The Philosophy of David Hume

"It’s not, and in some respects, Kemp-Smith has been superseded. But he gets an awful lot right, and he effected a sea-change in people’s understanding of Hume. I think it’s fair to say that the dominant idea before Kemp-Smith is that Hume was a sceptic, he didn’t allow that we know anything. Yes. A number of commentators in his own time, most notoriously James Beattie and Thomas Reid, had pegged Hume as the person who drove empiricism to its sceptical limit and thereby basically reduced it to absurdity. Because we’re not allowed to believe anything, we’re left in the position of the Pyrrhonian skeptic, after Pyrrho of Elis, who is supposed not to have been confident of anything, including whether he was sitting down or standing up or was in a room or outdoors. And of course that way madness lies… So the Reid-Beattie interpretation was quite dominant in the Victorian period and in early 20th century commentary. It took Norman Kemp-Smith to rescue Hume from that, and point out that no, Hume is not an opponent of natural belief. He is a naturalist. He’s interested in the mechanisms of the mind that lead to natural belief. Well, in a sense, that’s exactly what Hume does. He watches human beings in their natural habitat. Of course he wasn’t a field anthropologist, but he had his books: he was a historian and knew a great deal about how human beings behave and the kind of systems they form for themselves and so on. So you can see him as intensely interested in human nature, in the nature of the human motivational system, in the nature of our cognitive systems, and that makes him the granddaddy of an awful lot of sciences of man. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Yes, it’s a very back-handed compliment to Hume, because he was very doubtful about the powers of human reason. One’s got to be careful here, reasonable is a term of praise, and Hume uses it as such. He doesn’t doubt that there are better and worse ways of conducting our intellectual lives or conducting our scientific enquiries. He’s firmly on the side of the better ways of doing that. But he’s an opponent of the scholastic, quasi-mathematical, logical powers of the mind. Those powers he diminishes. What comes in to take their place is the doctrine of natural belief, of the way our psychologies will end up distributing confidence in things. Very much so. The second book of the Treatise was basically entirely about human motivation, leading onto the third book which is about ethics and to some extent politics as well. The mechanisms of the mind he’s interested in are the ones that have direct motivational efficacy. Yes, that’s the famous provocative remark, “and has no other office but to serve and obey them.” There’s an insight there which is picked up in much modern philosophy, and it is of course the insight of pragmatism, that success in action is, in some sense, the mother of thought. It’s because we need our actions in the world to serve our needs and to generate success, that we have the intelligences we do. That’s the nutshell idea of modern American pragmatism, and the pragmatist tradition."