play all this against the idea that you mentioned log but Locke reasoned that there was a God the idea that there was a god and God gave people their sense of reason and it was against that background that the raw society which you mentioned they followed the dictator as it were of a Francis Bacon explore the Scriptures and nature interrogate them these are the two answers of the world so that was very much the background religious media lecturer British background as he was then thought was very strong and that's a lie can you just give us some headline Peter before we move on as human a very broad range of interest could you just give us a few headlines about that sure um well he was very keen on seeing humans as part of the natural world and understanding us in that way so you can see him as a sort of forerunner of cognitive science he's investigating our faculties investigating how much we can know about the world and what the limits are but he turns that in lots of directions he investigates for example the psychology of the passions moral philosophy aesthetics religion you've mentioned and he writes essays on politics economics and of course the history so in all of these areas he's trying to see how we fit into the world based on an understanding gauge gained through experience and observation in line with the new science and you said and of course the history his multiple volume history of England was the great commercial success of the day made him very wealthy and also he thought was his greatest at that time as I understand it can we talk about Humes background Joan Paris well Hume grew up in the border country between Scotland and England he went to university at Edinburgh age 10 which was young but not that young his he went at the same time as his brother who was age 12 so wasn't that remarkable he went as young as he did my feeling is that he went to Edinburgh and didn't really learn very much from it he says in his autobiography that he wrote towards the end of his life that he learnt languages at university and not very much more than that that might be an exaggeration but I feel that he came down from university still aged in a very young news 15 feeling that well he hadn't learned very much and that his intellectual journey has already yet to begin so he had some time he his family wanted him to be a lawyer so they gave him the time to sit at home and read and study they thought he was studying law in fact he was reading Roman poetry and history and modern literature's of all kinds and he had developed a thirst and appetite for general learning as he calls it for the Arts in all their forms read as widely as he possibly could and gradually I think a sense of purpose developed sense that he has something to contribute to to philosophy and I think probably other things as well but in the first instance philosophy it's remarkable that it's a sir it is an autodidact at work isn't it to a great extent and you make you throw at languages for most people's languages learning languages to be able to read them and write language difficulty had he had two or three languages besides Greek and Latin and so this madness young boy is sitting in the borders reading intensely you're on your own in a variety of languages as he says a university education at the time in your first year you learnt or you brushed up on your Latin in the second year you learnt Greek and French he would have picked up French along the way and then yes and all today that is exactly what he was I see him sitting pretty much by himself on the family farm in baricza reading widely not perhaps there weren't very many people around that for him to be talking with he was four relating his ideas by him by himself and that's an important thing as I get from the from what from the notes and works of y'all that I've read is that is it this these have rather solitary person so it's it it's important thing to say because of the these great treaties comes out of solitary thinking an influenced by the the conversational companionship that a lot of people have a lot of a lot of intellectuals have is that right we would want to exaggerate that I mean he did have friends and he must have talked about some of his ideas with with some of them but I think yes I my sense of the treatise is that it is a work that was generated not through conversation and dialogue but through somebody it's somebody thinking things out for themselves and I think it's that rather private an idiosyncratic the origins of the book that make it made it so hard for people to understand you talking about the treatise of human nature which came out in his late 20s and he'd moved he was described as a breakdown at the age of about twenty and moved across to France to laugh leche while I sat down and wrote this book which not very successful at the time it has been seen as more and more and more important and influential in the area of philosophy why did he go to la flesche what's about la flesche well of course la flesche is where descartes had had studied so it had that connotation humors throughout his life very worried about money and one reason he went to France so he says was because it was cheaper to live in France he didn't have much of an income he was the second son the family had a small allowance but and to make it go as far as possible he moved to France and first Erastus champagne-y and then to la flesche knowledge ooh we don't really know exactly why he went there the wood of course has been a library there was a Jesuit institution in la flesche so there would have been a library there there would have been Jesuit priests to talk to and we know he had at