David Hume

David Hume (1632-1704) brought the odd consequences of empiricism fully into the open. Hume's philosophy was a thorough-going skepticism, the likes of which had not been seen since the ancients. Hume was one of the most brilliant of the Enlightenment enthusiasts, but he also recognized that reason-understood both as scientific method and as rationality more broadly conceived-had overstepped its limits. There is much, he saw, that reason cannot do, assurances it cannot deliver, proofs it cannot produce. Hume's skepticism was, paradoxically, the clearest example of solid, self-scrutinizing Enlightenment thinking. His conclusion was that even the best thinking cannot do what the Enlightenment thinkers thought it could do. Hume's skepticism was based on a number of doctrines that had emerged from the debate about knowledge that had now gone on since Bacon and Descartes. Hume was an avowed empiricist. All knowledge, he repeated, must come from experience. He also accepted the distinction between experience and the world to which it refers. But, then, can our belief in the "external" world be established by way of experience? No, nor can our belief in the "external" world be established by way of deduction without simply begging the question. Hume concluded that the most basic beliefs, upon which all of our knowledge is founded, cannot be established by reason. Similarly, in the realm of morals, Hume applied his skeptical eye and concludes that "it is not against reason that I should prefer the destruction of half the world to the pricking of my little finger." Reason cannot motivate us to be moral. Nevertheless, our emotions can and do. Each of us is born with a natural capacity for sympathy and a natural concern for utility (about as nuts-and-bolts a practical notion as philosophers ever employ) with which we construct, among other things, our ideas about justice and society. Hume tended to naturalism, the idea that what reason can not do, nature will do for us anyway. If reason cannot guarantee us knowledge, nature nevertheless provides us with the good sense to make our way in the world. If reason cannot guarantee morals, our human natures nevertheless supply us with adequate sentiments to behave rightly toward one another. But if reason cannot justify the belief in God and the religious prejudices that go along with it, then so much the worse for religion. Hume was an unrepentant atheist. If the learned tomes of Scholasticism did not succeed in providing sound arguments or good evidence for religious beliefs, then "commit them to the flames," pronounced Hume, infuriating the theologians. Luckily, he did not prescribe the same harsh treatment for other unprovable beliefs, such as our belief in the existence of the "external" world and our belief in the importance of morals. Reason may have its limits, but our sentiments and our natural common sense, cultivated  through our social traditions, have power and virtue too. Hume reminds us (again) of what has long been neglected in the search for rational certainty that defined so much of modern philosophy. A Passion for Wisdom

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