UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS
PHILOSOPHY 331: BRITISH EMPIRICISM


LECTURES ON HUME

A. Hume (1710-1776)

B. Skepticism and Empiricism

    1. Skepticism: Hume vs. Descartes

    2. Empiricism
        a. Compared to rationalism (Descartes)
        b. Two forms: knowledge vs. concepts
             i. Hume is a complete concept-skeptic
            ii. He is not a complete knowledge-skeptic

    3. Perceptions of the mind: ideas and impressions

    4. Hume's principle: ideas are copies of impressions
        a. Impressions cause (hence precede) ideas
        b. Ideas resemble impressions

    5. Two arguments for the empiricist principle

    6. A problem? The missing shade of blue

    7. Hume's critical use of the empiricist principle

    8. Hume's principles of association

C. Hume's Skeptical Doubts

    1. Two objects of human knowledge
        a. Relations of ideas: discoverable by
             i. Intuition
            ii. Demonstrative reasoning = deduction from a priori premises
        b. Matters of fact: discoverable by
             i. Immediate perception or observation
            ii. 'Experimental' reasoning = induction

    2. Differences between these two

    3. Reasonings concerning matters of fact
        a. All founded on cause and effect
        b. Knowledge of causes and effects
              i. Not attained by demonstrative reasoning
             ii. Arises rather from experience: but how?
        c. We don't discover causes and effects by reasoning from past experience 
        d. Three arguments for Hume's conclusion about factual inferences

D. Hume's Solution of these Doubts

    1. How do we make inductive inferences?
        a. Negatively: not by any kind of reasoning.
        b. Positively: by a kind of natural instinct. How?

    2. Implications of Hume's view: Nature vs. reason
        a. Nature operates mechanically
        b. Reason leaves room for evaluation and choice

    3. Some problems with Hume's view
        a. Example of the gambler
        b. Probability

    4. Hume's account of belief

E. The Idea of Necessary Connexion

    1. The nature and role of this idea

    2. The empiricist principle: no idea without an impression

    3. Possible sources of the idea of necessary connexion
        a. Not single instances of related pairs of events
        b. Digression: critique of Occasionalism
        c. Repetition of similar pairs: constant conjunction

    4. Definition of the idea of cause
        a. Definition 1: succession + constant conjunction
        b. Definition 2: succession + inference
        c. Question: Are these definitions equivalent?

F. Liberty and Necessity

    1. Hume accepts the traditional principle that an action must be free in order to
      have moral significance: only free actions are morally right or wrong.

    2. He also accepts determinism: the doctrine that everything that happens, 
      including every human action, is necessitated by antecedent causes.

    3. These two propositions, that some actions are free, and that all actions are 
      necessitated, seem to contradict each other. And yet, Hume claims, not only are 
      both true, but most ordinary people accept both of them.

    4. Hume's 'reconciling project' in Section VIII of the Enquiry is to show, first, that 
      both these propositions are true: second, that ordinary people do accept them; 
      and hence that necessity and freedom are compatible.

    5. He does this by defining what 'free' and 'necessary' mean when applied to human 
      actions. These definitions are not arbitrary, he claims, since they specify what ordinary 
      people mean when they speak of free and necessary actions. The senses in which he 
      uses these terms are their correct or proper senses.

    6. As Hume defines it, a 'necessary action' is an action that has a cause.

        a. Of course, Hume's conception of what it is to have a cause is different from that of 
          the philosophers who preceded him.

        b. The bulk of Hume's argument for the proposition that every human action does have 
          a cause (and that everybody believes it does) is devoted to showing that human actions 
          are no different from natural events in the relevant respects (which natural events every-
          body believes all have causes, as Hume conceives causes).

    7. Also as Hume defines it, a 'free action' is one that is 'spontaneous', i.e. such that an agent is 
      able to do it if he wills or decides to do it, i.e. one that is wholly caused by factors within the 
      agent and under his control, as opposed to forces or conditions outside the agent that prevent 
      him from doing what he wants to do, or constrain him to do what he doesn't want to do.

        a. Some philosophers have defined 'free action' as 'action that has no cause whatsoever'.

        b. In that sense, of course, 'free' is incompatible with 'necessary', not only as Hume defines 
          'necessary' but as other philosophers do too.

        c. But Hume claims that freedom in his sense of the word is all that is required for morality.

        d. Indeed, he makes (and argues for) the further two claims,

             i. that freedom in the philosophers' sense is incompatible with morality, and

            ii. that necessity in his sense is not only compatible with but is required for morality.

G. Skepticism

    1. Skepticism in general

    2. Different types of Skepticism
        a. Antecedent = Cartesian
             i. extreme
            ii. moderate
        b. Consequent
             i. excessive = Pyrrhonism
            ii. mitigated = Academical Philosophy

    3. Targets of Skepticism
        a. Sense perception: external objects and sensible qualities
        b. Abstract or a priori reasonings: space and time
        c. Moral or factual reasonings: cause and effect

    4. Value of Skepticism
        a. Excessive skepticism
        b. Mitigated skepticism