David Hume

Hume was born in Edinburgh in 1711 to a family that was long

established but far from rich. He was the second son, and it
was clear early on that he would need to find a job eventually.
But nothing seemed to suit him. He tried law (the vocation of
his father and older brother), but soon decided that it was “a
laborious profession” requiring “the drudgery of a whole life.”
He was considered for academic posts at the University of
Edinburgh and the University of Glasgow, but he didn’t land
either job
The 18th-century writer David Hume is one of the
world’s great philosophical voices because he hit upon
a key fact about human nature: that we are more
influenced by our feelings than by reason. This is, at
one level, possibly a great insult to our self-image, but
Hume thought that if we could learn to deal well with
this surprising fact, we could be (both individually and
collectively) a great deal calmer and happier than if
we denied it.
David Hume’s way of thinking:
Innate knowledge doesn’t exist
 Human beings aren’t born with innate thought patterns and knowledge
that dictate how they should interpret reality. For the empirical current,
everything we know about reality comes from our experiences.
Experiences can be internal or external, meaning they can come from
one’s own reflection and knowledge of our inner life or, on the contrary,
from our sensations and perceptions of the world.
 For empiricists, nothing precedes experience. The mind is like a blank
canvas we illustrate the knowledge we acquire over time on. David
Hume believed in these ideas. Nonetheless, they differed in the limits of
experience. On the other hand, Hume pointed out that knowledge is
reduced to our perceptions, taking into account the very nature of
experience.
There are two types of knowledge
 According to Hume, there are two types of knowledge: impressions and
ideas.
 Impressions are the thoughts that arise as a result of experiencing things
through the senses.
 Ideas are abstract and ambiguous since they don’t arise from physical
sensations.
Everything comes from perception. Impressions are the immediate
knowledge we get from perception. Therefore, ideas are derived from
impressions, which means they’re a lot more complex. Hume also talked
about the concept of imagination, the human ability to modify and produce
ideas.
“Beauty is no quality in things themselves: it exists merely in the mind which
contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty.”
–David Hume
Themes, Arguments, and Ideas The Uncertainty of Causation
• Hume observes that while we may perceive two events that seem to
occur in conjunction, there is no way for us to know the nature of their
connection. Based on this observation,
• Hume argues against the very concept of causation, or cause and effect.
We often assume that one thing causes another, but it is just as possible
that one thing does not cause the other.
• that causation is a habit of association, a belief that is unfounded and
meaningless. Still, he notes that when we repeatedly observe one event
following another, our assumption that we are witnessing cause and effect
seems logical to us.
• Hume holds that we have an instinctive belief in causality, rooted in our
own biological habits, and that we can neither prove nor discount this
belief.
The Problem of Induction
 Induction is the practice of drawing general conclusions based on particular
experiences. Essentially, the principle of induction teaches us that we can predict the
future based on what has happened in the past, which we cannot.
 Hume argues that in the absence of real knowledge of the nature of the connection
between events, we cannot adequately justify inductive assumptions.
 The first justification is functional: It is only logical that the future must resemble
the past. Hume pointed out that we can just as easily imagine a world of chaos, so
logic cannot guarantee our inductions.
 The second justification is that we can assume that something will continue to happen
because it has always happened before. To Hume, this kind of reasoning is
circular and lacks a foundation in reason.
 Hume left the discussion with the opinion that we have an instinctual belief in
induction, rooted in our own biological habits, that we cannot shake and yet cannot
prove.
 Hume allows that we can still use induction, like causation, to function on a daily basis
as long as we recognize the limitations of our knowledge.
Religious Morality Vs. Moral Utility
 Hume proposes the idea that moral principles are rooted in their utility, or
usefulness, rather than in God’s will.
 Hume was a moral sentimentalist who believed that moral principles
cannot be intellectually justified as scientific solutions to social problems.
 Hume argues that some principles simply appeal to us and others do
not. Moral principles appeal to us because they promote our interests
and those of our fellow human beings, with whom we naturally
sympathize. In other words, humans are biologically inclined to approve
and support whatever helps society, since we all live in a community and
stand to benefit.
 Hume used this simple but controversial insight to explain how we
evaluate a wide array of phenomena, from social institutions and
government policies to character traits and individual behavior.
The Division of Reason and Morality
 Hume denies that reason plays a determining role in motivating or discouraging
behavior. Instead, he believes that the determining factor in human behavior is passion.
As proof, he asks us to evaluate human actions according to the criterion of
“instrumentalism”—that is, whether an action serves the agent’s purpose. Generally, we
see that they do not and that human beings tend to act out of some other motivation
than their best interest.
 Based on these arguments, Hume concludes that reason alone cannot motivate anyone
to act. Rather, reason helps us arrive at judgments, but our own desires motivate us to
act on or ignore those judgments. Therefore, reason does not form the basis of
morality—it plays the role of an advisor rather than that of a decision-maker. Likewise,
immorality is immoral not because it violates reason but because it is displeasing to us.
 This argument angered English clergy and other religious philosophers who believed
that God gave humans reason to use as a tool to discover and understand moral
