In Our Time - David Hume

Episode Date: October 6, 2011

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the work of the philosopher David Hume. A key figure in the Scottish Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, Hume was an empiricist who believed that humans can only have knowledge of things they have themselves experienced. Hume made a number of significant contributions to philosophy. He saw human nature as a manifestation of the natural world, rather than something above and beyond it. He gave a sceptical account of religion, which caused many to suspect him of atheism. He was also the author of a bestselling History of England. His works, beginning in 1740 with A Treatise of Human Nature, have influenced thinkers from Adam Smith to Immanuel Kant and Charles Darwin, and today he is regarded by some scholars as the most important philosopher ever to write in English.With:Peter MillicanProfessor of Philosophy at the University of OxfordHelen BeebeeProfessor of Philosophy at the University of BirminghamJames HarrisSenior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of St AndrewsProducer: Thomas Morris.

Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk, forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, in the 18th century, the city of Edinburgh became the centre for an intellectual movement which has come to be known as the Scottish Enlightenment. At its heart were a group of radical thinkers,

people like Adam Smith and James Hutton, whose advances profoundly influenced fields ranging from economics to geology, medicine to agriculture. But perhaps the most significant figure of the Scottish Enlightenment was David Hume. In his lifetime, Hume was best known as the author of a best-selling history of England, but today he's acknowledged as one of the giants of Western philosophy. Hume wrote about a wide range of philosophical topics, including religion and ethics, and in his 20s produced a revolutionary account of human nature, our reason and emotions.

Hume's work was credited as an influence by Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein, and is still the subject of intense debate today. with me to discuss David Hume at Peter Milliken, Professor of Philosophy at Hartford College at the University of Oxford, Helen Beebe, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Birmingham, and James Harris, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of St. Andrews. Peter Milken, David Hume was born 300 years ago in 1711. Could you give us some sense of the intellectual landscape into which he was born?

Yes, certainly. I'll focus mainly on the theoretical background, which I think had a very major influence on him. He's only about a century after Galileo had turned his telescope to the sky and refuted the Aristotelian view of the world, and about 50 years after the formation of the Royal Society of London. So it's quite early in the scientific revolution. It's an age of scientific confidence, especially in the wake of Newton. So Newton's Principia was 1687, and that was greatly admired. So the predominant scientific view then was the so-called mechanical philosophy.

This is particularly associated with people like Descartes and Boyle. So the idea is that the physical world is getting better and better understood, but the kind of picture of the physical world is of a world composed of inert particles of matter, which act on each other through bumping into each other, through mathematically calculable forces of the kind that needs. Newton had been exploring. Now, this gives a skeptical potential. The world is very different in reality from how it appears to us. We perceive it through our senses, but we don't see all the little particles of which it's composed. And that naturally raises epistemological worries,

how much can we know about it. Now, John Locke, in his essay concerning human understanding of 1690 tried to give an account of our place in the world how we can think about it, how we can know about it, on these sorts of principles. But there was a big, big concern about where we fit in, because if the world is composed of mechanical particles like this, it's hard to see a place for the human soul, for God, and so forth. And we must play all this against the idea that you've mentioned Locke, but Locke reasoned that there was a God, the idea that there was a God, God gave people their sense of reason, and it was against that background that the Royal Society, which you mentioned,

they followed the dictat, as it were, of Francis Bacon, explore the scriptures and nature, interrogate them. These are the two answers of the world. So that was very much the background, the religious, intellectual religious background, as it was then thought, was very strong. Absolutely. Can you just give us some headline, Peter, before we move on, Hume had a very broad range of interest.

Could you just give us a few headlines about that? Sure. Well, he was very keen on seeing humans as part of the natural world and understanding us in that way. So you can see him as a sort of forerunner of cognitive science. He's investigating our faculties, investigating how much we can know about the world and what the limits are. But he turns that in lots of directions.

He investigates, for example, the psychology of the passions, moral philosophy, aesthetics, religion you've mentioned. And he writes essays on politics, economics, and, of course, So in all of these areas, he's trying to see how we fit into the world based on an understanding gained through experience and observation in line with the new science. And you say, and of course the history, his multiple volume history of England was the great commercial success of the day, made him very wealthy. And also he thought was his greatest achievement at that time, as I understand it. Can we talk about Hume's background, James Harris? Well, Hume grew up in the border country between Scotland and England.

