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A-Z of Thought: Hume
Kate Kirkpatrick
David Hume (1711–1776) was one of the most important philosophers to write in English. Born in Scotland, he was a precocious reader and attended Edinburgh University at the tender age of 12. His contemporaries knew him not only as a philosopher but also as a historian, essayist, and economist. However, as an atheist Hume was never allowed to hold an academic post, and at one stage he was charged with heresy. (Clerical friends got him off, since as an atheist he was not subject to the Church’s jurisdiction). Despite such challenges Hume kept excellent company, numbering Benjamin Franklin and Jean-Jacques Rousseau among his friends.
Hume was a sceptic, employing doubt to put knowledge, morality, and religion to the test. In an ironic turn of the Enlightenment, his rigorous scepticism deposed reason from the throne on which Descartes, the father or rationalism, had placed it. Like Descartes, Hume accepted that knowledge needs some foundation. However, when he considered our most basic beliefs – that we exist, that other things exist outside of us, that we can perceive these things, and so on – Hume realized that experience cannot provide this foundation. For, as Descartes argued, it is conceivable that we are only ever dreaming. And, as Hume’s contemporary George Berkeley objected, it is possible that the ‘outside world’ exists only in our own minds. So if our ‘experience’ of these basic matters is not beyond doubt, can we trust that our faculties of ‘reason’ actually are?
Hume concluded that reason – as scientific method and as rationality more broadly conceived – had exceeded its reach. As an atheist he was predisposed towards naturalism, believing that whatever reason could not do, nature would accomplish anyway. If reason fails to provide us with unshakeable knowledge, nature nevertheless bequeaths us with what we need to make our way in the world. If reason fails to guarantee morals, human nature gives us adequate sentiments to behave well towards one another. If reason cannot demonstrate that there is a God – well, so much the worse for religion. If learned religious tomes cannot provide sound arguments or evidence, Hume said, ‘commit them to the flames’.
Hume rejected metaphysics in favour of empirical, descriptive inquiry, paving the way for science as we now know it. Hume’s legacy in western thought has been extensive and indelible. Such luminaries as Adam Smith, Kant, Bentham, Darwin, and Huxley cite Hume as one of their most profound influences. More recently, Richard Dawkins praises Hume for making atheism ‘logically tenable’, and takes his ideas to the extreme. Tenable, perhaps. But a foregone conclusion? Kate Kirkpatrick
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