principles. By removing reason from its throne, Hume denied God’s role as the source
of morality.
The Bundle Theory of the Self
• Hume asks us to consider what impression gives us our concept of self. We tend to
think of ourselves as selves—stable entities that exist over time. But no matter how
closely we examine our own experiences, we never observe anything beyond a series
of transient feelings, sensations, and impressions.
• We cannot observe ourselves, or what we are, in a unified way. There is no impression
of the “self” that ties our particular impressions together. In other words, we can never
be directly aware of ourselves, only of what we are experiencing at any given
moment. Although the relations between our ideas, feelings, and so on, may be
traced through time by memory, there is no real evidence of any core that
connects them. This argument also applies to the concept of the soul.
• Hume suggests that the self is just a bundle of perceptions, like links in a chain. To
look for a unifying self beyond those perceptions is like looking for a chain apart from
the links that constitute it.
• Hume argues that our concept of the self is a result of our natural habit of attributing
unified existence to any collection of associated parts.
Hume’s deal with the Self
Emotion
Physical sensation
Any discernable perception
To Hume, the self is “that to which our several impressions
and ideas are supposed to have a reference. If any impression
gives rise to the idea of self, that impression must continue
invariably the same through the whole course of our lives,
since self is supposed to exist after that manner. But there is
no impression constant and invariable.
David Hume
The book of life
1. Feelings and Reason
• Hume’s philosophy is built around a single powerful observation: that the key thing we
need to get right in life is feeling rather than rationality. Hume insisted that, whatever
we may aim for, ‘reason is the slave of passion.’ We are more motivated by our
feelings than by any of the comparatively feeble results of analysis and logic. Reason
helps a little, but the decisive factors are bound up with our emotional lives – with our
passions as Hume calls them.
• Hume was deeply attentive to the curious way that we very often reason from, rather
than to, our convictions. We find an idea nice or threatening and on that basis alone
declare it true or false. Reason only comes in later to support the original attitude.
Hume so fervently believed in the role and significance of public intellectuals:
• Hume’s insight is that if you want to change people’s beliefs, reasoning with them like
a normal philosophy professor cannot be the most effective strategy, he is pointing out
that we have to try to adjust sentiments by sympathy, reassurance, good example,
encouragement and what he called Art – and only later, for a few determined souls, try
to make the case on the basis of facts and logic.
2. Religion
A key place where Hume made use of the idea of the priority of feeling over reason was
in connection with religion.
 Hume didn’t think it was ‘rational’ to believe in God, that is, he didn’t think there were
compelling logical arguments in favour of the existence of a deity. He himself seems to
have floated between mild agnosticism – there might be a God, I’m not sure – and mild
Theism – There is a God, but it doesn’t make much difference to me that there is. But
the idea of a vindictive God – ready to punish people in an afterlife for not believing in
him in this one – he considered a cruel superstition.
 Hume’s central point is that religious belief isn’t the product of reason. So arguing for
or against it on the basis of facts doesn’t touch the core issue. To try to persuade
someone to believe or not believe with well honed arguments seemed particularly daft
to Hume.
 We should not treat those who disagree with us over religion as rational people who
have made an error of reasoning but rather as passionate, emotion-driven creatures
who should be left in peace so long as they do likewise. Trying to have a rational
argument over religion was, for Hume, the height of folly and arrogance
3. Common Sense
 Hume was what is technically known as a sceptic, someone committed to doubting a
lot of the common-sense ideas of the day. One of the things he doubted was the
concept of what is technically called personal identity – the idea that we have that we
can understand ourselves and have a more or less graspable enduring identity that
runs through life. Hume pointed out that there is no such thing as a core self: “When I
enter most intimately into what I call myself,” he famously explained, “I always
stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or
hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception,
and never can observe anything but the perception.”
 Hume concluded that we aren’t really the neat definable people reason tells us that
we are and that we seem to be when we look at ourselves in the mirror or casually
use the grand misleading word I, we are “nothing but a bundle or collection of
different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and
are in a perpetual flux and movement.” Hume was very happy for us to hold onto
most of our common sense beliefs – because they are what help us to make our way
in the world.
4. Ethics
• Hume took a great interest in the traditional philosophical topic of ethics,
the conundrum of how humans can be good. He argued that morality
isn’t about having moral ideas, it’s about having been trained, from an
early age, in the art of decency through the emotions. Being good means
getting into good habits of feeling.
• Hume was a great advocate of qualities like wit, good manners and
sympathy because these are the things that make people nice to be
around outside of any rational plan to be ‘good’.
• Being able to follow a complex argument or deduce trends from data
doesn’t make you sensitive to the suffering of others or skilled at keeping
you temper. All these qualities are – instead – the work of our feelings.
We have to influence their feelings; we have to encourage benevolence,
gentleness, pity and shame through seduction of the passionate side of
our nature, without delivering dry logical lectures.
Blessed be God forever and
mabuhay!

Thank you everyone