Customer Reviews

An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding (Oxford World's Classics)

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This is one of the most impressive free kindle editions of a book that I have read. It is taken from a 1902 printing (a 2nd edition) that was reprinted from the posthumous edition of 1777. It includes endnotes and an extensive index put together by L.A Selby-Bigge, a late fellow of University College, Oxford. There is a table of contents at the beginning with hyperlinks. The endnotes also have hyperlinks, which makes it easy to read the notes and jump back to the text. The index also has hyperlinks. This is the first kindle freebie that I have seen with these features. This is handy for this type of book. Note that Hume is Scottish and the book was originally written in English.

I have always had an interest in philosophy and history and finally got around to reading this foundational work. The title describes exactly what this book is about. Hume starts by giving a brief introduction to philosophy and then jumps into the main questions. The biggie is where do ideas come from? How do we understand things? What is instinct, inspiration? It is interesting that his answers to these questions still hold up well to modern thought.

Hume wrote this book at a time and place where Calvinism still held great sway and God was thought to be behind every thought and action. His ideas were radical and I was interested to see how he tried to delicately handle ideas that would potentially offend many of his readers.

I highly recommend this seminal work to any one interested in philosophy and enjoys stretching their minds a bit. This is something I will refer to often. I continue to enjoy the access my Kindle gives me to great classics like this.

David Hume was perhaps the leading light in the Empiricist movement in philosophy. Empiricism is seen in distinction from Rationalism, in that it doubts the viability of universal principles (rational or otherwise), and uses sense data as the basis of all knowledge - experience is the source of knowledge. Hume was a skeptic as well as empiricist, and had radical (for the time) atheist ideas that often got in the way of his professional advancement, but given his reliance on experience (and the kinds of experiences he had), his problem with much that was considered conventional was understandable.

Hume's major work, 'A Treatise of Human Nature', was not well received intially - according to Hume, 'it fell dead-born from the press'. Hume reworked the first part of this work in a more popular way for this text, which has become a standard, and perhaps the best introduction to Empiricism.

In a nutshell, the idea of empiricism is that experience teaches, and rules and understanding are derived from this. However, for Hume this wasn't sufficient. Just because billiard balls when striking always behave in a certain manner, or just because the sun always rose in the morning, there was no direct causal connection that could be automatically affirmed - we assume a necessary connection, but how can this be proved?

Hume's ideas impact not only metaphysics, but also epistemology and psychology. Hume develops empiricism to a point that empiricism is practically unsupportable (and it is in this regard that Kant sees this text as a very important piece, and works toward his synthesis of Empiricism and Rationalism). For Hume, empirical thought requires skepticism, but leaves it unresolved as far as what one then needs to accept with regard to reason and understanding. According to scholar Eric Steinberg, 'A view that pervades nearly all of Hume's philosophical writings is that both ancient and modern philosophers have been guilty of optimistic and exaggerated claims for the power of human reason.'

Some have seen Hume as presenting a fundamental mistrust of daily belief while recognising that we cannot escape from some sort of framework; others have seen Hume as working toward a more naturalist paradigm of human understanding. In fact, Hume is open to a number of different interpretations, and these different interpretations have been taken up by subsequent philosophers to develop areas of synthetic philosophical ideas, as well as further developments more directly out of Empiricism (such as Phenomenology).

This is in fact a rather short book, a mere 100 pages or so in many editions. As a primer for understanding Hume, the British Empiricists (who include Hobbes, Locke, and Berkeley), as well as the major philosphical concerns of the eighteenth century, this is a great text with which to start.

David Hume was an anomaly of the Age of Reason. His contemporaries stoutly defended the ability of human beings to use a reason that they held to be divinely inspired to solve the assorted Mysteries of the Universe. For them, the evidence of the senses could only lead mankind away from these Revealed Truths. But Hume, in his An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, countered with equal stoutness, denying the validity of any conclusion not reached by sensory experience. If one could not form impressions by sight, taste, touch, sound, or smell, then the significance of that impression, in Hume's opinion, had to be discounted. Related to the link between impressions gathered by sense and those by reason, Hume posited that the conformity between an image of an object received from the external world and the reality of that object as it truly existed in that external world was impossible to establish since the only evidence of that object, or indeed of the external world itself, was no more than an amalgam of internal images.

Complicating matters for the supporters of reason over sense was the tricky matter of accepting that human frailty might lead to sensory imperfections (blindness, deafness etc) which could lead one to imperfectly use reason based on faulty sensory input. Hume suggested that a healthy skepticism that he termed "mitigated skepticism" would be a viable midpoint between too much skepticism, which would lead to rejection of all knowledge as insufficiently grounded in reality, and a dearth, which would lead to an acceptance of all knowledge as valid. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding represents his own use of reason to oddly enough undermine traditional concepts of reason itself to show a clear and convincing link between the validity of the senses to accept external stimuli such that man could rightfully draw logical and founded conclusions from their intersection.

