An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
Contents:
I continue to enjoy the access my Kindle gives me to great classics like this. This book is not the "best" book of philosophy.
Nor is it the "king" of philosophy books. It is, to say the least, the "god" of the books of philosophy. The issues discussed are only the most serious philosophical issues. The arguments are not merely compelling but also beautiful, appealing.
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And the spirit is that of the enlightenment at its most robust form. A word for philosophy lovers: The author may not convince everyone but challenges anyone that reads his philosophy. So you will be challenged, intrigued, motivated to question some or all of your convictions, or be persuaded to agree with the author. But more importantly, you will adore Hume.
Rene Descartes , "the father of modern philosophy," was a rationalist who attempted to attain certainty by discovering "first principles" on which he could overcome skeptical doubt and establish irrefutable truth. He claimed that one thing is absolutely certain: Cogito, ergo sum "I think, therefore I am".
From this solid rock on which to stand, he proceeded to claim that by reason alone he could prove the existence of God, the immortality of the soul, and the reality of an afterlife. Immanuel Kant was trained in the rationalist tradition, but when he read David Hume's work, the impact shattered his way of thinking. Taking a dim view of miracles, mysticism, and metaphysics, Hume skeptically asserted that empirical proofs of religion such as the existence of God, the immortality of the soul, and an afterlife are not possible.
In effect, he was saying to paraphrase Kant , "I have therefore found it necessary to deny knowledge [that is, reason and human understanding] in order to make room for lack of faith [that is, to make room for skepticism and unbelief]. If we take in our hand any volume: Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number?
Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and experience? Commit it then to the flames: For it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion. Inductive reasoning is done "after experience"; it is the scientific method forming hypotheses, performing experiments, and observing phenomena. The former process, "abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number" as in mathematics and geometry , does indeed produce certainty.
However, the latter process produces, at best, only probability albeit often a strong probability , based as it is on the assumption of "the uniformity of nature" that the universe will be the same in the future as it is in the present. Therefore, Hume's "empiricism" is qualified by its open-ended character as scientific hypotheses are subject to revision as new evidence is produced. Hume's "skepticism" is also qualified. Although Hume admits that, technically, Pyrrhonism excessive skepticism cannot be philosophically disproven, Hume recommends the practicality of a "mitigated" or moderate skepticism that acknowledges the importance of common sense and common life.
Hume's Enquiry is, one might quip, not an easy work for our "human understanding" to grasp. This is especially true of his erudite, but daunting, explications of cause and effect.
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding is a book by the Scottish empiricist philosopher David Hume, published in English in It was a revision of an. From a general summary to chapter summaries to explanations of famous quotes , the SparkNotes An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding Study Guide.
Another challenging chapter deals with the ages-old dispute between determinism and free will. His controversial and provocative essay, "Of Miracles," caused howls of protest from those accusing him of atheism, and resulted in his forever being excluded from a professional academic career. It contains a substantial page introduction by the editor Tom L.
Beauchamp, Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University , who explains the intellectual background to the work and surveys its main themes. This edition also includes detailed explanatory notes on the text, annotations, a glossary of terms, a full list of references, and a section of supplementary readings. See all 61 reviews.
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Amazon Drive Cloud storage from Amazon. Alexa Actionable Analytics for the Web. AmazonGlobal Ship Orders Internationally. Amazon Inspire Digital Educational Resources. Amazon Rapids Fun stories for kids on the go. Amazon Restaurants Food delivery from local restaurants. Unlike his predecessors, Berkeley and Locke, Hume rejects the idea that volitions or impulses of the will may be inferred to necessarily connect to the actions they produce by way of some sense of the power of the will.
He reasons that, 1. Having dispensed with these alternative explanations, he identifies the source of our knowledge of necessary connections as arising out of observation of constant conjunction of certain impressions across many instances.
In this way, people know of necessity through rigorous custom or habit, and not from any immediate knowledge of the powers of the will. Here Hume tackles the problem of how liberty may be reconciled with metaphysical necessity otherwise known as a compatibilist formulation of free will. Hume believes that all disputes on the subject have been merely verbal arguments—that is to say, arguments which are based on a lack of prior agreement on definitions.
He first shows that it is clear that most events are deterministic, but human actions are more controversial. However, he thinks that these too occur out of necessity since an outside observer can see the same regularity that he would in a purely physical system. To show the compatibility of necessity and liberty, Hume defines liberty as the ability to act on the basis of one's will e. He then shows quite briefly how determinism and free will are compatible notions, and have no bad consequences on ethics or moral life.
