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108 reviews for:
Enquiries Concerning the Human Understanding: And Concerning the Principles of Morals
David Hume
3.78 AVERAGE
108 reviews for:
Enquiries Concerning the Human Understanding: And Concerning the Principles of Morals
David Hume
3.78 AVERAGE
causation isn’t real but I don’t like Humes writing style
This work was an interesting read, but I can’t say I enjoyed reading it. This was such a difficult read for me to get through. I wanted to quit multiple times because of how painfully slow it felt to read and for how convoluted I found Humes writing. Humes likes to go on very long tangents where he constantly repeats himself. I just found myself so uninterested, despite his interesting thoughts. Maybe I’ll pick it up again when I’m more knowledgeable.
"After all, I may, perhaps, agree to your general conclusion in favour of liberty, though upon different premises from those, on which you endeavour to found it. I think, that the state ought to tolerate every principle of philosophy; nor is there an instance, that any government has suffered in its political interests by such indulgence. There is no enthusiasm among philosophers; their doctrines are not very alluring to the people; and no restraint can be put upon their reasonings, but what must be of dangerous consequence to the sciences, and even to the state, by paving the way for persecution and oppression in points, where the generality of mankind are more deeply interested and concerned."
Though perhaps not the central takeaway to this work, the above quote struck me, especially in light of the twentieth century.
Though short in pages, An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding packs a punch with philosophy. I struggled a bit to understand it, but I could also easily see how he wrote for "popular" audiences. Not my favorite by any means, but thought-provoking.
Though perhaps not the central takeaway to this work, the above quote struck me, especially in light of the twentieth century.
Though short in pages, An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding packs a punch with philosophy. I struggled a bit to understand it, but I could also easily see how he wrote for "popular" audiences. Not my favorite by any means, but thought-provoking.
“In our reasonings concerning matter of fact, there are all imaginable degrees of assurance, from the highest certainty to the lowest species of moral evidence. A wise man, therefore, proportions his belief to the evidence."
Best summary I've seen:
*As intriguing today as when it was first published, Hume's An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding is a fascinating exploration into the nature of human knowledge. Using billiard balls, candles and other colorful examples, Hume conveys the core of his empiricism—that true knowledge can only be gained through sensory experience. No other philosopher has been at the forefront of the mind than David Hume; physics, psychology, neuroscience—connections to Hume are everywhere. Here is the book that Immanuel Kant confessed to have awoken him from his "dogmatic slumber."*
In a way, it reminded me of A BriefER History of Time as Hawking also used billiard balls as explanatory props.
Especially loved the ending:
"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.”
Best summary I've seen:
*As intriguing today as when it was first published, Hume's An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding is a fascinating exploration into the nature of human knowledge. Using billiard balls, candles and other colorful examples, Hume conveys the core of his empiricism—that true knowledge can only be gained through sensory experience. No other philosopher has been at the forefront of the mind than David Hume; physics, psychology, neuroscience—connections to Hume are everywhere. Here is the book that Immanuel Kant confessed to have awoken him from his "dogmatic slumber."*
In a way, it reminded me of A BriefER History of Time as Hawking also used billiard balls as explanatory props.
Especially loved the ending:
"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.”
This was 4 philosophical-stars, and probably more like 2 enjoyment-stars. Hume is still the most agreeable philosopher I've come across, I just love his skeptical arguments. While most of this was soporific (just because of the nature of the enquiry - I'm not much interested in ideas of cause and effect, reason, impressions, and ideas) I did enjoy his probe into the testimony on miracles and religion. Glad his publisher eventually relented on including those parts.