He went to university at Edinburgh, age 10, which was young, but not that young. He went at the same time as his brother, who was age 12. So it wasn't that remarkable. He went as young as he did. My feeling is that he went to Edinburgh and didn't really learn very much from it. He says in his autobiography that he wrote towards the end of his life that he learnt language. at university and not very much more than that. That might be an exaggeration.

But I feel that he came down from university, still aged, very young, he was 15, feeling that, well, he hadn't learned very much and that his intellectual journey as we've yet to begin. So he had some time. His family wanted him to be a lawyer, so they gave him the time to sit at home and read and study. They thought he was studying law.

In fact, he was reading Roman poetry and history and modern literature. of all kinds and he had developed a thirst and appetite for general learning, as he calls it, for the arts in all their forms, read as widely as he possibly could, and gradually, I think, a sense of purpose developed, a sense that he had something to contribute to philosophy, and I think probably other things as well, but in the first instance, philosophy. It's remarkable that it is an autodidact at work, isn't it, to a great extent.

And when you mention you throw away languages for most people's languages, is learning languages to be able to read them and write in English difficult. But he had two or three languages besides Greek and Latin. And so this young boy is sitting in the borders reading intensely year and year out. In a variety of languages, as you said, so university education at the time that in your first year you learnt, or you brushed up on your Latin, in your second year you learned Greek and French.

He would have picked up French along the way. And then, yes, an auto-dialdiald is exactly what he was. I see him sitting pretty much by himself on the family farm in Berwickshire. reading widely, perhaps there weren't very many people around there for Hume to be talking with. He was formulating his ideas by himself. And that's an important thing as I get from the notes and works of yours that I've read, is that he's rather a solitary person. It's an important thing to say because of his great treaties comes out of solitary thinking,

uninfluenced by the conversational companionship that a lot of people have, a lot of intellectuals have. Is that right? Well, we wouldn't want to exaggerate that. I mean, he did have friends, and he must have talked about some of his ideas with some of them. But I think, yes, my sense of the treatise is that it is a work that was generated, not through conversation and dialogue,

but through somebody thinking things out for themselves. And I think it's that rather private and idiosyncratic, the origins of the book that made it so hard for people to understand. You're talking about the treatise of human nature, which came out in his late late... 20s and he'd moved, he had, was described as the breakdown at the age of about 20 and moved across to France to La Flesch while La Fletch, and sat down and wrote this book which, not very successful at the time, but has been seen as more and more and more important and influential in the area of philosophy.

Why did he go to La Flesch? What's about La Flesche? Well, of course, La Flesche is where Descartes had studied, so it had that sort of that connotation. Humus throughout his life very worried about money and one reason he went to France so he says was because it was cheaper to live in France he didn't have much of an income he was the second son of the family he had a small allowance but and to make it go as far as possible he moved to France

and first to Rance in Champagne and then to La Flesche and Anjou we don't really know exactly why he went there there would of course be a library there was a Jesuit institution in La Flesche so there would have been a library there there would have been Jesuit priests to talk to. We know he had at least one conversation with Jesuit priests and presumably more than that. But I think he would have been, as we've been saying,

more or less on his own most of the time. Is it possible for you to encapsulate what the overall purpose of this first book was, a treatise of human nature? Well, as the title suggests, it was meant to be an account of human nature, of what human beings are like. I think we can think of it as divided into

two parts, as it were. He published one part of it first, and then there were going to be other parts later. And the first part is two books, one on the reason and one on the passions. So we begin with an account of the key constituents of human nature, reason and passion and how they relate to each other. And that was meant to be a platform for moving on to analyzing morals, criticism,

or what we might now call aesthetics or taste and politics. He didn't finish, or perhaps didn't even start the books on politics and criticism, but he did write a book on morality which was published a year later. So we begin with an account of reason and passion, their nature, how they relate to each other, and then we move on to aspects of human nature that are kind of founded on reasoning, passion and their relation. Did he have a purpose? Is there a stated purpose? I will prove this to you that you have not realized before. His purpose is to tell us what human nature is like, and of course the implication there is that those who'd gone before him hadn't got to the truth about human nature.

