an enquiry concerning human understanding-(oxford worlds classics) david hume peter millican

[...]... pervasive Having identified the common threads that linked the ancient, medieval, and early modern worlds, we shall then be in a position to turn with more appreciation to the pages of the Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, one of the very finest works of philosophy and the authoritative statement of David Hume s mature epistemology 1 From Ancient to Modern Cosmology Aristotle was supremely honoured... Christianity, a synthesis impressively refined by Thomas Aquinas (1225–74) The Christianization of the Roman Empire had long since brought about the suppression of all the pagan schools of philosophy that had thrived in ancient Greece (such as the Academic and Pyrrhonian sceptics, the Epicureans, and the Stoics).2 These rival traditions were then largely forgotten until the Renaissance, when pagan manuscripts... II) The main point Hume emphasizes here is a corollary of his inductive approach to science: since all our factual reasonings are founded on an assumption of uniformity or resemblance, their strength can be expected to depend on the degree of resemblance involved Though Hume illustrates this point by the analogy between humans and animals —appealing to the instinctive nature of animal reasoning to... drawn between atoms and empty space, and avoiding the Cartesian plenum Boyle’s corpuscularianism became philosophical orthodoxy in Britain through the work of his friend John Locke, a philosopher destined to eclipse Descartes, and whose epistemology and political theory were to exert huge influence into the nineteenth century and beyond Locke’s monumental Essay concerning Human Understanding, published... emphasizing the ‘many positive advantages, which result from an accurate scrutiny into the powers and faculties of human nature’ It might be suggested that any such supposed ‘science is uncertain and chimerical’, but Hume responds to this suggestion by insisting that at least some kind of ‘mental geography, or delineation of the distinct parts and powers of the mind’ is clearly defensible and well within... ‘intelligible’ We cannot ‘understand’ how billiard balls communicate motion by impulse, nor how the mind has command over the body, nor even how any mind, whether human or divine, has command over itself And the fact that we cannot understand these operations proves that we cannot perceive the necessity which supposedly governs them All are equally unintelligible, equally opaque to ‘clear and distinct’ perception... illusion (as shown in Sections IV and VII), and it is this recognition that provides the key to properly understanding the necessity of human actions In learning that the necessity of physical operations amounts to no more than constant conjunction and consequent inference, we come to see that human actions too are subject to the same necessity While making this case, Hume in passing develops his view... led to the criminal’s action Here Hume does little more than drop this hint; the full development of his sentimentalist moral theory comes in the companion work, his Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals 15 Section IX: ‘Of the Reason of Animals’ In the wake of the Darwinian revolution, it is no surprise that there should be similarities between animal and human thinking, but in the eighteenth... cause and reason why opium makes one sleep.’ ‘The reason is that in opium resides a dormitive virtue, of which it is the nature to stupefy the senses.’ Here the appeal to ‘dormitive virtue’ is clearly no more than giving a fancy name to an unknown cause of the observed phenomenon Any appearance of explanation is entirely bogus, and most natural philosophers understandably became anxious to distance... for both Roman Catholics and Protestants, concerned the question of free will The growth of empirical science, and the mechanical philosophy in particular, put increasing emphasis on laws of nature and the clockwork predictability of physical phenomena Hence most of the great philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (e.g Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, Leibniz, Hume, and Kant) were . Data Hume, David, 1711–1776 [Philosophical essays concerning human understanding] An enquiry concerning human understanding / David Hume; edited with an introduction and notes by Peter Millican. p CLASSICS AN ENQUIRY CONCERNING HUMAN UNDERSTANDING DAVID HUME (1711–76) was born and educated in Edinburgh. In 1739–40 he published A Treatise of Human Nature, a great work but poorly received, and Hume. Aristotelian to Cartesian Intelligibility 3. Corpuscularianism, Locke, and Newton 4. Free Will, and the Dangers of Infidelity 5. God’s Design, and Human Reason 6. Inertness, Malebranche, and Berkeley 7.