least one conversation with Jesuit priest and presumably more than that but I think he would have been as we've been saying more or less on his own most of the time is it possible for you to encapsulate what the overall purpose of this first book was a treatise of human nature well as the title suggests it was meant to be an account of all human nature of what human beings alike I think we can think of it as divided into two parts as it were he thought he published one part of it first and then there were going to be other parts later in the first part his two books one on the reason and one on the passions so we begin with an account of the key constituents of human nature reason and passion and how they relate to each other and that was meant to be a platform for moving on to and analyzing morals criticism or we might now call aesthetics or taste and politics he didn't finish perhaps didn't even start the books on politics and criticism but he did write a book on morality which was published a year later so we begin with an account of reason and passion their nature how they relate to each other and then we move on to aspects of human nature that are they kind of founded on on reason and passion and in relation did he have a purpose is there a stated purpose I will prove this to you that you are not realized before his purpose is to tell us what human nature is like and of course the implication there is that uh you know those who'd gone before him hadn't got to the truth about about human nature his overall purpose was surely to present a very provocative thesis about how reason and passion relate to each other so the traditional philosophical view is that human beings are essentially rational and that our lives are essentially a matter of governing the passions through the operation of reason whether it be Plato Aristotle or the Stoics this is the this is the picture of human nature that dominates and the task of philosophy is to tell us how reason should dominate the passions on humans view the passions are in the driving seat reason is subservient to them book one of the treatise is a demonstration of how reason not to use his own language almost destroys itself at its own hands it turns out to be not what we thought it was and it turns out that the passions are essential to who we are the passions are the major determinants of human life when reason ends up having quite a subservient role to them I hope we come back tonight Helen baby he's often described as an empiricist something he read about in knock and seems have embraced and for the rest of his life is immediately after his read can you tell us what that word meant to him yeah so empiricism is set against rationalism and those philosophical positions are positions to do with what the sources of our knowledge and our thoughts are and how it is that we can come to know about the world and how it is that we can get to actually even think about the world so for the rationalist our knowledge of the world is something that can at least in some cases be acquired just by thinking about it so just by sitting down and thinking you can come to know things about the world around you whereas for the empiricists any knowledge that we might have about the external world has to come through the evidence of our senses it has to come through experience so you might think imagine someone kind of somehow growing up in a cave and never stepping outside the cave for the rationalists that person could in principle if they're kind of clever enough and think hard enough come to know things about the world outside the cave for example to pick up on the religious theme they might be able to come to know that God exists just by reasoning and thinking whereas for an empiricist if you're brought up in a cave and you never go outside you're never going to know anything about what happens outside the cave because any claim you might have to know something has to come you have to have evidence for it and of course if all the evidence you've got is what's inside the cave you can't have any evidence about what's outside the cave so the denying innate knowledge yeah so um not just innate knowledge but also innate ideas so the second part of the debate is to do with how it is we get to even think things about the world and in that time philosophers thought the components of thought it's being ideas which you might think of as kind of concepts so you know when you think about a tree you have the idea of the tree before your mind now where do ideas come from rationalists thought that some of our ideas our innate we're just born with them the idea of God is an example that a rationalist thought that the idea of God was just kind of imprinted there at birth whereas empiricists again thought that our ideas had to come through experience so you only get to be able to think about putting a bit simplistically but you only get to think about trees because you've had the experience of trees so again when you think of the cave as it turns out for the empiricists the person that's been brought up in the cave not only can't know anything about what's outside the cave but actually they probably can't even think anything about what's outside the cave they can't think about trees because they lack the idea of a tree so someone who kind of as it were might use the word tree in sentences might thereby actually not be saying anything at all because there's no idea that attaches to the word so the source of all of our ideas has to come from experience first of all how radical was this and what did it mean how did it as it were feed into the philosophy at the time in James's as alluded to that but