His overall purpose was surely to present a very provocative thesis about how reason and passion relate to each other. So the traditional philosophical view is that human beings are essentially rational and that our lives are essentially a matter of governing the passion through the operation of reason, whether it be Plato or Aristotle. Aristotle or the Stoics. This is the picture of human nature that dominates and the task of philosophy is to tell us how reason should dominate the passions. On Hume's view, the passions are in the driving seat. Reason is subservient to them. Book one of the treatise is a demonstration of how reason not, to use his own language, almost destroys itself at its own hands. It turns out to be not what we thought it was and it turns out that the passions are essential to who we are, the passions are the major determinants of human life and reason ends up having quite a subservient

role to them. I hope we come back to that. Helen Beebe, he's often described as an empiricist, something he read about in Locke and seems have embraced and for the rest of his life immediately after he'd read it. Can you tell us what that word meant to him? Yeah, so empiricism is set against rationalism and those philosophical positions are positions to do with what the sources of our knowledge and our thoughts are and how it is that we can come to know about the world

and how it is that we can get to actually even think about the world. So for the rationalist, our knowledge of the world is something that can, at least in some cases, be acquired just by thinking about it. So just by sitting down and thinking you can come to know things about the world around you. Whereas for the empiricists, any knowledge that we might have about the external world has to come through the evidence of our senses. come through experience. So you might think, imagine someone kind of somehow growing up in a cave and never stepping outside the cave. For the rationalist, that person could in principle,

if they're kind of clever enough and think hard enough, come to know things about the world outside the cave. For example, to pick up on the religious theme, they might be able to come to know that God exists just by reasoning and thinking. Whereas for an empiricist, if you're brought up in a cave and you never go outside, you're never going to know anything about what happens outside the cave because any claim that you might have to know something has to come, you have to have evidence for it. And of course, if all the evidence you've got is what's inside the cave, you can't have any evidence about what's outside the cave.

So the denying innate knowledge? Yeah. So not just innate knowledge, but also innate ideas. So the second part of the debate is to do with how it is we get to even think things about the world. And in that time, philosophers thought of, the components of thought it's being ideas, which you might think of as kind of concept. So, you know, when you think about a tree, you have the idea of the tree before your mind. Now, where do ideas come from?

Rationalists thought that some of our ideas are innate. We're just born with them. The idea of God is an example. A rationalist thought that the idea of God was just kind of imprinted there at birth, whereas empiricists, again, thought that our ideas had to come through experience. So you only get to be able to think about trees, as putting it a bit simplistically, but you only get to think about trees because you've had experience of trees. So again, when you think of the cave, as it turns out,

out for the empiricist, the person that's been brought up in the cave, not only can't know anything about what's outside the cave, but actually they probably can't even think anything about what's outside the cave. They can't think about trees because they lack the idea of a tree. So someone who, kind of as it were, might use the word tree in sentences might thereby not be saying anything at all because there's no idea that attaches to the word. So the source of all of our ideas has to come from experience. First of all, how radical was this and what did it mean, how did it as it were,

feed into the philosophy of the time? James has alluded to that, but if you could develop that a bit. And he identifies two different sources of knowledge, as I understand it. Could you just develop that a little, please? Yeah, so Hume thinks it's maybe easiest to set this up, thinking about the inquiry, which is the later work, rather than the treatise.

Hew makes a distinction between matters of fact and relations of ideas. Matters of fact, basically, a fact about the world, facts about whether God exists. There is a tree. Facts about trees, facts about the existence and nature of God and so on. Hume is on the empiricist side of the fence, and so he thinks that any alleged knowledge of God or trees or whatever has to come through experience. And in fact, he thinks that we can't really have knowledge of the external world. We can never be certain of any fact about the external world, whether it's a claim about God or a claim about trees or whatever.