Hume first published his ideas concerning sensory impressions in A Treatise of Human Nature (1739). Written when Hume was not yet twenty-five, this book was a powerful indictment of the overarching reliance on reason to fathom all of Nature's secrets. Unfortunately, the buying public did not agree and sales flat lined, causing him to re-write it. This revised version, which Hume called An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, was artistically superior and sold well. He divided his book into twelve sections, summarized thus:
(I) Of the Different Species of Philosophy: Hume's opening section introduces philosophy as having two broad parts: moral philosophy or the science of human nature and natural philosophy.
(II) Of the Origin of Ideas: In the ongoing debate over which is the more potent, immediate sensory impressions of objects or abstractions of thought recalled in memory, Hume declares that the former overrule the latter. He also suggests that the reliability of cause and effect is questionable since past performance is no guarantee of future performance.
(III) Of the Association of Ideas: Ideas tend to combine in predictable sequences: those that resemble each other; those that are contiguous to each other; and those that retain a cause and effect on each other.
(IV) Skeptical Doubts Concerning the Operations of the Understanding: Hume emphasizes the need to retain a healthy sense of skepticism, not too much and not too little. Sensory impressions, as always, take precedence over reasoned thought: "The most lively thought is still inferior to the dullest sensation."
(V) Skeptical Solution of these Doubts: Human beings tend to assume that habit or custom is a sufficiently valid reason to continue an action. Not so, warns Hume.
(VI) Of Probability: Hume defines "probability" and "chance" as terms that incorrectly influence human beings as to the most likely outcome of an event. Probability and chance are no more effective at prediction than habit or custom.
(VII) Of the Idea of Necessary Connection: If custom, habit, probability, and chance do not effectively predict events, then what does? Hume suggests that "the observation of constant conjunction of certain impressions across many instances" will prove so.
(VIII) Of Liberty and Necessity: Hume notes that if one follows cause and effect to its ultimate cause (God), then one as an ultimate rationalist might refuse to accept God as the Primum Mobile of all things.
(IX) Of the Reason of Animals: Animals learn in ways not unlike how people do. Constant experience with related stimuli seems to teach better than reason--which animals lack.
(X) Of Miracles: Hume notes that miracles are witnessed only by country bumpkin types and are thus unreliable. The church took extreme exception with this section.
(XI) Of a Particular Providence: Though we might like to think that God exists, we have no experience to infer either His divine existence or an afterlife.
(XII) Of the Academic or Skeptical Philosophy: In the first part to this section, Hume lists competing variations of skeptical argument. In the second, emphasizes the need to eliminate the sole reliance on cold reason and logic to solve the assorted ills of mankind.

David Hume tried mightily to undermine reason as the sole factor in human discourse. Ironically, he was so successful in doing so that his books helped to usher in the next generation of Romantics who assumed much the same.

We thought that this was a legitimate book, but discovered that it was published by a company that simply copied texts from digital sources. Not at all what we expected.

This volume earns the names "thin" and "compendious" at the same time. In typical Oxford fashion, it contains not merely the original text and modern notes, but a collection of further relevant appendices, including an abstract from the later "Treatise of Human Nature", an essay on the "soul" intended for the Enquiry but published separately later, posthumous dialogues concerning the subject matter, excerpts from Hume's letters which address the Enquiry, a short autobiography published in the year of Hume's death, and glossaries and multiple indices.

Hume appears to have regretted his publication at such an unripe age of the Enquiry, which at first did not sell well and brought still-dangerous accusations of atheism. Indeed, the accusation of atheism could still be lethal in contemporary Europe, and Hume always approaches the subject indirectly, including pro-forma acknowledgements of a Creator, with his more daring work published separately as anonymous or posthumous essays. Nevertheless, his early work built up a following in later years and ultimately rendered him financially independent.

The fundamental achievement of this work must be its strong philosophical case for empiricism as the basis of all knowledge of the world that is worth the name. "When we run over libraries, persuaded of these principles, what havoc must we make? If we take in our hand any volume, of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance, let us ask, 'Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence?' No. Commit it then to the flames. For it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion." Hume places this judgement on a footing which seems undeniable. What do we know of causation other than as a generalisation of necessary relationships gathered from experience? Nothing. What do we know of the intrinsic properties of objects that can be ascertained by pure reason without ever having observed them? Nothing.

Hume was deeply sceptical of any inference about objects not directly observed - the nature of causation and even of forces and the like could not directly be seen. I wonder how he would have dealt with today's increasingly indirect and specialised science, where a particle in an accelerator is often a mere representation on a computer display? We cannot know, but I am sure his opinion would have been worth hearing.

Hume is also worth listening to on miracles, which he rejects as never having been sufficiently testified to in all of human experience - although, mark you, he does not reject in principle their possibility. No, his point is that no testimony suffices to provide assurance of a miracle's occurrence. A miracle requires human testimony, which is fallible. It is easier to believe in the failure of testimony than the failure of the laws of nature, hence no testimony suffices to demonstrate a miracle save that the falsity of the testimony would be yet more miraculous than the event itself.

Hume's 18th-Century circumlocution makes his text a little more difficult to read than modern English-language philosophers or the ancients, but Hume is arguably the greatest philosopher of the English language. His ideas and friendship influenced Adam Smith and he is a key figure of the Scottish Enlightenment. Anyone interested in Enlightenment thinking, epistemology, humanism or atheism ought to make their self familiar with this work.