An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding

by David Hume

Publisher:

Open Court

, 1921

Overview

In An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, Hume presents the main arguments in A Treatise of Human Nature in a shorter, more polemical form. He makes the same distinction between ideas and impressions. He argues that ideas are made up of impressions through resemblance, contiguity, and cause and effect. Hume builds the same case that meaningful terms must be built on ideas that are built on impressions. In the light of the epistemology he puts forward, Hume examines questions of free will, the reason of animals, and miracles.

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Key Features

• Presents the arguments in A Treatise of Human Nature in condensed form
• Discusses a wide range of topics, including impressions, free will, and miracles

Contents

Top Highlights

“‘That no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous, than the fact, which it endeavours to establish; and even in that case there is a mutual destruction of arguments, and the superior only gives us an assurance suitable to that degree of force, which remains, after deducting the inferior.’” (Page 121)

“A wise man, therefore, proportions his belief to the evidence. In such conclusions as are founded on an infallible experience, he expects the event with the last degree of assurance, and regards his past experience as a full proof of the future existence of that event. In other cases, he proceeds with more caution: He weighs the opposite experiments: He considers which side is supported by the greater number of experiments: to that side he inclines, with doubt and hesitation; and when at last he fixes his judgement, the evidence exceeds not what we properly call probability.” (Page 116)

“A miracle is a violation of the laws of nature; and as a firm and unalterable experience has established these laws, the proof against a miracle, from the very nature of the fact, is as entire as any argument from experience can possibly be imagined. Why is it more than probable, that all men must die; that lead cannot, of itself, remain suspended in the air; that fire consumes wood, and is extinguished by water; unless it be, that these events are found agreeable to the laws of nature, and there is required a violation of these laws, or in other words, a miracle to prevent them? Nothing is esteemed a miracle, if it ever happen in the common course of nature.” (Page 120)

Praise for the Print Edition

I freely admit that the remembrance of David Hume was the very thing that many years ago first interrupted my dogmatic slumber and gave a completely different direction to my researches in the field of speculative philosophy.

—Immanuel Kant

Product Details

• Title: An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding
• Author: David Hume
• Publisher: The Open Court Publishing Company
• Publication Date: 1924
• Pages: 267
• Resource Type: Topical
• Topic: Empirical Philosophy

About David Hume

David Hume (1711–1776) was born in Berwickshire, near Edinburgh, in Scotland. Hume was a philosopher, historian, economist, and essayist. He attended the University of Edinburgh from the age of 11 but left at 15 to pursue private study. His skepticism concerning religion kept him from getting the Chair of Ethics and Pnuematical Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. When he failed to get the position, he accompanied his cousin as a secretary on a military mission against the French in Canada. After his trip to Canada, Hume travelled with his cousin to Vienna and Turin. He wrote at least one important philosophical treatise during this trip. When he returned to Scotland he accepted a position as a librarian and completed the six-volume History of England, which became a best seller. Hume lived in Paris as secretary to the British ambassador to France for three years. A fleeing Jean-Jacques Rousseau accompanied Hume on his return trip to England. Hume lived in London for a year, serving as under-secretary of state. Returning to Edinburgh, he built a house where he remained for the rest of his life.

Hume’s empiricist philosophy centered on his assertion that the science of man is the basis for all other sciences. In other words, one must understand how the human mind works in order to properly understand other sciences. Hume believed that there was no constant, permanent self. Rather, the self is always the sum of one’s sensations and reflections. Knowledge, likewise, is derived from sensations and reflections on those sensations. Consequently, propositions about objects are semantically equivalent to propositions about one’s experiences. While we can have belief in something that is not directly observable, we cannot have knowledge about that thing. Hume taught that “cause” and “effect” were qualities of human perception, not necessarily of the object itself. For example, we see ball A strike ball B; following that, ball B moves. Hume argued that while we perceive ball A to have caused the effect of ball B moving, those qualities might not exist in the balls themselves. The habit of seeing a ball strike another ball, followed by the movement of the second ball, leads us to perceive that ball A caused ball B to move. Hume wasn’t saying that ball A didn’t cause ball B to move; just that we cannot empirically observe the mechanism for the movement, and thus we cannot have knowledge of it.