So in a sense, experience isn't really a source of knowledge, it's a source of belief, and those beliefs might or might not be reasonable or justified to a certain extent, but it's not really knowledge. And on the other hand, we have relations of ideas. So in Hume thinks we can have certain knowledge there. So you can know that 5 plus 7 is 12, you can know that a triangle has to have three sides. Can you know it if you haven't experienced it? You have to have the experience in order to get the ideas. 5 plus 7 equals 12, unless you've seen it,

and counted up the 5 matches and the 7 matches, and count it again and it's 12 matches. Right. Can you have a concept of 12 without having experienced 12? Yeah, so you can only reason concerning ideas once you've got the ideas themselves. So you have to have acquired the idea of 5 and the idea of 12. And again, because Hume's and Empiricists, those are not going to be innate ideas. You have to have some experience of, I don't know, counting things in order to have the ideas.

But once you've got the ideas, you can see just from kind of intuition that those ideas go together in a certain kind of way. But after the initial empiric... empirical move that you've made, that you know that five matches are five and seven are seven, and you can count to 12? Yeah. Once you've got the idea of five and the idea of seven, you can figure out without having to do the counting that five plus seven is 12. So Hume thought that those things were, did count a certain knowledge, but on the other hand, that's not really knowledge about the external world.

Hume says, you know, you could know that a triangle had three sides, even if there were never any triangles in nature. So although he thinks that there is a place where we have certain knowledge, we can't have certain knowledge of the external world. Peter Milliken, as I understand it, one of the central concerns of the treaties is something known as induction. That's very important to it. Can you tell us what he means by that? Yeah, Hume doesn't actually use the word induction, but we now do when talking about him. He uses various terms for it. Such as.

He talks about reasoning concerning matter of fact or probable inference. or moral inference. But essentially, when we talk about induction in this context, what we mean is any inference to some matter of fact which goes beyond anything that we perceive or remember. Can you give us an example? Yeah, sure. So suppose I drop a pen.

I let go of my pen in midair. I expect it to fall. Suppose I put a match to a piece of paper. I expect the piece of paper to catch fire. So I'm making a prediction about something. that I haven't yet perceived. And the question is, and Hume raises this in the treatise, but he makes much more of it in his later works, in the abstract of the treatise that was just a year later and in the inquiry. He basically argues that when we make any inference like that,

we're taking something for granted for which we can give no reason whatever. So the way the argument goes is like this. It's a very nice one. Imagine Adam, newly created, created by God. So Adam is a human being with perfect human faculties just created by God. And he sees one billiard ball moving towards another. And God says to him, Adam, what's going to happen when that billiard ball hits that one? And Hume's claim is that Adam, by simply looking at the billiard balls, perceiving them, analyzing as much as he likes what he actually perceives of the balls, is not going to be able to predict what happens. And it follows that in order to know what's going to happen, Adam has to have had experience of billiard balls.

But how can experience make a difference? Well, it can only make a difference if what we've experienced gives a guide to what we haven't experienced. And that's taking for granted that the unobserved will resemble the observed. And then Hume dismisses in turn the various ways by which one might try to establish that and concludes that it's just something we have to take for granted. James Harris, does this move on to the notion of causation. How does he explain that problem, which has beguile, I'm told, beguiles philosopher still? Well, so if we're doing induction, what we're trying to figure out,

what are the effects of the things that we observe, what are the causes of things that we observe? So once Adam's seen that one billiard ball knocks another billiard ball wrong, when the next billiard ball comes, he'll have an idea that same thing's going to happen again. And if it happens repeatedly, you'll think, well, that's the way things go. And he'll come to believe that the first billiard ball is the cause of the moment. movement of the second billed. Now the philosopher then wants to know, well, what exactly is it that we're talking about when we're talking about causes?

And Hume says, well, there are three components to the idea of a cause. There's the fact that the cause has to come into close relation, has to bang into the effect. It has to be a spatial contiguity. He thinks the cause has to operate or take place before the effect takes place. So you've got events in a certain relation. But he thinks of something else. He thinks that the cause, at least he takes himself to be analyzing our ordinary idea here, takes our ordinary ideas that the cause makes the effect happen.