if you could develop that a bit and he identifies two different sources of knowledge as I understand it could you just develop that a little place yep so um Hume thinks it's maybe easiest to set this up thinking about the inquiry which is the later work rather than the treatise who makes a distinction between matters of fact and relations of ideas matters of fact basically a facts about the world facts about whether God there is a truth that facts about trees facts about the existence and nature of God and so on Hume is on the empiricist side of the fence and so he thinks that any alleged knowledge of God or trees or whatever has to come through experience and in fact he thinks that we can't really have knowledge of the external world we can never be certain of any fact about the external world whether it's a claim about God or a claim about trees or whatever so in a sense experience isn't really a source of knowledge it's a source of belief and those beliefs might or might not be reasonable or justified to a certain extent but it's not really knowledge and on the other hand we have relations of ideas so in human things we can have certain knowledge there so you can know that five plus seven is twelve you can know that a triangle has to have three sides can you know it if you haven't experienced it you have to have the experience it must be a seven equals twelve unless you've seen it and counted up the five matches and the seven matches and canid again and it's twelve matches right can you have a concept of twelve without having experience twelve yep so you can only reason concerning ideas once you've got the ideas themselves so you have to have acquired the idea of five and the idea of 12 and again because humans an empiricist those are not going to be innate ideas you have to have had some experience of I don't know counting things in order to have the ideas but once you've got the ideas you can see just from kind of intuition that those ideas go together in a certain kind of but after the initial imperium P Racal move that you've made that you know that five matches are five and seven or seven and you can count to 12 yeah once you've got the idea of five and the idea of seven you can figure out without having to do the counting that five plus seven is twelve so Hume felt that those things were did count a certain knowledge but on the other hand they not if that's not really knowledge about the external world Hume says you know you could know that a triangle has three sides even if there were never any triangles in in nature so although he thinks that there is a place where we have certain knowledge we can't have certain knowledge of the external world Peter Milliken one of as I understand it one of the central concerns of the treaties is something known as induction that is very important to it can you tell us what he means by that yep Hume doesn't actually use the word induction but we now do when talking about him he uses various terms for it but it's oh yeah he talks about reasoning concerning matter of fact or probable inference or moral inference but essentially when we talk about induction in this context what we mean is any inference - some matter of fact which goes beyond anything that we perceive or remember can you give us an example yeah sure so um suppose I drop a pen I let go of my pen in midair I expect it to fall suppose I put a match to a piece of paper I expect the piece of paper to catch fire so I'm drawing up by making a prediction about something that I haven't yet perceived and the question is and Hugh races this in the treatise but he makes much more of it in his later works in the abstract of the treatise that was just a year later and in the inquiry and he basically argues that when we make any inference like that we're taking something for granted for which we can give no reason whatever so um the way the argument goes is like visits a very nice one imagine Adam newly created by God so Adam is a human being with perfect human faculties just created by God and he sees one billiard ball moving towards another and God says to him Adam what's going to happen when that billiard ball hits that one and humans claim is that Adam by simply looking at the billiard balls perceiving them and analyzing as much as he likes what he actually perceives of the balls is not going to be able to predict what happens and it follows that in order to know what's going to happen Adam has to have had experience ability billiard balls but how can experience make a difference well it can only make a difference if what we've experienced gives a guide to what we haven't experienced and that's taking for granted that the unobserved will resemble the observed and then Hume dismisses in turn the various ways by which one might try to establish that and concludes that it's just something we have to take for granted James Harris does this this moves on to the notion of causation which how does he explain that problem which has beguiled and because I'm told Big Al's philosopher still well so if we're doing induction what we're trying to figure out what are the effects of of the things that we observe what are the causes of things of you so once Adams seeing that one billiard ball knocks another billiard ball wrong when the next billiard ball comes you'll have an idea that it's same things going to happen again and if it happens repeatedly you think well that's the way things go and he'll come to believe that the first billiard ball is the cause of the movement of the second billiard ball yeah now the philosopher then wants to know well what exactly is it that we're talking about when we're talking about causes