Book Review: An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding by David Hume

An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding and A Letter from a Gentleman to his Friend in Edinburgh by David Hume

David Hume is an eighteenth-century English philosopher who had a more skeptical outlook. In this short work from later in his life, he writes about various issues around what humans know and how we know those things. He starts out with a distinction between moral philosophy and natural philosophy. Natural philosophy is what we would call today "the sciences" and is focused more on abstract elements like mathematics and geometry. Moral philosophy is about human behavior, but for Hume it also includes politics, history, and anthropology, not just ethics. Moral philosophy is also grounded on experience or factual states and is often less certain than math.

Central to Hume's philosophy is his denial of cause and effect in experience (and thus in everything covered by "moral philosophy"). We assume the sun will rise tomorrow or bread is nourishing because of our repeated experiences. There is nothing absolute or necessary in the idea that the sun will rise tomorrow as there is necessity in the idea that interior angles of a triangle adding up to one hundred and eighty degrees. We know the sun will rise because of a continuity of experience, not because of a cause and effect relationship. Hume applies this reasoning to all of human experience.

He also argues that all ideas come to us through experience or our senses. This position leads him to deny any and all spiritual realities. Miracles cannot happen because they are violations of the laws of nature, which are necessary and cannot be contradicted, like mathematics and geometry. Hume disregards human testimonies to miracles like Jesus's resurrection as unverifiable and prone to error. He goes so far as to deny the knowability of the existence of God because humans can't reason back from an effect, like the created universe, to a cause, like a creator. 

In "A Letter from a Gentleman to his Friend in Edinburgh" Hume gives a defense against criticisms of his theory, focusing mostly on his natural atheism. The arguments he gives try to sidestep the issue by talking about different ways of arguing and that some arguments still retain their force though they have no basis in experience. It makes for a rather unconvincing shell game.

Hume's style of writing is easy to read. He is very clear and forthright. But he is not convincing. Aristotle defined science as about what happens always or for the most part. Hume seeks an absoluteness that denies the malleability of reality in a search for certitude. This leads him into all sorts of errors.

Not recommended unless you are interested in what Hume had to say as part of the history of philosophy. N.B. I have the first edition of this book which did not include "Hume's Abstract of a Treatise of Human Nature."