There's something in the cause that makes the event necessary. So we have an idea of what Hume terms necessary connection between cause and effect. And this is the crucial thing that distinguishes between coincidences and causal relations. So the question then becomes, well, what exactly is our idea of necessary connection? And that turns out to be a real puzzle. That's to say, to return to the empiricist framework, we have to ask, well, where do we get this idea of necessary connection from? And Hume thinks it's very unclear indeed where we get the idea from. We don't get it, crucially, from just observing the world.

Observing the world, we just see one thing happen, then another thing happen. We see one billiard ball moving and the second bill moving in reaction. We don't see the causal interaction, the necessary connection between the first Billiard Ball's movement and the second. Sorry, I'm slowing you down, but people listening would say, we do, it hits it, it moves on. But that's just seeing one thing following another thing. It's not seeing the relation between these two things. What's the distinction you're making? Well, that's exactly Hume's point in a way.

It turns out, so he takes himself to be examining an idea that we natural. have. It turns out that this idea that we naturally have, the idea of a necessary connection. It turns out to be, well, it turns out that our idea of causation is in fact just taken from this interaction between the bulls and that we feel that we have

a sense of the one billy bull making the other happen. We then, and he tells a complicated story about where we get that feeling from, we then project that onto the world and take ourselves to have a sense of a necessary connection between those two things.

It is just a projection and there are various ways in which Hume can be interpreted upon this, but perhaps he's saying there is in fact nothing there other than the relations of events, the patterns of events, and we just project all this talk of necessary connection and causal connection onto the world. Maybe there really is no such thing after all. And he takes this right through to the way human beings behave, and we'll help come to that a little later. Meanwhile, Helen Bibi, in the treatise, Hume distinguishes radically between, reason and passions, which we could call emotions. That was, reason had been in the driving seat from Aristotle onwards,

and up he comes and says, no, it's subservient to passion. And desire is the driver, and reason mops things up and puts them in the right order. I am so sorry for this encapsulation such a binocular term, but I just want to move the programme. So can you tell us in your proper words what is on about? Yeah, well, actually, what he says about the reason and the passions fits into the general project in the way that the talk about induction and causation does. He's trying to reject the kind of rationalist worldview,

that's one of the things that he's trying to do, which sees the world as kind of a world of sort of logical connections that we can kind of engage with. He wants to think of human beings as much more kind of mechanistic and sort of animalistic in a way than the rationalists do. so he thinks that the human mind is much more like the mind of another animal than kind of the sort of feeble version of the mind of God. When it comes to reason and the passions,

there's a view out there that moral properties, whether something is good or bad, are discerned by the faculty of reason. This is something, again, that you can kind of get out of the world just by thinking about it. And so one odd thing about the properties of goodness and badness is that they seem to be kind of motivating. You know, if you think that something's good,

that's supposed to kind of automatically motivate you towards it. And once you think that, it's quite easy to set up a kind of conflict between reason and the passion. So on the one hand, I ought to be doing this thing. And on the other hand, you might have your kind of desires or aversions telling you that you don't really want to do that thing. Happens all the time. I ought to be doing good things instead I'm doing the opposite.

Absolutely. We'll all understand that. So there's a sort of an opposition set up there between, on the one hand, our passions like desire. and aversion, hope and fears, and reason kind of motivating us to do good things and avoid bad things. Hume thinks that picture is just completely wrong.

He thinks that reason couldn't possibly discern anything that itself is kind of motivating in that way. The only thing that can motivate you to do anything is a passion, a desire, or a hope, or whatever. Or imagination. He uses that word as well, doesn't he? What does he mean by that? He talks about desire and imagination, doesn't it?

Peter? The imagination for Hume is a very important faculty because the word imagination is related to the word image. That is, so philosophers like Descartes thought that you could draw a distinction between two different kinds of ideas in the mind, and one is a sort of ethereal, godlike, perfect vision of the kind we have of mathematical objects so we can form these ideas that have no imagistic part. Whereas other ideas that we have, for example, of things in the world,

are coloured by our sensory perception of them, so that they are, as it were, quasi-sensory ideas. Now, Hume wanted to say that all of our ideas are like that, because all of our ideas come from experience. So for him, the imagination is inevitably the main faculty in the mind that presents our ideas to us. So he wants to analyse a very large amount of our thinking in terms of the imagination.

