Hume

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Hume

• PHI 185

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Topics

• Two Species of Philosophy
• Humes Theory of Mind
• Two Objects of Human Reason
• Skeptical Doubts
• A Skeptical Solution
• Liberty (Free Will)
• The Self and Personal Identity
• Moral Distinctions

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Two Species of Philosophy

• Man as an active being sentimentalism
• Taste and sentiment
• Examples from common life
• Feel the difference between vice and virtue
• Easy and obvious philosophy
• Man as a reasonable being intellectualism
• Form the understanding
• Seek original principles
• Accurate and abstruse philosophy

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The Right Course

• Man is a reasonable being.
• Man is a sociable, no less than a reasonable
  being
• Man is also an active being.
• Indulge your passion for science, but let your
  science be humanwith direct reference to
  action and society.
• Be a philosophy but, amidst all your
  philosophy, be still a man.

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Human Understanding

• The only method of freeing learning, at once,
  from these abstruse questions, is to enquire
  seriously into the nature of human understanding,
  and show, from an exact analysis of its powers
  and capacity, that it is by no means fitted for
  such remote and abstruse subjects.

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Reconciliation

• Happy, if we can unite the boundaries of the
  different species of philosophy, by reconciling
  profound enquiry with clearness, and truth with
  novelty! And still more happy, if, reasoning in
  this easy manner, we can undermine the
  foundations of an abstruse philosophy, which
  seems hitherto served only as a shelter to
  superstition, and a cover to absurdity and error!

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The Mind

• Perceptions
• Thoughts or ideas
• Impressions
• All our ideasare copies of our impressions
• Survey of the mind (introspection)
• Defective sense organs
• Missing shade of blue?
• Principles of Association
• Resemblance, Contiguity, Cause/Effect

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Meaning and Nonsense

• When we entertain, therefore, any suspicion that
  a philosophical term is employed without any
  meaning or idea, we need but inquire from what
  impression is that supposed idea derived?

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Objects of Human Reason

• Relations of Ideas and Matters of Fact
• Relations of Ideas
• Analytic Judgments
• Contrary is impossible
• Intuitively or demonstrably certain
• Matters of Fact
• Synthetic Judgments
• Contrary is possible
• Reasoning based on cause and effect

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Knowledge of Cause and Effect

• Causes and effects are discoverable, not by
  reason, but by experience.
• The effect is different from the cause and not
  discoverable in it. Not knowable a priori.
• What is the foundation of our conclusions from
  experience?
• All inferences based on experience suppose that
  the future will resemble the past.

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Will the Future Resemble the Past?

• Can experience of past events give us knowledge
  about future events? Will the future be like the
  past? Is nature uniform?
• Not by a chain of reasoning no intuitive medium
• Not by deduction opposite not impossible
• Not by induction circular appeal to experience

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The Problem of Induction

• Different kinds of inductive inferences
• A future event is predicted on the basis of a
  past event (inductive forecasting)
• The whole population is predicted to have a
  feature that the sample does. (inductive
  generalization)
• The nature of inductive reasoning
• The conclusion contains more information than the
  premises
• The evidence only makes the conclusion likely

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Justifying Induction

• We are justified in using induction in the
  future because it has always worked in the past.
• Justification is a normative project
• An inductive justification for the practice of
  induction.
• Is this circular?
• If inductive reasoning cant be justified by
  induction and cant be justified by
  demonstration, is there any way to justify the
  practice?

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Skeptical Solution

• Doubts about induction shouldnt limit our
  enquiries in common life.
• The principle of custom or habit guides our
  inductive practice.
• Not reasoning or grounded in the understanding
• All inferences from experience, therefore, are
  effects of custom, not of reasoning.
• Custom makes our experience useful to us.
• The imagination is the source of our beliefs
  about induction

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Philosophical Problems

• From what impression could this idea be
  derived?
• Normativity How are inductive inferences
  justified?
• Normativity How are human actions justified
  (moral)?
• Necessity What are necessary (causal)
  relationships?
• Necessity How is human behavior necessary or
  free?
• What is the nature of the self? Substance?
• Hume rejects any talk about anything that
  transcends experience as nonsense.

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Necessary Connection Whence the Idea?

• We dont arrive at the idea by observing external
  objects.
• We dont arrive at the idea by reflecting on the
  operation of our minds on our bodies.
• The union of mind and body is mysterious
• We cant move any part of our body at will
• We move something internal to move our arms

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Necessary Connection Whence the Idea?

• We dont arrive at the idea by reflecting on the
  operation of our minds on our ideas.
• The relation of mind to idea is mysterious
• Minds command over ideas is limited
• Self-command of mind is not uniform
• In no case are we acquainted with anything that
  can be called a power.
• Appealing to God wont help
• Dont know what Gods power would be

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Necessary Connection

• Objects are conjoined, but not connected.
• This connection, therefore, which we feel in
  the mind, this customary transition of the
  imagination from one object to its usual
  attendant, is the sentiment or impression from
  which we form the idea of power or necessary
  connection.

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Cause

• Definition 1 an object followed by another and
  where all the objects similar to the first are
  followed by objects similar to the second.
• where if the first had not been, the second
  never had existed.
• Definition 2 an object followed by another and
  whose appearance always conveys the thought to
  that other.

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Liberty and Necessity

• Free actions cant be thought of as uncaused
  since we want to assign responsibility.
• We cannot surely mean that actions have so
  little connection with motives, inclinations, and
  circumstances that one does not follow with a
  certain degree of uniformity from the other and
  that one affords no inference by which we can
  conclude the existence of the other. (771)

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Liberty

• By liberty, then, we can only mean a power of
  acting or not acting according to the
  determinations of the will. (771)
• Hypothetical liberty
• Compare with Locke (618)

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Liberty and Morality

• All laws being founded on rewards and
  punishment, it is supposed as a fundamental
  principle that these motives have a regular and
  uniform influences on the mind and both produce
  good and prevent the evil actions. (772)
• Person not answerable for actions
• From something not durable and constant
• Performed ignorantly and casually

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The Nature of the Self

• Descartes
• What kind of thing am I?
• Leibniz
• Monads and perceptions
• Spinoza
• My relation to nature?
• Locke
• Suspicious of substantial accounts

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Self

• From what impression(s) is the idea of the self
  derived?
• Not from one impression constant and invariable
• when I enter most intimately into what I call
  myself, I always stumble on some perception of
  other. I never can catch myself at any one time
  without a perception.
• Bundles of impressions (803)

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Identity

• Identity or sameness
• an object that remains invariable and
  uninterrupted
• Diversity
• A distinct idea of several objects existing in
  succession and connected together by a close
  relation.
• Transition of the mind from one object to another
• Imagination
• Relations of resemblance and cause/effect

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Examples

• Mass of matter
• Small and large changes
• Common ends - living things
• Continued existence of based on common cause
• Slow and fast changes - river

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Personal Identity

• our notions of personal identity proceed
  entirely from the smooth and uninterrupted
  progress of thought along a train of connected
  ideas. (806)
• Resemblance and Causation
• Soul compared with republic or commonwealth (807)
• Memory discovers, not produces, personal identity
• Compare with Locke (630)

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Write on one of the following

• How does Hume understand the nature of cause and
  effect (necessary connection)?
• Compare Hume and Descartes on the nature of the
  self.
• Compare Hume and Locke on personal identity.
• Compare Hume and Locke on freedom.