and Hume says well there are three components to the idea of a cause there's the the fact that the cause has to come in two has to come in too close relation has to bang into them to the effect as to be a spatial contiguity he thinks the cause has to operate or take place before the effect takes place so you've got events in a certain relation but he thinks of something else if he thinks that the cause is takes himself to be analyzing our ordinary idea here takes our ordinary our ordinary ideas the cause makes the effect happen for something in the cause that makes the event necessary so we have an idea of what Hume terms necessary connection between cause and effect and this is the crucial thing that distinguishes between coincidences and causal relations so the question then becomes well what exactly is our idea of necessary connection and that turns out to be a real puzzle as to say to return to the empiricist framework we have to ask for where do we get this idea of necessary connection from and human thinks was very unclear indeed where we get the idea from we don't get it crucially from just observing the world observing the world we just see one thing happen then another thing happened we see one billiard ball moving and the second billiard ball moving in reaction we don't see the causal interaction the necessary connection between the first billiard balls movement and the second so humans know it I'm slowing you down but people listening would say we do it is it it moves on that sort of seeing one thing following another thing it's not seeing the relation between these two things it's not such a distinction you make well that's exactly humans point in a way it turns out so he takes himself to be examining idea that we naturally have it turns out the decider that we naturally have the idea of a necessary connection it turns out to be one it turns out our idea of causation is in fact just taken from this the interaction between the balls and that we we feel that we have a sense of the 1 billion ball making the other happen we then and it has a complicated story about where we get that feeling from we then project that onto the world and take ourselves to have a sense of a necessary connection between those two things but it is just a projection and the raverus ways in which human can be interpreted upon is but perhaps he's saying there is in fact nothing there other than the relations of events the patterns of events and we just project all this talk of necessary connection and causal connection onto the world maybe there really is no such thing of and it takes this right through to the way human beings behave and well I hope come to that a little later meanwhile Helen Helen baby in the treaty's Hume distinguishes radically between reason and passions which we could call emotions and that was reason had been in the driving seat from Aristotle onwards and up he comes and says no it's subservient to passion and desire is the driver and reason mocks things up and put them in the right order I am so sorry for this encapsulation but I just want to move know what so can you tell us in your proper words what is on about yeah well actually what he says about the reason and the passions fits into the general project in the way that the talk about induction and causation does he's trying to reject the kind of rationalist worldview that's one of the things that he's trying to do and which sees the world as kind of a world of sort of logical connections that we can kind of engage with he wants to think of human beings as much more kind of mechanistic and sort of animalistic in a way than the rationalists due up so he thinks that the human mind is much more likely at the mind of another animal than kind of sort of feeble version of the mind of God when it comes to reason and the passions there's a view out there that moral properties whether something is good or bad are discerned by the Faculty of reason this is something again that you can kind of get out of the world just by thinking about it and Hume and so one odd thing about the properties of goodness and badness is that they seem to be kind of motivating you know if you if you think that something's good that's supposed to kind of automatically motivate you towards it and once you think that it's quite easy to set up a kind of conflict between reason and the passions so on the one hand I ought to be doing this thing and on the other hand you might have your kind of desires or aversions telling you that you don't really want to do that happens all the time I ought to be doing good things and I'm doing absolutely all understand that so so it there's a sort of an opposition set up there between on the one hand our passions like desire and aversion hope and fears and reason kind of motivating us to do to do good things and avoid bad things Hume thinks that pitch is just completely wrong he thinks that reason couldn't possibly discern anything that itself is kind of motivating in that way the only thing that could motivate you to do anything is a passion a desire or a hope or whatever all imagination uses that word as well doesn't it what does he mean by that he talks about desire and imagination doesn't it Peter the imagination for Hume is a very important faculty because the word imagine imagination is related to the word image that is so philosophers like Descartes thought that you could draw a distinction between two different kinds of ideas in the mind and one is a sort of ethereal godlike perfect vision of the kind we have a mathematical object so we can form these these ideas that have no imagistic part whereas other ideas that we have for example