Welcome to this set of lectures on David Hume, eight lectures which are going to be focussing mainly on book, one of the treatise of human nature,
but there will also be a fair bit of reference to other works, as you will see indeed in this first lecture.
Today, I'm going to talk about some of the historical background to Hume,
where he was coming from, where he was going, looking at some of the major themes,
things that can often seem very confusing actually in Hume,
and I'm going to be telling a story about why I think he approached his philosophy in the way that he did.
Some of what I say is very secure. Some is conjecture where it is conjectural.
I shall draw attention to that for you. So first of all, some historical background, and I want to stress this is very selective.
But I hope it puts in context a lot of Hume's main interests.
So first of all, let's just place him in the general time he's born in 1711.
So just not long. More than 300 years ago.
And he's born just about 100 years after Galileo instituted the Scientific Revolution.
OK, so that isn't so very long.
Bacon Francis Bacon advocated empirical science in 16:20 that was very influential, and clearly Hume was influenced by it as well.
We get Descartes coming along in sixteen forty one with his meditations, the Royal Society of London promoting science is formed in sixteen sixty.
Robert Boyle writes the sceptical chemist or publishes it in Sixteen Sixty One and Newton's principio comes in.
Sixteen eighty seven. So part of the background here is the so-called mechanical philosophy.
This was to a significant extent instituted by Galileo, but Descartes was its principal early advocate.
He basically wanted to say that the physical world is composed entirely of matter.
The essence of matter is extension, and physical happenings in the world can be explained in terms of interactions
between bits of matter pushing into each other or bashing into each other.
Essentially, you've got mechanical action as the key to the operation of the universe.
Robert Boyle His science was very much based on a similar idea,
except he differed from Descartes in thinking of matter as being impenetrable extension.
So he doesn't. Unlike Descartes, he doesn't say matter just is extension, but matter is impenetrable extension.
And his view influenced a lot of people, including Newton,
now an attraction of the mechanical philosophy is that it seems to make causation intelligible.
Think of one billiard ball bashing into another. We feel we can understand why the one is making the other move.
In contrast, the Aristotelian style of science that had preceded Galileo fought in terms of objects moving under internal strivings.
The reason stones fall to the Earth, which is the centre of the universe,
is because they are trying to reach their natural place and the mechanistic dislike this kind of
science because it seemed not to be intelligible and explanatory in the same way it was proposing,
as it were occult forces planets knowing where they should be moving in order to go round the Sun in order to attract each other and so on.
But the new science opens a sceptical gap as well.
Where is the Aristotelian in the Aristotelian model? The world is fundamentally intelligible to us because we can understand God's purposes in it.
Under the new science, the world that we experience is very, very different from what's really there.
We don't actually get to see the fundamental particles of matter and the way in which they're operating.
So we get the possibility of sceptical doubts.
I'm going to introduce Thomas Hobbes because he plays quite a large part, I think, in influencing some of the arguments that he went for.
And the reaction to them. So Hobbs, like Descartes, is a mechanism.
He also, like Descartes, thinks the world is completely composed of matter.
But he takes the view that matter is all there is.
So where is they can't believe that we have immaterial souls, Hobbs wanted to say.
The only things that exist are material things, so he's a materialist in that sense.
He, like Descartes, thinks that everything in the physical world. But for him, that's all.
The world is causally determined by the laws of mechanics. And he thinks that a perfect science would be essentially demonstrative.
So he thinks that the mechanical world view gives an intelligible understanding of how things are.
That's what science should pursue. Now, Hobbs is best known today as a political theorist.
He wrote the leviathan very famously with some notorious views.
But actually, in his day, what was really shocking was the materialism.
Now, Hobbs didn't actually explicitly deny the existence of God, but most people took him to be effectively an atheist.
Because if you deny the existence of immaterial stuff,
if you say the only stuff that exists in the universe is material that makes religion very difficult.
Not only does it seem rather implausible to think of God himself as some sort of material thing, but also obviously immortality,
the doctrine of immortality seems very hard to maintain if in fact, the only part of us that exists is the material body.