How does this relate to the notion of free will? And I'd like to tend to jamms this after you've talked about it. Sure. How does this, this as it were, dynamic between passion and reason relate to the notion that all of us like to have that we've got free will? Okay, the first point to make is that when Hume says that, or seems to make reason subordinate to the passions, that's not actually as radical a thesis as it might seem. He's simply saying that reason, that is cognition, tells us what's there in the world. It tells us about facts.

But when we want to do something, we have to have a motivation. So the two are working together. And I think the subordinate... But the interesting thing is that he believes that the passion, I'm sorry to keep on about it. He believes that the passions, emotions are the primary. Well, you tell me. In the treatise, he says that, yes. In his later works, he's much more even-handed.

says that they both go together. Now, with regard to free will... But you've just said... Sorry, I mean, I don't know anything, but you've just said that there is... The driver is the passions, and they do go together in the sense that reason then comes in, but they don't go together in the sense that they're of equal primary importance.

Or are they, you tell me. Oh, I would say they are. Oh, right. Because the passions tell you what you want. The reason tells you how to get there. So, passions are setting the end of your action. What end are you desiring to reach? But then in order to get there, you have to know what will cause what,

and that's where reason comes in. So in order to know how to achieve your ends, suppose I want to cook something that's very tasty, and that's because I'm looking forward to having the nice taste, I've got to use my reason, that is my knowledge of cookery, in order to get there. But the primary cause of that is a desire to eat, isn't it? Sure.

well, but both are important. I mean, it's like with a car, you need an engine, you also need a steering wheel. James, James Harris, do you want to take that on? And then there's something else on to ask you. Well, I mean, this is, of course, if you want to move on to free world, this is, of course, directly relevant to the free world question. Yeah. The kind of control over the will that was traditionally thought the human beings had

was in large part of the control of the reason over desire and volition and so forth. So this was an old question in philosophy exactly what kind of control we have over our desires, volitions and actions. And Hume, being an empiricist, being the kind of philosopher that we've described so far, thinks that we need to examine this question empirically.

That's to say we look at experience and we try and decide what it means to call human beings free, what it means to call their actions necessitated. So we might think that various suppositions about human beings as being just one part of creation, being like animals, as Helen was saying, and so forth,

gives us good reason to think that human beings are, in some sense, necessitated in their actions. What we then want to know is, well, over and above this apparent fact that we're much like any other organism in the universe, do we have some special property of freedom? And if so, what is that? What does it mean when we attribute freedom to ourselves

as we very naturally do in both ordinary practical life and moral and political life and so forth. He also talks about us, the human beings, being in charge of their own morality and not being given from outside, not being given from religion, for instance. What's his argument there? I mean, the arguments I see is that he thinks we get it because we have an empathy. We don't like people to suffer, and therefore we try to stop them suffering, and that makes us better people. Right. So, sorry.

So morality is presented by Hume as a refinement, as a development of the passions. So when I said earlier that this books, one and two of the treat is the relationship, reason, passions is the foundation of the other aspects of human nature. This is one of those respects. So morality develops out of our emotional lives. We have naturally, obviously we have passions of various kinds, naturally, of all, different kinds. We learn to moderate them, we respond to the passions of others, we begin to try and think impartially and objectively about our desires, about our sense of what should be done

and what shouldn't be done and what other people should do and shouldn't do. And gradually, a moral code develops out of these sympathetic interactions between ourselves and other people. Peter? The upshot of that is quite interesting. He gets very close to a, a, kind of sophisticated form of utilitarianism. In the moral inquiry, later work that he wrote, he explains how if you look at all the various things that we count as virtues,

they are all those properties of people that are useful or agreeable to either themselves or others. So essentially his view, his mature view, is that morality is all about cultivating those kinds of properties, And he explicitly says that reason plays a large part there. We find out, by using our reason,