of things in the world are colored by our sensory perception of them so that they are as it were quasi sensory ideas now Hume wanted to say that all of our ideas are like that because all of our ideas come from experience so for him the imagination is inevitably the the main faculty in the mind that presents our ideas to us so he wants to analyze a very large amount of our thinking in terms of the imagination how does this relate to the notion of free will and I'd like to turn James this after you've talked about it harder what how does this this as it were dynamic between passion and reason relate to the notion that all a bit like to have that we've got free will okay the first point to make is that when Hume says that thought seems to make reason subordinate to the passions that's not actually as radical a thesis as it might seem he's simply saying that reason that his cognition tells us what's there in the world it tells us about facts but when we want to do something we have to have a motivation so that the two are working together and I think the the supporting interesting thing is that he believes that the passion I'm I'm sorry to give on about he lives that the passions emotions are the primary though that they're that well you that is tell me in the treatise he says that yes in his later works he's much more even-handed and he says that they both go together now with regard to free will but you just said I'm sorry I mean I don't know anything but you've just said that that there is a the driver is the passions and they do go together in the sense that reason then comes in but they don't go together in the sense at that there are equal primary importance or or other you tell me oh I would say they are really the passions tell you what you want the reason reason tells you how to get there so passions are setting the end of your action what what is it that your what end are you desiring to reach but then in order to get there you have to know what will cause what and that's where reason comes in so in order to know how to achieve your ends you know suppose I want to cook something that's very tasty and that's because I'm looking forward to having the nice taste I've got to use my reason that is my knowledge of cookery in order to get there but the primary cause of that is a desire to eat isn't it sure well but both are important mmm I mean it's it's like with a car you need an engine you also need a steering wheel James come in James house you want to check that or no which always and then there's something else about you well I mean this is equipment if you want to move on to free well this is course directly relevant the free world question yes I mean the kind of control over the will that was traditionally thought the human beings had was and was in large part of the control of the repo of Reason over desire and volition and so forth so this was an old question in philosophy exactly what kind of control we have over our desires Volition's and actions and Hume being an empiricist being the kind of philosopher that we've described so far thinks that we need to examine this question empirically as to say we look at experience and we try and decide what it means to call human beings free what it means to call their actions necessitated so we might think that various suppositions about human beings as being at just one part of creation being like animals as Helen was saying and so forth gives us good reason to think that human beings are in some sense necessitated in their actions what we then want to know as well over and above this apparent fact we're much like any other organism in the universe do we have some special property of freedom and if so what is that what is it what it mean when we attribute freedom to ourselves as we very naturally do in both ordinary practical life and moral and political life and so forth he also talks about us the human beings being in charge of their own morality and not it not being given from outside not being given from religion for instance yes what's his argument duh I mean the arguments I see is that he thinks we get it because we have an empathy we don't like people to suffer and therefore we try to stop them suffering and that makes us better people so soon sorry and the morality is is presented by Hume as a refinement as a development of of the passions so so when I said earlier that this this books one and two of the treat is the relationship reason passion is the foundation of the other aspects of human nature this is one of those respects so morality develops out of our emotional lives we have not we obviously have passions various kinds naturally above of all different kinds we learn to moderate them we respond to the passions of others we begin to try and think him partially and objectively about our desires about our sense of what should be done and what shouldn't be done and what other people should do and shouldn't do and gradually a moral code develops out of these sympathetic interactions between ourselves and other people Peter if the upshot of that is quite interesting he gets very close to a kind of sophisticated form of utilitarianism in the moral inquiry later work that he that he wrote he explains how if you look at all the various things that we count as virtues they are all those properties of people that are useful or agreeable to either themselves or others so essentially his view is his mature view is that morality is all about cultivating those kinds of properties and he explicitly says that reason plays a large part there we find out by using our reason which properties it is of human beings which are useful and agreeable and we just