And I've noted some cases where the opposition to jobs even played out in parliament and burning of books in Oxford.
He was not the favourite philosopher. Over the following century or two, he was a notorious bogeyman.
In fact, a whole load of philosophers I've listed, some of them just the most prominent at the bottom, they're lined up to attack what they thought.
The doctrine of materialism was absolutely appalling on the main argument against materialism
is that there are certain properties that we have that matter could not possibly have.
And in particular, we are capable of thought. And.
Thinking matter is impossible. Why? Because matter is just inert stuff.
All right. Matter doesn't have active powers of thought is an active power and therefore matter could not have it.
So there must be stuff in the universe besides matter and materialism must be false.
That was the basic argument. Incidentally, this argument is still around with us now in discussions about what we now call physical ism,
whether the mind is actually an operation of physical matter.
Often the argument is trotted out. There is no way that physical matter could have certain properties like consciousness or whatever.
It's essentially the same debate. Now, amongst the people who opposed jobs, the most important is John Locke.
He was influenced by Boyle. He thought of materialist interaction as a particularly intelligible.
But unlike many other philosophers, certainly unlike unlike Boyle, unlike Hobbs, he was far more agnostic.
He far more doubtful about our ability to penetrate into the inner essences of things.
So he puts much more evidence, much more emphasis on empiricism,
finding out things about the world by experience rather than trying to work out with our minds how things must be so very,
very different from Hobbs with his demonstrative science. And he also puts a significant emphasis on probability.
So in trying to find out about the world, we have to accept uncertainty.
We cannot pursue the sort of certain science that people like Descartes and Hobbes aspired to.
So he wrote his great essay concerning human understanding that was published in 60 90.
So three years after Newton, a fantastically influential book, the most influential philosophy book over the following century.
Now, Lock is standardly thought of as the father of British empiricism,
and people think of Lock Berkeley and Hume as the three great British empiricist.
So one important point I want to make here is that we need to distinguish between two different kinds of empiricism.
One of them concept empiricism. And that is a question of where our thoughts come from.
What is the origin of our ideas in contemporary terms and concepts?
Empiricism claims that all our ideas are derived from experience.
You cannot have the idea of anything at all except by experiencing it.
So, for example, there's no way you could have an idea of the colour red without perceiving something that's red.
There's no way you could have the idea of the taste of a pineapple until you've actually tasted it.
It's quite a popular example at the time, because pineapples are rather exotic fruit.
So this is clearly disagreeing with Descartes, who thought that we have certain innate ideas,
he thought the idea of extinction was innately thought the idea of God was innate,
so we could acquire knowledge simply by consulting our ideas in isolation from experience.
Whereas concept empiricism says no, all of our ideas come from experience.
Now that's different from knowledge, empiricism, knowledge,
empiricism claims that all our knowledge of the world derives from and depends on experience.
So the only way we can know anything about the world is by appeal to experience.
So just to give you an example of the distinction here.
Take the idea of a bachelor. A male unmarried man.
Well. There's no way that you could have the idea of a man or the idea of marriage, except through experience.
But once you have got the idea of a bachelor as an unmarried man, you don't need to appeal to experience to see that all bachelors are unmarried.
That just follows by understanding of the definition. So you don't need empirical evidence to support it.
So it's entirely possible for someone to be a concept empiricist to say all our ideas come from experience and yet to
hold that we have a priori knowledge that is knowledge that doesn't need to appeal to experience for its justification.
So you can be a concept empiricist, as Locke was without being a knowledge empiricist.
And indeed, Locke is not a pure knowledge empiricist.
He thinks there are some things we can prove a priori.
Indeed, some of these principles will see feed into his proof of the existence of God.
OK, so let's now turn to some major human themes empiricism, scepticism, naturalism.
So these when when people discuss Hume, one of the major perennial topics of discussion is how we should view Hume,
which is the most prominent theme in his philosophy. Is he a sceptic?
Is he a naturalist? Is he something else? You will see, for example, in the examinations for this paper,
a very common question asks about the supposed tension between his scepticism and his naturalism.