which properties it is of human beings, which are useful and agreeable. And we just find that we do, in fact, generally count those as virtues. And then he wants to say we should systematize that. Can I move, because this takes us towards religion about which he wrote extensively, and he mostly wrote very critically of religion,

although it's a moot point whether he was writing against God or just against the arguments being put forward. for God. But this morality, because that takes us into it, Helen, I think. You're right in your notes, Peter. If a person sees someone else suffering, he or she, in a sense, feels the other person's pain,

and that gives you a basis. Well, I think a lot of people enjoy seeing other people suffer pain. I mean, people who conquer countries want people to suffer pain. We've got this world at the moment with people wanting people to suffer pain every day of the week in their millions. So I don't know whether is that a better

starter for morality than people would say, well, if you have an overall system, a code of conduct, even a religious code or something. Is that an argument? Well, I mean, that's a difficult issue for Hume, I guess, and he has to tell a story about how it is that we need to kind of cultivate our sentiments in such a way that we aim at things that are agreeable for other people as well as ourselves. But the problem for Hume with the idea that we just sort of start out with a list of moral rules that come from God is, of course, that sort of fundamental problem that, that's to take it for granted that reason could kind of be a motivating force just by itself and he thinks that that can't be right. So he thinks that it does all need to come back to the sentiments and the passions. Otherwise, you don't get a story about moral motivation. Of course, some people aren't motivated to doing good and that's a problem.

But nonetheless, the foundation of morality still has to be based in sentiment and not religion for Hume. So can I just say with Helen for a moment, Peter? So he's saying that religion doesn't deliver on this. Yeah, neither religion nor reason nor sort of pure thought deliver on this. But is he suggesting an ad hoc empirical view that we just take it as it comes? There's no sort of local, national family codes of conduct or anything. I think you can derive, he thinks that you can derive the conduct from it, but the starting point has to be sentiment and our own motivation.

Yeah, in a way he's rather complacent. he thinks that uncorrupted human nature will agree on all sorts of things and he wants to blame religion for corrupting morality so when you get people who want to see others suffer because they believe the wrong thing he's going to say this is a corruption of natural morality and that if you can get rid of all the false beliefs that drive it then we'll converge

Alan maybe he's does this bring us to Hume's theory of the nature of the self, can you tell us about that? And how this connects with his idea of morality, for instance? I'm not sure how it connects with the idea of morality, except kind of tangentially through worrying about the existence of God again. But the kind of view that Hume really wants to set himself against is the idea, or at least the uncritical acceptance of the idea

that there's such a thing as a human soul, thought of as a sort of immaterial, non-physical substance, something that persists even after the destruction of the body. And because Hume's an empiricist, he thinks that if you're to think coherently about the nature of the human soul or existence after death or whatever, you have to have an idea of the soul. And so now the question is, what's the source of that idea? And given empiricism, the source of that idea has to be experience. So Naukeem very famously asks, well, do we have experience of the soul such that we could then have an idea of this thing?

and his answer is no. So he says, you know, look inward to the workings of your own mind. What do you find? Do you find an experience of the soul? And his answer is no. What you find is a whole lot of fleeting impressions, you know, visual sensations, tactile sensations, various thoughts. You might feel hungry or a bit cold or whatever.

What you don't find is some experience of the thing that's having all of those experiences. So Hume thinks that we really don't, or at least, I mean, this is very controversial, but on one way of looking at what Hume thinks, Hume thinks that we just don't have the idea of a soul. So it's just... So philosophers and theologians that take the notion of the soul for granted and then kind of build big speculative theories

on that basis have gone wrong right at the beginning. They're supposing that they're talking meaningfully and in fact they're really just not at all. James Harris, when the treatise was published, it was barely received, poorly received, and he was obviously very disappointed, a young man. and he later wrote almost disclaiming it and got on with a career as an essayist

and then in his day as a great historian, philosopher. But what happened to that treatise? How did its ideas gradually grow and become more significant for people like you, that philosophers took it up and it developed and influenced ideas? Well, the first thing to say is that Hume didn't exactly disown the ideas in the treatise. He, with qualifications, repackaged what he took to be