find that we do in fact generally count those as virtues and then he wants to say we should systematize that can I move because this takes us towards religion about which he wrote extensively and mostly wrote very critically of religion although it's it's a moot point whether he was writing against God or just against the arguments being put forward for God but this this morality because that takes us into it Helen I think you write in your in your notes Peter and if a person sees someone else suffering he or she in a sense feels the other person's pain and that gives you a basis well I think a lot of people enjoy seeing other people suffer pain I mean people who conquer countries want people to suffer pain we've got this world at the moment with people wanting people to suffer pain every day the week in in their millions so I don't know whether is not a better start of a morality than people say well we have an overall system a code of conduct even a religious code or something is that an argument it well I mean it that's a difficult issue for Hume I guess and he does he has to tell a story about how it is that we need to kind of cultivate our sentiments in such a way that we aim at things that are agreeable for other people as well as ourselves but the problem for Hume with the idea that we just sort of start down start out with a list of moral rules that come from God is of course that sort of fundamental problem that that's to take it for granted that you could that reason could kind of be a motivating force just by itself and he thinks that that can't be right so he thinks that it does all need to come back to the sentiments and the passions otherwise you don't get a story about moral motivation of course some people aren't motivated to do to to doing good and that's a problem but nonetheless the foundational morality still has to be based in sentiments and not religion for Hume so can I just stay with home promoter Peter so he's saying that religion doesn't deliver on this yeah written either religion no reason to ignore sort of pure thought deliver on this but is he suggesting an ad hoc empirical view that we just take it as it comes there's no there's no sort of local national family codes of conduct or anything I think you can derive thinks that you can derive my home time from it but the starting point has to be sentiment in our own motivation yeah in a way he's rather complacent he thinks that uncorrupted human nature will agree on all sorts of things and he wants to blame religion for corrupting morality so when you get people who want to see others suffer because they believe the wrong thing he's going to say this is a corruption of natural morality and that if you can get rid of all the false beliefs that drive it then will come will converge and then maybe is it does this bring us to a huge three of the nature of the self can you tell us about that and well how this connects with this idea of morality for instance um I'm not sure how it connects with the idea of morality except kind of tangentially through worrying about the existence of God again but the the kind of view that Hume really wants to set himself against is the idea or at least the uncritical acceptance of the idea that there's such a thing as a human soul thought of as a sort of immaterial non-physical substance something that you know persists even after the destruction of the body and because Humes an empiricist he thinks that if you're to think coherently about the nature of the human soul or existence after death or whatever you have to have an idea of the soul and so now the question is what's the source of that idea and given empiricism the source of that idea has to be experience so now Hume very famously asks well do we have experience of the soul such that we could then have an idea of this thing and his answer is no so he says you know look inward to the workings of your own mind what do you find do you find an experience of the soul and his answer is no what you find is a whole lot of fleeting impressions you know visual sensations tactile sensations various thoughts you might feel hungry or a bit cold or whatever what you don't find is some experience of the that's having all of those experiences so Hume thinks that we really don't or at least I mean this is very controversial but on one way of looking at what Kim thinks he thinks that we just don't have the idea of a soul so it's just so philosophers and theologians that take the notion of the soul for granted and then kind of build big speculative theories on that basis have gone wrong right at the beginning there supposing that they're talking meaningfully and in fact they're really just not at all James Harris when the treatise was published it was barely received and poorly received inadequately received very a Newser obviously very disappointed a young man and he later wrote almost disclaiming it and got on with the career as an essayist and Dennis in his day is a great historian most of us but how would happen to that treat is how did its ideas gradually grow and become more significant for people like you that philosophers took it up and it developed and influenced ideas well the first thing to say is that Hume didn't exactly disown the ideas in the treatise he with qualifications repackaged what he took to be the the main arguments in a series of later books giving his omitted something so he and so that said the ideas remain in play and I guess you attained an afterlife in the first instance because of the importance that other philosophers attached to refuting him so both in Scotland his Scottish contemporaries members of the Scottish enlightenment