I find Hume's skepticism interesting here, in that he's arguing against rationalising things unlike someone like Descartes. Here, for my future self, is a summary of the main topics covered in this text:
- The classification of ideas into thoughts/thoughts and impressions (impressions are much more vivid than ideas)
- The copy principle: simple ideas come from simple impressions e.g. a colourblind person can't conceive of colour and a selfish person can't conceive of true generosity
- Our ideas are connected by: resemblance, contiguity, and causation
- Human reason can be divided into: relations of ideas and matters of fact
- Causation: the fact that we don't actually perceive it, there is only constant conjunction
- Belief in the uniformity of nature is founded on habit, not reason
- Secret powers: the qualities of objects that are not apparent through sensory experience e.g. that bread is edible
- The future: we can't predict it, we can't even say that the sun will rise tomorrow, only that it is probable it will
- Fiction vs belief: the difference is how strong the feeling behind it is i.e. beliefs cause stronger sentiments than fiction
- How we experience the world: only through phenomena, not as things actually are
- That we have no justification for believing in testimony of miracles
- And hence that any religion based on the occurrence of miracles is unfounded
- That we should employ the balance of probabilities when choosing whether to trust testimony
- That compatibilism is the way to go because determinism relies on causation which we can't perceive, and 'freedom' is simply being able to act in accordance with our own will
- That the existence of God can't be inferred from its effects because we can't even begin to understand or have experience of the qualities of God (while I can infer from the effect of a footprint that a human has passed by, because I have experienced humans walking)
- That Cartesian doubt is unworkable
- That we cannot say for certain that the material world exists because this is based on experience and experience can be called into doubt
And here are some interesting thoughts (some stolen from members of my tutorial discussion):
- That Hume employs a common sense method by making a range of assumptions about the world, i.e. that there is regularity in nature, that natural laws are fixed, etc, but then he employs extreme scepticism in the final chapters
- Is the clear distinction between impressions and ideas justified? Are impressions really more vivid than impressions? Sometimes our fantasies can be more pleasurable to experience than our senses
- Does every simple idea really come from an impression? How does a person think of/create a gear, and know that inserting it into another one would make it work in a particular way
- Arguably, experience or custom is a form of reason in itself e.g. the action of eating bread because I have been able to ingest it before is a quite rational process
--> his scepticism is about induction itself. But couldn't induction count as reason? Most people who believe in induction tend to do better, so doesn't that give us a reason to use induction?
- The argument from defect (i.e. that a blind person can't have an impression of colour) doesn't necessitate that ideas are copies of impressions because what if we just have a bunch of other ideas, other than sight, that don't come from impressions at all?
I find Hume's skepticism interesting here, in that he's arguing against rationalising things unlike someone like Descartes. Here, for my future self, is a summary of the main topics covered in this text:
- The classification of ideas into thoughts/thoughts and impressions (impressions are much more vivid than ideas)
- The copy principle: simple ideas come from simple impressions e.g. a colourblind person can't conceive of colour and a selfish person can't conceive of true generosity
- Our ideas are connected by: resemblance, contiguity, and causation
- Human reason can be divided into: relations of ideas and matters of fact
- Causation: the fact that we don't actually perceive it, there is only constant conjunction
- Belief in the uniformity of nature is founded on habit, not reason
- Secret powers: the qualities of objects that are not apparent through sensory experience e.g. that bread is edible
- The future: we can't predict it, we can't even say that the sun will rise tomorrow, only that it is probable it will
- Fiction vs belief: the difference is how strong the feeling behind it is i.e. beliefs cause stronger sentiments than fiction
- How we experience the world: only through phenomena, not as things actually are
- That we have no justification for believing in testimony of miracles
- And hence that any religion based on the occurrence of miracles is unfounded
- That we should employ the balance of probabilities when choosing whether to trust testimony
- That compatibilism is the way to go because determinism relies on causation which we can't perceive, and 'freedom' is simply being able to act in accordance with our own will
- That the existence of God can't be inferred from its effects because we can't even begin to understand or have experience of the qualities of God (while I can infer from the effect of a footprint that a human has passed by, because I have experienced humans walking)
- That Cartesian doubt is unworkable
- That we cannot say for certain that the material world exists because this is based on experience and experience can be called into doubt
And here are some interesting thoughts (some stolen from members of my tutorial discussion):
- That Hume employs a common sense method by making a range of assumptions about the world, i.e. that there is regularity in nature, that natural laws are fixed, etc, but then he employs extreme scepticism in the final chapters
- Is the clear distinction between impressions and ideas justified? Are impressions really more vivid than impressions? Sometimes our fantasies can be more pleasurable to experience than our senses
- Does every simple idea really come from an impression? How does a person think of/create a gear, and know that inserting it into another one would make it work in a particular way
- Arguably, experience or custom is a form of reason in itself e.g. the action of eating bread because I have been able to ingest it before is a quite rational process
--> his scepticism is about induction itself. But couldn't induction count as reason? Most people who believe in induction tend to do better, so doesn't that give us a reason to use induction?