I think we need to look at this with a bit more nuance, and I think there's much less tension between those when they are suitably interpreted.
So I'll sketch a little bit of that today. OK, so the main work we're looking at is a treatise of human nature.
This was published in 1759 1740. So Books one and two of the treatise were published in January 17 39,
and Book three was published in very end of October, beginning of November 17 40.
Now, a work that I would strongly advise you to read is the abstract of the treaties.
This is a short pamphlet, really, that Hume wrote anonymously, and he wrote it in order to provide a puff for the treaties.
So he talks about the author of the treaties in the third person is he talks about what the aim of the author of the treaty seems to be.
Let me try and explain his ideas, make them a little bit more accessible and go and buy the book.
So he's basically wanting to to sell more copies of the treaties.
But it's a fascinating document. We're pretty certain that he wrote it, though that used not to be a generally accepted.
It certainly is. Now there's a lot of evidence that that Hume was the author.
He describes the philosophy of the treaties there as very sceptical. He starts from empiricism.
He celebrates the Association of Ideas. So that's just some of the themes in it, so I'll give a little bit more detail later.
OK, so let's look at Hume's concept empiricism, I said that Locke is a concept empiricist.
Indeed, a large part of Locke's essay concerning human understanding is designed to show how
lots of ideas which you might not have thought were came from experience actually did.
And Hume takes this on board, so he describes what we tend to call his copy principle,
most scholars call it that that's not Hume's term, but it's a useful term. The copy principal Hume describes it as his first principle.
The first principle of his philosophy that all our simple ideas that is our simplest thoughts in their first appearance are
derived from simple impressions is sensations or feelings which are correspondent to them and which they exactly represent.
So all our ideas are copied from sensations or feelings.
And Hume is very explicit that he is here following Locke.
He thinks he's giving a more precise version of Locke's empiricism.
So let's look at some of the potential tensions here.
On the one hand, we find him himself describing his work as sceptical.
And we will see later that there are a lot of sceptical arguments in book one of the treaties.
And one can debate about whether that is something that Hume seeks for its own sake.
Is he deliberately being sceptical or is he being forced into scepticism by his principles,
including the couple of principle, and will be coming to that somewhat later in the series of lectures?
On the other hand,
the subtitle of the treatise of Human Nature describes it as an attempt to introduce the experimental method of reasoning into moral subjects.
He's trying to do empirical science, cognitive science, science of the mind, and he's using the copy principle to explain our ideas,
and he's using principles of Association of Ideas to explain a lot of our thought.
So that makes it look much more positive. So you can see why people think there's a tension between the scepticism and the naturalism.
The scepticism tends to undermine the possibility of knowledge.
The naturalism seems to be pursuing it.
Now, I'll have more to say about this in a later lecture, but for now, I just want to distinguish three different types of naturalism.
I think actually there are two others that are in play when humour is discussed,
but these seem to me to be pretty straightforward and straightforwardly attributable tribute of all to him.
So first of all, he is an explanatory naturalist. He looks for a natural science of human behaviour with down to earth causal mechanisms.
He's not going to have any truck with occult properties with spooks, gods, etc.
He sees man as part of the natural world alongside the animals.
So we get what I call biological naturalism.
He does not think that we have an immaterial soul.
He's also and you can see these are very much connected against invisible, intelligent powers.
He is against religion. I call that A. Supernatural ism.
Now that's not so explicit in most of what he writes.
And that's the prudential reasons he doesn't want to be too explicit about his atheism.
We one can debate exactly the nature of Hume's views on religion.
Some think he's an agnostic. I think most Hume scholars think he's an atheist.
He certainly doesn't accept anything like the conventional view of a good god who created the world.
OK, so notice that naturalism has various varieties, and we'll see that they have.
They figure in different ways in what is to come. OK, so now I want briefly to talk about some early influences on him.
And I'm not going to talk at length about these, but I want to draw these things to your attention at the end of the lecture,
I'll be mentioned some mentioning some readings where you can go and find out more if you're interested.