that you mentioned the beginning and members of the the German enlightenment most obviously Immanuel Kant devoted an enormous amount of intellectual energy to showing the Hume was wrong on precisely the topic that we've been talking about in his program induction causation to an extent personal identity morality and so forth so Hume remained in people's minds philosophically speaking attained philosophical reputation in the next hundred years or so because he was wrong and people needed to show that he was wrong in order to show that philosophy remained possible humors a skeptic he seemed to be suggesting that knowledge was impossible people like Kant and the Scots like Thomas Reid thought the knowledge definitely was possible and so they wanted to show how was possible by refuting Hume so that takes us to about roughly roughly 1900 after then people begin to think well hold on though humors right about lots of things and they begin to take up human a lot in a much more positive way and to base their own positive philosophies on human ideas Peter can you - Peter Milliken can you take that on and just drive through in his essays he was a brilliant essayist in his day was that he wrote other books of course and how he's coming to the 20th century and infused people in int influence people like you well I think part of the reason he's become so influential in the last hundred years has been to do with changes in the scientific world things like relativity quantum mechanics people have come to realize that the world is a much more peculiar place than they thought it was in Newton's time and there was Hume saying all along actually pure reason won't tell us what the world is like we've got to experiment and we might find out it's very different from our intuitive ideas I think also in contemporary philosophy most philosophers want to establish moral theories for example that an independent of religion even if there they are in fact religious they typically won't want to say that morality depends on God because they will want it to be a substantial claim that God is good so they want morality to mean something independently of God and I think Hugh because he was very much a standard bearer for trying to produce a theory of man and a theory of morals etc independently of God that's that's why he ended up pioneering a lot of the paths that modern philosophers are treading Helen yeah so just to pick up on that point one of the really novel and influential things that Hume did was to pull God out of the philosophical picture so philosophers nowadays you know some philosophers do philosophy of religion but you don't appeal to God in your theory of morality or your theory of how it is we can come to know about the external world i theory of what the world is like before hume that was a very that wasn't the standard way of going people would use god to all sorts of purposes so you have descartes in his meditations proving the existence of God from rational principles and then having proved the existence of God using that to establish that we can know things about the external world and so on and really what Hume did was kind of take God out of the picture and stop philosophy being something that we're kind of the existence of God has taken as your premise and where there's this anecdote of it on his deathbed he famously said you there was no Boswell was what about this great deathbed resolution not to acknowledge any religion at all which become a little talisman hasn't it for a theist it hasn't of course there's a long philosophical tradition of philosophers dying the philosophers death which say the philosopher faces death bravely without fear without needing religious consolation and Humes Humes death has taken its place and that in this long history so yes Hume famously wasn't a man of religion and much to the astonishment of people like James Boswell he maintained that conviction as to say his lack of conviction to the deathbed as to say he was able to face death calmly he was able to make jokes about it there was none of the fear and trembling that was supposed to overtake even the skeptic as it as he faced the yeah the big the final curtain but as I understand it finally Peter Milliken he his arguments against his arguments against the arguments for God were very powerful and consistent but the idea of there being a possibility of a God like Darwin he thought well there it is it's very difficult to interpret humans views on God because he deliberately refrains from being too explicit but I think that there are as it were coded messages in his text which suggest he really wasn't a believer thank you very much thank you Peter Milliken James Harris and Helen BB next week we'll be talking about the ming voyages in the early 15th century when the chinese sailed around the world thank you for listening thank you for listening to this radio for podcast if you've enjoyed it you might like to try others like it such as start the week or thinking aloud which are both available from the Radio 4 website

Channel: Philosophy Overdose

Views: 46,246

Rating: 4.8476954 out of 5

Keywords: Philosophy, David Hume, Hume, Empiricism, Rationalism, Skepticism, Epistemology, Metaphysics, Positivism, Foundationalism, Theory of Knowledge, Causation, Problem of Induction, Necessity, Laws of Nature, Personal Identity, Bundle Theory, The Self, History of Philosophy, Moral Philosophy, Concept, Philosophy of Mind, Causality, Human Nature, Atheism, Agnosticism, Religion, Theology, Naturalism, Free Will, Sentimentalism, Practical Reason

Id: Sai1s0ShldE

Length: 41min 59sec (2519 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 27 2015