An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding: A Letter from a Gentleman to His Friend in Edinburgh

This review mostly concerns the Enquiry. The Letter is primarily a defense of Hume's earlier Treatise of Human Nature, while his Abstract is an anonymous review of the Treatise. It strikes me as very funny, though not surprising, that Hume would review his own work. Funny because any author would give his right arm to get at least one favorable review when all the other critics are completely missing its point. Unsurprising because Hume was probably one of the only people alive at that time who could truly grasp all the facets of his radical philosophical claims. The Enquiry was written after the Treatise. Hume, though he claimed the opposite, seems never to have really recovered from the blow he took from seeing his Treatise "fall dead born from the press." As a result, his Enquiry is far more cautious in the steps it takes. (For those of you who have read both, yes, I swear, Hume IS more cautious. Compare the claims.) A more robust philosophical stance is taken in his Treatise, while a more focused stance is taken in his Enquiry. The Enquiry is mainly a work of epistemology and as such, scrutinizes our methods of acquiring knowledge. Making perhaps the most radical (and poignant) claim in all of modern philosophy, it posits, and supports, that there is NO causation, only conjunction. That, for example, when we see a glass drop and break, we cannot say we know gravity caused this (in the way we know two plus two equals four). All we see is constant conjunction. The connection is lacking, i.e., it is not inconceivable that the glass wouldn't bounce, turn to ash, or dissolve into sand (the way it is inconceivable that two plus two equals five). This, in effect, nullifies all the so called "laws" of nature that are formed by science. (Note that this does not state that there are no laws of nature, just that we really can never make the claim that we ever really know there are laws of nature.) This could be thought of as the philosophical shot heard round the world. Agree or disagree, Hume must be answered. Hume has historically been charged with creating an intellectual and philosophical cul-de-sac with his skepticism. To paraphrase Bertrand Russell, Hume makes a claim which none can refute, but at the same time one which none can accept. In effect, Hume's philosophy seems to bind the human mind, stopping its journey of discovery and ultimately accomplishing what his predecessor, John Locke, set out to do, i.e., map the extent of human knowledge. However, where one may see Hume's philosophy as shackles and fetters in the search for truth, one could also equally see his philosophy as liberation. Implicit in his philosophy is the idea that ANYTHING is possible. There are no shackles, no fetters, no limits; only those that we create for ourselves. Our limits are self-imposed, constructs of our observance (and inference) of connection. In this way Hume appears in the same light as the Eastern masters seeing that reality

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.

Hume, I and many others think, was the greatest philosopher to have written in English, and this is the book to pick up if you want to introduce yourself to Saint David's distinctive brand of classical empiricism. This is a must-read for anyone with even a passing interest in philosophy, and it's hard for me to see how anyone interested in the history of modern thought can avoid reading this book or the corresponding sections of Hume's Treatise.As is well-known, the Enquiry concerning Human Understanding was intended as an encapsulation and popularization of the views Hume defended in Book I of his magnum opus, A Treatise of Human Nature. Hume assumed that book's commercial failure could be accounted for by its length, difficulty, and lack of accessibility, and so, being a man who desired literary fame, he hoped to acquire commercial success by presenting the same ideas in a more appealing and accessible manner. Unfortunately, it seems Hume misunderstood what the literati of his day were looking for in a philosophical treatise. For the Enquiry, like the Treatise before it, didn't bring him the fame he sought. Still, Hume did understand what goes into writing excellent philosophical prose, and consequently this book is a much easier read than Book I of the Treatise. Indeed, this book constitutes an excellent introduction to Hume's thought, and, except for maybe Berkeley's Three Dialogues, I can't think of another primary source that would serve as a better introduction to classical British empiricism. Now, let's get to the ideas here. Hume, like the other classical empiricists, was primarily concerned with the psychological question of the origin of our concepts. About the answer to this question, the empiricists were all agreed--our concepts are furnished by experience, which includes both sensory experience and introspection (i.e., the experience of our own mental states). And the empiricists also agreed about the way we can justify our beliefs. Some beliefs are true (or false) in virtue of the ideas they contained, and we can know their truth (or falsity) simply by thinking about them; other beliefs are true (or false) in virtue of how the external world is, and we can know their truth (or falsity) only by drawing on our experiences of the world. According to Hume, all substantial conclusions about the world fall into this second category. That is, the truth (or falsity) of all substantial claims about the existence and nature of things in the external world can be discovered only by checking those claims against the evidence of our senses. The traditional way of placing Hume within the story of empiricism goes something like this. Hume takes up the empiricism of Locke and Berkeley and pushes it to its logical conclusion. Whereas Locke and Berkeley hadn't been wholly consistent empiricists, Hume, the true believer, demonstrates that classical empiricism leads to a pretty thoroughgoing skepticism. Since he's wholly convinced of

This is a superb edition of one of the basic works in Western philosophy. Designed to be used by both casual and serious students of philosophy, this edition contains the text of Hume's Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (EHU) and a series of other sections that provide background and further directions for studying Hume. Included are an excellent precis of the EHU, a first rate annotated bibliography concerning works by and about Hume, considerable background material on Hume, and excellent notes to the text of the EHU. The EHU is a concise and charmingly written presentation of Hume's views of the nature and particularly the limitations of human knowledge. The EHU presents Humes basic concepts of human thought, human pattern recognition, and then proceeds to Hume's revolutionary analysis of the problem of induction. Hume exposes our limitations in establishing certain cause and effect relations. Hume's analysis of this problem and its corollaries leads to ultimate skepticism about our ability to know the external world with certainty and undermines much of the basis for religion. Hume presents his ideas in an attractive style that owes much to famous 18th century essayists like Addison. A fundamental work and very readable work.

This is a good edition of the first but fundamental book published by Hume in 3 volumes (1 and 2 in 1739; 3 in 1740) dedicated to the methodical study of knowledge, passions and moral, through experience and practical observation. It is with Hume that empiricism (following Locke and Berkeley) reaches its complete expression as a "modern" classical system, against previous dogmatic visions of philosophy. According to Kant, Hume awoke him from the dogmatic dream......With Hume, english illustration comes to a definitive expression. Through his opus, empiricism is systematized and acquires a new dimension that expands its influence on all fields of philosophy. Previous conceptions about the theory of knowledge, ethics, politics, esthetics, and the philosophy of religion, all are transformed or renovated by Hume. In spite of his critics, Hume's system dwelled with different topics of modern interest: positivism, psychology, nominalism, critical skepticism, determinism, agnosticism, moral philosophy, political economy, etc.No serious philosopher after Hume, has been able to avoid a careful look at his system. So if you are a student or scholar of the subject matter, I highly recommend this edition of Hume's seminal work.