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Hume insists that the conclusions of the Enquiry will be very powerful if they can be shown to apply to animals and not just humans. He believed that animals were able to infer the relation between cause and effect in the same way that humans do: Hume concludes that there is an innate faculty of instincts which both beasts and humans share, namely, the ability to reason experimentally through custom.
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
Nevertheless, he admits, humans and animals differ in mental faculties in a number of ways, including: The next topic which Hume strives to give treatment is that of the reliability of human testimony, and of the role that testimony plays a part in epistemology. This was not an idle concern for Hume. Depending on its outcome, the entire treatment would give the epistemologist a degree of certitude in the treatment of miracles.
True to his empirical thesis, Hume tells the reader that, though testimony does have some force, it is never quite as powerful as the direct evidence of the senses. That said, he provides some reasons why we may have a basis for trust in the testimony of persons: Needless to say, these reasons are only to be trusted to the extent that they conform to experience. And there are a number of reasons to be skeptical of human testimony, also based on experience. If a testimonies conflict one another, b there are a small number of witnesses, c the speaker has no integrity, d the speaker is overly hesitant or bold, or e the speaker is known to have motives for lying, then the epistemologist has reason to be skeptical of the speaker's claims.
There is one final criterion that Hume thinks gives us warrant to doubt any given testimony, and that is f if the propositions being communicated are miraculous. Hume understands a miracle to be any event which contradicts the laws of nature. He argues that the laws of nature have an overwhelming body of evidence behind them, and are so well demonstrated to everyone's experience, that any deviation from those laws necessarily flies in the face of all evidence.
Moreover, he stresses that talk of the miraculous has no surface validity, for four reasons. First, he explains that in all of history there has never been a miracle which was attested to by a wide body of disinterested experts. Second, he notes that human beings delight in a sense of wonder, and this provides a villain with an opportunity to manipulate others. Third, he thinks that those who hold onto the miraculous have tended towards barbarism. Finally, since testimonies tend to conflict with one another when it comes to the miraculous—that is, one man's religious miracle may be contradicted by another man's miracle—any testimony relating to the fantastic is self-denunciating.
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Still, Hume takes care to warn that historians are generally to be trusted with confidence, so long as their reports on facts are extensive and uniform. However, he seems to suggest that historians are as fallible at interpreting the facts as the rest of humanity. Thus, if every historian were to claim that there was a solar eclipse in the year , then though we might at first naively regard that as in violation of natural laws, we'd come to accept it as a fact. But if every historian were to assert that Queen Elizabeth was observed walking around happy and healthy after her funeral, and then interpreted that to mean that they had risen from the dead, then we'd have reason to appeal to natural laws in order to dispute their interpretation.
Hume continues his application of epistemology to theology by an extended discussion on heaven and hell. The brunt of this chapter allegedly narrates the opinions, not of Hume, but of one of Hume's anonymous friends, who again presents them in an imagined speech by the philosopher Epicurus. His friend argues that, though it is possible to trace a cause from an effect , it is not possible to infer unseen effects from a cause thus traced. The friend insists, then, that even though we might postulate that there is a first cause behind all things—God—we can't infer anything about the afterlife, because we don't know anything of the afterlife from experience, and we can't infer it from the existence of God.
Hume offers his friend an objection: His friend concurs, but indicates that there is a relevant disanalogy that we can't pretend to know the contents of the mind of God, while we can know the designs of other humans.
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Hume seems essentially persuaded by his friend's reasoning. The first section of the last chapter is well organized as an outline of various skeptical arguments. The treatment includes the arguments of atheism, Cartesian skepticism, "light" skepticism, and rationalist critiques of empiricism. Hume shows that even light skepticism leads to crushing doubts about the world which - while they ultimately are philosophically justifiable - may only be combated through the non-philosophical adherence to custom or habit.
He ends the section with his own reservations towards Cartesian and Lockean epistemologies. He concludes the volume by setting out the limits of knowledge once and for all. If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number?
Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? Commit it then to the flames: The criteria Hume lists in his examination of the validity of human testimony are roughly upheld in modern social psychology, under the rubric of the communication-persuasion paradigm. The "custom" view of learning can in many ways be likened to associationist psychology. This point of view has been subject to severe criticism in the research of the 20th century. Still, testing on the subject has been somewhat divided.
Testing on certain animals like cats have concluded that they do not possess any faculty which allow their minds to grasp an insight into cause and effect. However, it has been shown that some animals, like chimpanzees, were able to generate creative plans of action to achieve their goals, and thus would seem to have a causal insight which transcends mere custom.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Philosophical Essays Concerning Human Understanding 1 ed. Retrieved 28 June The mentality of apes.