- The argument from defect (i.e. that a blind person can't have an impression of colour) doesn't necessitate that ideas are copies of impressions because what if we just have a bunch of other ideas, other than sight, that don't come from impressions at all?
Already had a background in behavioural neuroscience, and while some of the beginning bits of the book were interesting it got boring for myself after some time
at first i was like "hey, hume isn't that bad!" but then hume dived into yet another self-indulgent and frustratingly repetitive ramble and i can't help but think god, i can't wait to read kant just so i can read him tell this guy to shut the fuck up.
don't get me wrong: the earlier sections are very clever works of philosophical reasoning. hume's prose is shockingly very readable and almost frighteningly modern which is rare for a philosopher, methinks, especially ones from his era.
that said, this genuinely needed to be cut down to size. there are entire sections that i think go on for several pages longer than would be necessary. although hume's writing makes it all rather easy — i shudder to think what the reading process would have been like had he been obscure and convoluted — i still can't help but feel frustrated.
don't get me wrong: the earlier sections are very clever works of philosophical reasoning. hume's prose is shockingly very readable and almost frighteningly modern which is rare for a philosopher, methinks, especially ones from his era.
that said, this genuinely needed to be cut down to size. there are entire sections that i think go on for several pages longer than would be necessary. although hume's writing makes it all rather easy — i shudder to think what the reading process would have been like had he been obscure and convoluted — i still can't help but feel frustrated.
informative
reflective
medium-paced
How do we know things about the world? When we wake up in the morning, when we make our breakfast and rush to our workplace or to a chore, why do we expect things to be the way they are? Do we even have a right to believe that our daily routine will be the same as the day before? These are simple questions, and yes, most people won’t go beyond an “I don’t know” or an “I guess” in answering them. The eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher David Hume, however, wasn’t content with shrugging them off. He wanted to push the boundaries of inquiry to their breaking point to see if we really can have that certainty about our lives that we take for granted. He wanted to examine our cognitive capacity to reason and think about the world around us in order to find answers to questions like the ones I posed above. And so An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding was written, and it’s a work I can say that I enjoyed very much.
As one of the great empiricists of his day, Hume was critical of rationalists like Descartes and Malebranche who believed that much of our knowledge was gained a priori (before experience); he contended that, instead, most of the knowledge we have about the world comes from experientially-verified matters of fact—causal relations whose opposites can be reasonably conceived and do not contain implicit contradictions, such as the sun not rising tomorrow, and thus require confirmation from our senses. Furthermore, because our ideas are copied from our impressions, even concepts that seem initially to be a priori (such as whiteness and circularity) are actually known to us because of our constant experience with them in the everyday world. Unfortunately, the matter isn’t so cut-and-dried, because the problem with this inductive principle is that it cannot account for the uniformity that seems to forever conjoin certain causes to certain effects. This uniformity cannot be reasoned demonstratively because there is no contradiction in believing that the future will not resemble the past (unlike saying that 5+6 will someday not equal 11 or that one day there will be a married bachelor, which are contradictions and are thus propositions separate from matters of fact), and it cannot be reasoned through experience because in order to make predictions about the future, it would need to be assumed as true based on past inductive experience, and that would be circular. Thus, induction is not a valid form of reasoning—and yet it’s something that we do on a day-to-day basis.
The solution to this problem is not so much as a solution as an admission that our knowledge is too limited to probe the grander designs of the natural world. We can only rely on the knowledge immediately available to us through experience, and based on this experience, we come to expect that certain effects follow certain causes because we’ve very rarely been met with an exception that tells us otherwise, if at all. So while it’s conceivable that the sun will not rise tomorrow, and we can’t know for sure until it doesn’t, we expect it to rise because it’s risen every day since the day of our birth. We’ve been conditioned, in a sense, to wake up with the certainty that our room will be bright at 8 AM in June rather than dark, and while that certainty is fallacious because uniformity is fallacious, we rely on it just the same because it allows us to live our lives with a sense of comfort and security. After all, what good would come out of constantly doubting the future by discounting all instances of the past that have predicted it? Though a skeptic from beginning to end, Hume nevertheless concludes his work by advocating for a mitigated skepticism that pushes his readers to doubt just enough so that they can work to advance theories of knowledge rather than remain complacent in existing ones. There is no sense to disbelieve everything like Descartes did because it would unnecessarily burden our lives, but it’s also important not to rest on one’s laurels, either, because an inquisitive mind is never a bad thing. Philosophy is not simply an endless interrogation of the world and its operations—it’s also a new way of looking at things beyond what is conventional and expected using rigorous, systematic and reasoned approaches. And though not every aspect of Hume’s reasoning has held up over these past 265 or so years, he has nevertheless become a major influence in the way we see the world today because he dared to question the philosophy of the past in order to advance the science of the future.
