Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-r5fsc Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-25T08:11:47.929Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Sceptical Beast in the Beastly Sceptic: Human Nature in Hume

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 April 2012

P.J.E Kail
P.J.E Kail
Affiliation:
St Peter's College, University of [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

David Hume's most brilliant and ambitious work is entitled A Treatise of Human Nature, and it, together with his other writings, has left an indelible mark on philosophical conceptions of human nature. So it is not merely the title of Hume's work that makes discussion of it an appropriate inclusion to this volume, but the fact of its sheer influence. However, its pattern of influence – including, of course, the formulations of ideas consciously antithetical Hume's own – is an immensely complex one, subtle and incredibly difficult to decode. In all probability ‘Hume's’ presence in contemporary thinking of human nature is to likened to the end product of a historiographical game of Chinese whispers, whereby ‘Hume's’ view on x and y is now inflected with interpretations his work – or, more accurately, selected parts of it – that are in turn filtered by thinkers and traditions with different focuses and interest from Hume's own. I am not equipped even to begin to trace this line of influence, a lack compounded by my relative ignorance of the present state of the debate on human nature. Nevetheless various ‘humean’ doctrines still orient debate (even if they aren't labelled as such) and I guess these claims include the idea that causation is a matter of instantiating a universal regularity, that normativity can understood causally, that motivation is a matter of belief plus some independently intelligibly ‘attitude’, that a self is best conceived as a collection of independent states that (somehow) combine to yield a self and so on.

Type
Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 70 , July 2012 , pp. 219 - 231
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2012

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 All page references to David Hume: Essays, Moral, Political and Literary, ed. Miller, Eugene, rev. ed. (Indiana: Liberty Press, 1995)Google Scholar. Henceforth EMPL.

2 References to Norton and Norton (eds.) A Treatise of Human Nature (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000)Google Scholar, following the convention of book, part, section and paragraph numbers. Page references to A Treatise of Human Nature ed. Selby-Bigge, L. A., revised by P. H. Nidditch (2nd ed., Oxford: Clarendon, 1978) (SBN)Google Scholar.

3 Michel de Montaigne: The Complete Essays, translated Screech, M. A. (London: Penguin, 1991)Google Scholar.

4 For a discussion of the history of this particular trope, see Harrison, Peter ‘The Virtues of Animals in Seventeenth-Century Thought’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 59 (1998), 463–484CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 For a fascinating account of the historical uses of this animal, see Floridi, Luciano, ‘Skepticism and Animal Rationality: The Fortune of Chrysippus' Dog in the History of Western Thought’, Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie, 79 (1997), 27–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 How can man ‘…from the power of his own understanding, know the hidden inward motivations, of animate creatures?’ (505). For a discussion of Montagine and Pyrrhonism, in connection with naturalism see Berry, Jessica ‘The Pyrrhonian Revival in Montaigne and Nietzsche’, Journal for the History of Ideas 65 (2004), 497–514CrossRefGoogle Scholar. She uses this to draw interesting lessons about Nietzsche's naturalism.

7 For the context of this argument see Serjeantson, Richard ‘The passions and animal language’, Journal for the History of Ideas, 62 (2001), 425–444CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

8 For a discussion of this, seen Harrison ‘The Virtues of Animals in Seventeenth-Century’, p. 480.

9 Page references to The Fable of the Bees; or Private Vices, Publick Benefits ed. Kaye, (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1988), Vol. 1Google Scholar.

10 For a fascinating discussion of this topic, see Riskin, Jessica, ‘Eighteenth-Century Wetware’, Representations, 83 (2003), 97–125CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 One serious difference may turn on the fact that animals are not moral agents – for discussion, see Pitson, A E ‘The Nature of Humean Animals’, Hume Studies, 19 (1993), 301–316Google Scholar.

12 For a fuller discussion, see my ‘Leibniz Dog and Humean Reason’ in Mazza, Emilio and Ronchetti, Emanuele (eds.) New Essays on David Hume (Milan: Angeli, 2007), 65–80Google Scholar.

13 New Essays on Human Understanding ed. Remnant, and Bennett, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 143Google Scholar.

14 Emmanuel Eze tries to explain what in Hume's theory of mind might be behind this claim, and how Hume might be think of “negro” minds as closer to animal minds. But I think this fails to address that fact that Hume talks of an ‘original’ distinction, which he treatment of the differences between humans and animals in no way countenances. See Eze, ‘Hume, Race and Human Nature’, Journal for the History of Ideas 61 (2000), 691–698CrossRefGoogle Scholar. It is worth noting that Hume was anti-slavery – see his essay ‘Of the populousness of ancient nations’.

15 Gaskin, J C A (ed.) David Hume, Principle Writings on Religion (Oxford: World Classics, 1993) 45Google Scholar.

16 ‘The Naturalism of David Hume (I)’, Mind 14 (1905), 149–173, 155Google Scholar. Kemp Smith takes Hume's earlier work to be informed by a ‘half-hearted…theistic view of nature’ (The Philosophy of David Hume: A Critical Study of its Origins and Central Doctrines (London: MacMillan, 1941) 563Google Scholar. I think that is unwarranted claim. For discussion see Wright, John P. ‘Kemp Smith and the Two Kinds of Naturalism in Hume's Philosophy’ in Emilio Mazza and Emanuele Ronchetti (eds.) New Essays on David Hume (Milan: Angeli, 2007)Google Scholar and Loeb, Louis ‘What is Worth Preserving in the Kemp Smith Interpretation of Hume?’, British Journal for the History of Philosophy 17 (2009), 769–797Google Scholar.

17 References to Beauchamp, (ed.) An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999)Google Scholar by section and paragraph number. Page numbers to Selby-Bigge, L. A. (ed.) rev. Nidditch Hume's Enquiries (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975) (SBN)Google Scholar.

18 References to Beauchamp, (ed.) An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998)Google Scholar by section and paragraph number. Page numbers to Selby-Bigge, L. A. (ed.) rev. Nidditch Hume's Enquiries (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975) (SBN)Google Scholar.

19 Except, perhaps, in the case of the northern propensity for strong liquor and the southern propensity for love and women (again, we are not showing Hume in his best light). Even here Hume seems ambivalent about physical causes.

20 For two accounts of this which the present discussion relies upon, see Gill, MichaelThe British Moralists on Human Nature and the Birth of Secular Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006)Google Scholar and Cohon, RachelHume's Morality: Feeling and Fabrication (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008)Google Scholar.