David Hume

Early Life and Education

David Hume was born on April 26, 1711 (old style), in Edinburgh, Scotland, to a minor gentry family. His father died when he was two. He entered the University of Edinburgh at the remarkably young age of twelve (not unusual at the time) but left without a degree, having discovered that his true passion was philosophy and literature rather than law, which his family intended for him.

Between the ages of eighteen and twenty-three, Hume underwent an intense period of reading and reflection that resulted in a kind of intellectual crisis — a combination of philosophical excitement and physical exhaustion. In 1734, he moved to France, settling at La Flèche in Anjou (the same Jesuit college where Descartes had studied over a century earlier). There, in a period of extraordinary productivity, he composed his first and most ambitious work.

A Treatise of Human Nature

Hume's Treatise of Human Nature (1739–1740), subtitled 'An Attempt to introduce the experimental Method of Reasoning into Moral Subjects,' was completed before he was thirty. It is one of the most important and original philosophical works ever written — and it was, by Hume's own account, a commercial failure. 'It fell dead-born from the press,' he wrote, 'without reaching such distinction as even to excite a murmur among the zealots.'

The Treatise's three books — 'Of the Understanding,' 'Of the Passions,' and 'Of Morals' — developed a comprehensive naturalistic philosophy. Hume pushed Locke's and Berkeley's empiricism to its logical conclusion: if all knowledge derives from experience, then many of our most fundamental beliefs — in causation, the external world, the self — cannot be rationally justified. They rest instead on natural instinct and habit.

The Problem of Causation

Hume's analysis of causation is perhaps the single most consequential argument in modern philosophy. We observe that event A is regularly followed by event B, and we infer that A causes B. But what justifies this inference? Not reason — for there is no logical contradiction in supposing that the future might differ from the past. Not experience — for that would be circular (using past experience to justify reliance on experience). Causal reasoning rests on custom and habit: the mind's natural tendency to expect the future to resemble the past. This 'problem of induction' remains unsolved.

Edinburgh and Later Works

Stung by the Treatise's failure, Hume recast his philosophy in more accessible form. The Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748) and the Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751) refined and sharpened the arguments of the Treatise. Hume considered the second Enquiry 'of all my writings, historical, philosophical, or literary, incomparably the best.'

The Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding contains Hume's famous argument against miracles (Section X): no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle unless its falsehood would be more miraculous than the event it describes. It also presents the 'missing shade of blue' puzzle and the clearest statement of his fork: all genuine knowledge is either 'relations of ideas' (mathematics and logic) or 'matters of fact' (empirical claims). Everything else is 'sophistry and illusion.'

The Historian

From 1754 to 1762, Hume published his monumental History of England (six volumes), which became the standard reference for a century and made him far more famous in his own time than his philosophy did. He served as librarian to the Edinburgh Faculty of Advocates, secretary to the British embassy in Paris (where he was lionized by the French philosophes), and Under-Secretary of State.

Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion

Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, composed over many years and withheld from publication during his lifetime, is widely regarded as the greatest work in the philosophy of religion in the English language. Through a three-way conversation between Cleanthes (the design argument advocate), Demea (the orthodox metaphysical theologian), and Philo (the skeptic, generally taken to represent Hume's own views), the Dialogues systematically dismantle the arguments for God's existence from design, first cause, and necessity.

Death

Hume died on August 25, 1776, in Edinburgh, of what was probably abdominal cancer, facing death with composure and good humor. His friend Adam Smith described him as 'approaching as nearly to the idea of a perfectly wise and virtuous man as perhaps the nature of human frailty will permit.' His calm, atheistic death scandalized pious contemporaries.

Legacy

Hume's influence on philosophy is incalculable. His problem of induction, his analysis of causation, his is-ought distinction (the logical gap between descriptive and normative claims), and his sentimentalist moral theory remain live topics in contemporary philosophy. Kant's critical philosophy was formulated as a response to Hume. Logical positivism, pragmatism, and contemporary naturalism all trace their roots to Hume's empiricism.