David Hume
David Hume - A Famous Scottish Philosopher
David Hume (1711 - 1776) Philosopher and historian. Born in Edinburgh, he studied but did not graduate at Edinburgh University. He took up law, but suffered from bouts of depression, and tried his hand instead at commerce as a counting-house clerk in Bristol.
Destined to become a leading figure in the British empiristic tradition of philosophy, David Hume was from an early age attracted by the study of philosophy and history. In 1734 he went to La Fleche in Anjou, France, staying there until 1737. During this period he wrote his most important work, A Treatise of Human Nature, published (anonymously in London)after he returned to Scotland to stay on the family estate at Ninewells in Berwickshire.
Hume was bitterly disappointed at the initial reception of the Treatise but received some acclaim for his Essays, Moral and Political in 1742. Having failed to gain the chair of moral philosophy at Edinburgh in 1744, on account of charges of atheism, he spent the next 7 years in various employment in England and abroad. His Enquiry concerning Human Understanding dated originally 1748. In 1751 he applied for the chair of logic at Glasgow (1751), previously held by Adam Smith, but again was rejected.
In 1745 Hume became tutor to an insane nobleman, the Marquis of Annandale and a year later he became secretary to General St Clair on an expedition to France and also on secret missions to Vienna and Turin in 1748. In that year he published a simplified version of the Treatise entitled Enquiry concerning Human Understanding.
In 1752 he became Keeper of the Addvocates' library at Edinburgh, and held the post until 1763. During this time and achieved real fame and recognition with his Political Discourses (1752) and his five volume History of England was published from 1754-1762. From 1763 to 1765 he acted as secretary to the ambassador in Paris, and was received with great enthusiasm by the French court and literary society. He returned to London in 1766 and became Under-Secretary of State for the Northern Department in 1767. He finally returned to Scotland in 1768 to settle in Edinburgh where he died.
Hume held that all knowledge is grounded in sense experience, either directly and vividly in the form of impressions, or indirectly and more faintly as ideas. There are no innate ideas, and a word has meaning only in so far as it conjures up something that derives from an impression. He held that whatever has no root in experience is empty, and thus summarily dismissed metaphysics. The content of experience must therefore be either a relation of ideas, which can be studied formally as logical connections between meanings; or it is a matter of fact, which is simply so and has no logical links with other mattersof fact. Demonstrative knowledge is possible only in the former case, and then only in mathematics, which deals with ideas of quantity; whereas in the field of matters of fact proof is impossible. As for causality, Hume held that there is nothing in the way of impressions that can account for it. Therefore the causal idea arises from the habits of association in the perceiving mind; having repeatedly experienced B after A closely connected in space and time, the mind forms the habit of regarding the sequence as necessary.
What is it thathas these experiences? Hume on the one hand denied there is an ego, since no such idea can be evolved; there are only bundles of impressions. On the other hand, he did speak of the mind, and ultimately he left the question open. Hume's skepticism thus denied that impressions and ideas one can infer a persisting external world, but he was not concerned to undermine our beliefs in ordinary matters of fact, e.g. that fire burns. His theory thus meant to show that the scope of reason is more restricted than is often thought.
In his ethical theory likewise, David Hume insisted on the importance of habits and feelings, rather than on rational obedience to general principles. Moral behaviour springs from men's natural feelings of good will towards each other; those qualities on the whole are approved that make for happiness both for the owner of them and for his fellow human beings.
'Beauty in things exists in the mind which contemplates them'
of Tragedy
David Hume (1711 - 1776)
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