the main arguments in a series of later books. I didn't discern, but he just, anyway. So the ideas remain in play. And I guess Hume attained an afterlife in the first instance because of the importance that other philosophers attached to refuting him. So both in Scotland, his Scottish contemporaries, members of the Scottish Enlightenment that you mentioned at the beginning,

and members of the German Enlightenment, most obviously Emmanuel Kant, devoted an enormous amount of intellectual energy to showing that Hume was wrong on precisely the topics that we've been talking about in this program, induction, causation, to an extent, personal identity, morality, and so forth. So Hume remained in people's minds, philosophically speaking, attained philosophical reputation in the next hundred years or so

because he was wrong and people needed to show that he was wrong in order to show that philosophy remained possible. was a skeptic, he seemed to be suggesting that knowledge was impossible. People like Kant and the Scots like Thomas Reed thought the knowledge definitely was possible, and so they wanted to show how it was possible by refuting Hume. So that takes us to about roughly, roughly 1900. After then, people begin to think, well, hold on, no Hume was right about lots of things, and they begin to take up Hume in a much more positive way and to base their own positive philosophies on Humean ideas.

Peter, can you, Peter Milliken, can you take that on and just drive through in his essays? He was a brilliant essay in his day, and he wrote other books, of course, and how he's come into the 20th century and interviews people in influence people like you. Well, I think part of the reason he's become so influential in the last hundred years has been to do with changes in the scientific world, things like relativity, quantum mechanics. People have come to realize that the world is a much more peculiar place. than they thought it was in Newton's time. And there was Hume saying all along,

actually pure reason won't tell us what the world is like. We've got to experiment, and we might find out it's very different from our intuitive ideas. I think also in contemporary philosophy, most philosophers want to establish moral theories, for example, that are independent of religion. Even if they are in fact religious, they typically won't want to say that morality depends on God,

because they will want it to be a substantial claim that God is good. So they want morality to mean something independently of God. And I think Hume, because he was very much a standard bearer for trying to produce a theory of man and a theory of morals, etc., independently of God, that's why he ended up pioneering a lot of the paths that modern philosophers are treading. Helen? Yeah, so just to pick up on that point, one of the really novel and influential things that Hume did was to pull God out of the philosophical picture.

So philosophers nowadays, some philosophers do philosophy of religion, but you don't appeal to God in your theory of morality or your theory of how it is we can come to know about the external world, our theory of what the world is like. Before Hume, that wasn't the standard way of going. People would use God to all sorts of purposes. So you have Descartes in his meditations. proving the existence of God from rational principles, and then having proved the existence of God,

using that to establish that we can know things about the external world and so on. And really what Hume did was kind of take God out of the picture and stop philosophy being something that where kind of the existence of God is taken as your premise. And there's this anecdote about on his deathbed, he famously said, he there was no, Boswell, was, what about this great deathbed resolution not to acknowledge any religion at all, which would become a, little talisman, hasn't it, for atheists? It has, and of course, there's a long philosophical tradition

of philosophers dying, the philosopher's death, which is to say the philosopher faces death bravely, without fear, without needing religious consolation, and Hume's death has taken its place in this long history. So yes, Hume famously wasn't a man of religion, and much to the astonishment of people like James Boswell, he maintained that conviction, to say his lack of conviction, to the deathbed.

That's to say he was able to face death calmly. He was able to make jokes about it. There was none of the fear and trembling that was supposed to overtake even the skeptic as he faced the final curtain. But as I understand it, finally, Peter Milliken. His arguments against the arguments for God were very powerful and consistent.

but the idea of there being a possibility of a God like Darwin, he thought, well, there it is. It's very difficult to interpret Hume's views on God because he deliberately refrains from being too explicit. But I think that there are, as it were, coded messages in his text which suggest he really wasn't a believer. Thank you very much. Thank you Peter Milliken, James Harris and Helen Beebe. Next week we'll be talking about the Ming voyages in the early 15th century

when the Chinese sailed around the world. Thank you for listening. Thank you for listening to this Radio 4 podcast. If you've enjoyed it, you might like to try others like it, such as Start the Week, or Thinking Aloud, which are both available from the Radio 4 website.