Hume, David (1711–1776)

HUME, DAVID (1711–1776)

HUME, DAVID (1711–1776), Scottish philosopher and historian. Hume was born in the Scottish border country near Edinburgh into an old family of prosperous provincial lawyers. His father died when he was an infant. His mother never re-married and devoted herself to raising Hume and his brother and sister. Throughout his life Hume was deeply attached to his family and proud of its traditions. He studied at the University of Edinburgh until the age of fourteen or fifteen. For the next ten years he pursued a rigorous plan of independent study that surveyed the whole of humanistic learning and cost him a temporary nervous breakdown. From this period, Hume conceived two projects, the later fulfillment of which would complete his career as a writer—a philosophical science of human nature (comprehending all the sciences) and the writing of history. Hume is unique in being both a great philosopher and a great historian. He is commonly ranked, along with William Robertson, Edward Gibbon, and Voltaire as one of the four most important eighteenth-century historians.

By the age of twenty-six Hume had composed his philosophical masterpiece, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–1740). The work was not well received, and Hume quickly began recasting its ideas into the more readable form of essays. Most of these were published from 1741 to 1752 and were warmly received in Britain and America and translated into French, German, and Italian. The most important works from this period are Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary (1752), An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), and An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751). These essays contain important contributions to epistemology, aesthetics, economics, and moral and political philosophy. The Natural History of Religion (1757) and Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (published posthumously in 1779), arguably establish Hume as the founder of the philosophy of religion.

Around 1752 he turned to the second project set for himself in his youth, namely the writing of history. The History of England appeared in six volumes over the years 1754–1762. It achieved the status of a classic in Hume's lifetime, was viewed as the standard work on the subject for nearly a century, and was in print down to the end of the nineteenth century, passing through at least 160 posthumous editions. Hume had now achieved a European reputation as one of the great writers of his age, and he enjoyed friendships with such illustrious figures as Adam Smith, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, Denis Diderot, Jean d'Alembert, and Benjamin Franklin.

In 1983 The History of England was republished after having been out of print for nearly a century. During that period Hume had been narrowly thought of as a technical philosopher. The early skeptical and negative interpretation of The Treatise of Human Nature put forth by James Beattie, Thomas Reid, Immanuel Kant, and John Stuart Mill persisted far into the twentieth century. Hume's historical work was considered irrelevant to his philosophy and almost entirely forgotten. Hume, however, thought of the History as an integral part of his philosophical work. This can best be appreciated by considering his skepticism. The ancient Pyrrhonians taught that the main source of misery for highly cultivated people is the attempt to guide life by philosophical speculation. Hume denied that the disposition to philosophize could or should be purged, but he agreed with the Pyrrhonians that philosophical speculation can be a source of disorder in the soul. The first problem for Hume's science of human nature, then, was to distinguish what he called "true philosophy" from its corrupt and corrupting forms. Hume used skeptical tropes to make this distinction. His intention was neither to subvert (Beattie, Reid, Mill) nor to raise skeptical challenges for others to solve (Kant). His goal was to purge the philosophical intellect of its corrupt forms.

False philosophy seeks radical autonomy and imagines itself emancipated from the pre-reflective customs and prejudices of common life. True philosophy knows this to be a psychological and conceptual impossibility. True philosophy may still speculate about reality but only by critically passing through, and rendering more coherent, the inherited prejudices of common life. Hume went beyond the Pyrrhonians in teaching that false philosophy has a corrupting effect not only on the soul but on social and political order as well—and especially so under modern conditions where, for the first time in history, the disposition to philosophize was becoming a mass phenomenon. He narrated the tragedy of the English Civil War in the History as just such a corruption. His critique of philosophical rationalism in all its forms (in science, morals, politics, religion, and philosophy itself) is the one theme that unites his philosophical and historical work. And it establishes Hume as the first to work out a systematic critique of modern ideologies.

See also Alembert, Jean Le Rond d' ; Diderot, Denis ; Historiography ; Kant, Immanuel ; Philosophy ; Rousseau, Jean-Jacques ; Skepticism, Academic and Pyrrhonian ; Smith, Adam .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Sources

Hume, David. David Hume's Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals. Edited by L. A. Selby-Bigge. 3rd ed. revised, edited by P. H. Nidditch. Oxford, 1975.

——. Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary. Edited by Eugene F. Miller. Indianapolis, 1985.

——. Principal Writings on Religion, Including Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion and The Natural History of Religion. Edited by J. C. A. Gaskin. Oxford and New York, 1993.

——. A Treatise of Human Nature. Edited. by L. A. Selby-Bigge. 2nd ed. with text revised and variant readings by P. H. Nidditch. Oxford and New York, 1978.

Secondary Sources

Bongie, Laurence L. David Hume, Prophet of the Counter-Revolution. Indianapolis, 2000. Shows how important Hume's History was in shaping the ideological conflict in France shortly before, during, and after the French Revolution.

Forbes, Duncan. Hume's Philosophical Politics. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1975. Views Hume's History as an integral part of his political philosophy.

Livingston, Donald W. Hume's Philosophy of Common Life. Chicago, 1984. Argues against the reading of Hume as a radical empiricist; shows how his philosophical and historical writings are internally connected.

——. Philosophical Melancholy and Delirium: Hume's Pathology of Philosophy. Chicago, 1998. Fully explores Hume's distinction between true and false philosophy.

Norton, David Fate. David Hume: Common-Sense Moralist, Sceptical Metaphysician. Princeton, 1982.

Penelhum, Terence. Themes in Hume: The Self, the Will, and Religion. Oxford and New York, 2000.

Stewart, John B. Opinion and Reform in Hume's Political Philosophy. Princeton, 1992.

Donald W. Livingston