OK, so you went to Edinburgh University very early. It wasn't that unusual to go to university when you were very young.
He actually went along with his brother, who was two years older, which is why Hume went so well, is obviously very bright as well.
The education there was very traditional, very religious in, mainly in Latin.
His home was at a place called Chirnside, eight miles west of Barrack.
Now Barrack is right on the coast on the border between Scotland and England.
And I said a little bit about what we know of his background there, quite a lot of this comes from a letter that he wrote to a physician in 1734.
And he talked about a disease that he seemed to have been suffering from.
And how he got into the mental state that made him feel so bad, he evidently studied moral philosophy,
traditional moral philosophy from the Greeks, but on doing this, he found it very unsatisfactory.
He was trying to understand the basis of morality.
And but he concluded on reading all these various systems that everyone consulted his fancy in erecting schemes
of virtue and of happiness without regard in human nature upon which every moral conclusion must depend.
This, therefore, I resolved to make my principles study.
He wants to study the principles of human nature so that he can actually get to philosophical truth because he's been
looking at all these philosophers preaching about morality and coming out with schemes of virtue that simply don't work.
And in trying to pursue them himself, he has been led to a mental breakdown.
And he's now trying to start again, understanding human nature in order to build on that.
So hence, his attempt to introduce the experimental method of reasoning into moral subject.
Another aspect of his early life, which we know from much later documents, is his loss of religious faith.
So we've got a letter to Gilbert Ellis of Minto in 1751.
One of his friends and you can see he recently burned an old manuscript book wrote before I was 20,
which contained page after page the gradual progress of my thoughts on that head.
He began with an anxious search after arguments to confirm the common opinion to justify religion.
And he found it was a perpetual struggle of a restless imagination against inclination.
So he wanted to be religious. He'd been brought up religious. But he found that he couldn't maintain that.
Now, interestingly, in a deathbed interview with James Boswell, so this was in 1776, when Hume was dying.
He knew very well that he was dying.
He seems to have had cancer of the colon or something like that.
And he took a long time to die.
So he there was lots of opportunity for him to revise his works, to talk to his friends and to have people like Boswell visit him.
Boswell was fascinated by him and because he found it inconceivable that somebody facing annihilation because Hume did not believe in immortality.
Here he was on his deathbed. Was it really possible that this man could face death with equanimity?
And Boswell found that very disconcerting.
Hume did face it with equanimity.
But in that interview, Hugh said that he was religious when he was young, but that the morality of every religion was bad.
So a major part of his objection to religion is the moral aspects of that of religion, and that comes out in a lot of Hume's works.
And he'd never entertained any belief in religion since he began to read Locke and Clark.
Now, I suspect that there's a little bit of humour in Hume's words here.
And by the way, we do have a record of him joking with Adam Smith on his deathbed,
joking about what he will say to car on the ferryman man who very souls across the sticks.
Hume clearly did retain his sense of humour, which was a very active right up to his death.
Here he is, saying that he never entertained any belief in religion since he began to read Locke and Clark.
Two of the people who had devoted a lot of their energies to proving the existence of God.
So it's not reading atheists that's put him off religion. Apparently, it's reading the atheists and finding their arguments inadequate.
OK, now I want to suggest there's a missing piece in this puzzle,
we've seen reasons why you might be sceptical about established orthodoxies, both moral and religious.
We've seen why he's keen to study human nature through solid empirical methods rather than invention,
and we've seen why he would seek a theory that's independent of religion. How does all this fit with his enthusiasm for empiricism?
The copy principle, his first principle? How does that fit in?
Well, let's go looking for the missing link,
because I'm going to suggest that there is a clear explanation here suggested by a lot of what we know
about Hume's early life and which makes considerable sense of what is going on in one of the treaties.
So lock and unlock what connects, lock and unlock Clark, and he himself has put these together.
He hasn't believed in religion since you read Locke and Clarke.
Well, both Locke and Clark are mentioned in one particular section of the treaties, and it's the section where Hume discusses the causal maxim.
