Scriptorium Daily
David Hume (May 7, 1711 – August 25, 1776) was born this day, three hundred years ago, and died just a month and a half after the founding of the United States of America. He is known as being the third in the series of British philosophers in the school of Empiricism, as opposed to the Continental philosophers in the school of Rationalism.
The Rationalists were Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, and Pascal, and they basically argued that man has inherent within himself the light of reason which can make sense of the universe. Their starting-point is logic, their reasoning is deductive, and they believed that all internally naturally possess such epistemological potential.
In contrast, the Empiricists (John Locke was English; George Berkeley was Irish; and David Hume was Scottish) believed that man was born as a tabula rasa, devoid of internal knowledge, and all truth is derived from externals such as sensory perception and experience.
Among the Empiricists, Locke (1632-1704) was a devout Christian and Berkeley (1685-1753) was an Anglican bishop. However, Hume is known for being a staunch atheist. How did he veer so far from his Empiricist predecessors?
David Hume was best known for being a skeptic. He took Locke’s representative theory of knowledge to the furthest possible conclusion. Locke said that the mind does not really have any direct knowledge of the outside world, because the outside world is always filtered through the senses to arrive at the mind. The mind then takes that data and interprets it. But if we cannot know anything except that which we derive from external sense perception, then Hume reasoned: maybe we cannot even trust that. Perhaps we cannot prove anything at all, not even our own existence!
Hume was especially famous for his denial of causation. He could not prove that any two objects or actions can actually have a connection between them outside of coincidental correlation. For example, if you put your hand in a fire and are burned, he would argue that you cannot definitely say that that fire necessarily burned you, or that every fire in the world would burn you.
This led him to his path of atheism. In his denial of causation, he ultimately denied a first cause, or Prime Mover, i.e. God. He especially did not think that one could put moral attributes on this first cause, or that miracles could ever occur. Ironically, his objection to miracles lay in the fact that they defy laws of nature, which is odd coming from a man who doubts any reality which comes to us through sensory data! Contrast this to Locke who argued that miracles provide evidence for faith. Hume took the inverse argument: miracles are so nonsensical that only people who had faith can believe in them!
Though much of what Hume taught can be debunked, especially considering how logically inconsistent he was, he is mainly credited with being the founder of modern skepticism which roots his significance in history and as someone worth studying, even if we disagree with him.