It’s also an engaging read, too, I’m not going to lie. One would expect a philosophical text from 1748 to be rather difficult and dry, but I was pleasantly surprised by the eloquence of Hume’s rhetoric. He was also very sassy when he wanted to be, and I couldn’t help but smile whenever he tried to put his critics to shame after making a decisive point. When you finish a book wishing you could have a drink with its author, I think it says a lot about one’s overall experience, and it’s no different in this case: I genuinely had a good time with this read, and it’s convinced me to read more philosophical texts in the future.
As one of the great empiricists of his day, Hume was critical of rationalists like Descartes and Malebranche who believed that much of our knowledge was gained a priori (before experience); he contended that, instead, most of the knowledge we have about the world comes from experientially-verified matters of fact—causal relations whose opposites can be reasonably conceived and do not contain implicit contradictions, such as the sun not rising tomorrow, and thus require confirmation from our senses. Furthermore, because our ideas are copied from our impressions, even concepts that seem initially to be a priori (such as whiteness and circularity) are actually known to us because of our constant experience with them in the everyday world. Unfortunately, the matter isn’t so cut-and-dried, because the problem with this inductive principle is that it cannot account for the uniformity that seems to forever conjoin certain causes to certain effects. This uniformity cannot be reasoned demonstratively because there is no contradiction in believing that the future will not resemble the past (unlike saying that 5+6 will someday not equal 11 or that one day there will be a married bachelor, which are contradictions and are thus propositions separate from matters of fact), and it cannot be reasoned through experience because in order to make predictions about the future, it would need to be assumed as true based on past inductive experience, and that would be circular. Thus, induction is not a valid form of reasoning—and yet it’s something that we do on a day-to-day basis.
The solution to this problem is not so much as a solution as an admission that our knowledge is too limited to probe the grander designs of the natural world. We can only rely on the knowledge immediately available to us through experience, and based on this experience, we come to expect that certain effects follow certain causes because we’ve very rarely been met with an exception that tells us otherwise, if at all. So while it’s conceivable that the sun will not rise tomorrow, and we can’t know for sure until it doesn’t, we expect it to rise because it’s risen every day since the day of our birth. We’ve been conditioned, in a sense, to wake up with the certainty that our room will be bright at 8 AM in June rather than dark, and while that certainty is fallacious because uniformity is fallacious, we rely on it just the same because it allows us to live our lives with a sense of comfort and security. After all, what good would come out of constantly doubting the future by discounting all instances of the past that have predicted it? Though a skeptic from beginning to end, Hume nevertheless concludes his work by advocating for a mitigated skepticism that pushes his readers to doubt just enough so that they can work to advance theories of knowledge rather than remain complacent in existing ones. There is no sense to disbelieve everything like Descartes did because it would unnecessarily burden our lives, but it’s also important not to rest on one’s laurels, either, because an inquisitive mind is never a bad thing. Philosophy is not simply an endless interrogation of the world and its operations—it’s also a new way of looking at things beyond what is conventional and expected using rigorous, systematic and reasoned approaches. And though not every aspect of Hume’s reasoning has held up over these past 265 or so years, he has nevertheless become a major influence in the way we see the world today because he dared to question the philosophy of the past in order to advance the science of the future.
It’s also an engaging read, too, I’m not going to lie. One would expect a philosophical text from 1748 to be rather difficult and dry, but I was pleasantly surprised by the eloquence of Hume’s rhetoric. He was also very sassy when he wanted to be, and I couldn’t help but smile whenever he tried to put his critics to shame after making a decisive point. When you finish a book wishing you could have a drink with its author, I think it says a lot about one’s overall experience, and it’s no different in this case: I genuinely had a good time with this read, and it’s convinced me to read more philosophical texts in the future.
Hume is considered one of the great philosophers for a reason,he may be wrong but he is very clear. Love his anti-miracle opinions.