Whatever begins to exist must have a cause of existence. And he argues that that maxim cannot be proved.
It may be true a human seems to believe it, but he doesn't think it is demonstratively provable.
But anyway, Lock and Clark both not only advocated this principle.
They also used it as the basis of their proof of the existence of God, the cosmological argument.
They also appealed within those proofs to the principle that matter cannot give rise to thought.
Remember exactly the same principle that is being used against Hobbs?
That big bogeyman a hugely important principle at the time. So here I've quoted relevant parts from Locke's cosmological argument.
He appeals to the causal maxim everything that begins to exist must have a cause of existence.
That means you've got to have something there from eternity.
The universe can't just spring into existence without a pre-existing cause.
And since matter alone cannot cause thought, the eternal being has to be a thinking being.
So we get God. Clocks cosmological argument, and here I'm actually using Hume's own paraphrase of the argument, he he gives something,
he gives this argument in his posthumous dialogues concerning natural religion,
but it's basically taken from Clarke, and you can see the same sorts of principles being applied.
So who is Samuel Clark? Samuel Clark is someone who's not much discussed now, which actually misrepresents the history.
He was the most prominent British philosopher in the generation after Locke.
He was the most prominent advocates of Newtonian philosophy.
He famously debated with Anthony Collins, a notorious free thinker, about the nature of free will.
Collins wanted to say that human behaviour is subject to causal necessity in the same way as physical things.
Whereas Clark wanted to say, no, they're not human beings act according to moral necessity, but not real necessity, not physical necessity.
So when one billiard ball bashes into another, billy a ball, that's genuine physical necessity.
There is no way that the other ball could not move.
But when I act, I mean, suppose someone holds a gun to my head and says, Give me your phone and I give them my phone.
I'm only acting from moral necessity. You can certainly predict that I'll behave that way.
Any rational person would. But it's not as though I genuinely am necessitated to do it.
We call it necessity. Maybe it's necessary that you do that because it's so predictable.
Any rational person would behave in that way. But that's not genuine physical necessity, according to Clark.
So we'll see that Hume has a comment directly on that a bit later.
OK. Another character here, Henry Hume, Lord later, Lord claims he was elevated as a judge and became Lord Cames.
He was a distant relative of Hume, and he was very much Hume's mentor when he when he was at Edinburgh because he was very young.
Keynes was 15 years older. He corresponded with Samuel Clarke about free will in necessity.
He also corresponded with Andrew Baxter, a prominent Scottish philosopher,
and he took an immense interest in the Locke's chapter in his essay concerning human understanding on power.
The origin of the idea of power, and that's a chapter discusses free will and so on as well.
So here we have a man intimately linked with Hume at a formative period of Hume's life with this set of very serious interests.
So say his family home was nine miles away from Chirnside, where Hume lived.
Also close to Chirnside, eight miles away, a chap called William Dudgeon was writing philosophy.
Now his philosophy was necessity Aryan. He thought that everything in the world is necessitated causally.
God has set up the world in such a way that everything will run determinedly deterministic.
And for the best. And here we have Andrew Baxter.
Who I've already mentioned as being a correspondent with Cames, who's Hume's mentor,
and he's a tutor for the children of gentry, six miles away from Chirnside.
And he published an attack on Dudgeon. So Baxter's enquiry at the time was more famous than than Berkeley, I mean, nowadays we think of,
you know, Lock Berkeley Human Berkeley is this star between Locke and Hume.
At the time, both Clark and Baxter would have been more prominent.
We have Baxter's work, you can see going quickly through several editions.
Interestingly, now Baxter's work is best known as a critique of Berkeley.
But we will see that human Hume's writings interact with those of Baxter.
Now, strikingly, dudgeon, this free thinker who'd been writing an asset, NASA's necessity Orion tracked,
saying that everything in the world is determined and was attacked by Baxter.
He was actually prosecuted at Chirnside, the village where he lived, where his uncle was minister.
And. This happens at a time when Hume is forming his philosophical views.
So we've got a whole sequence of things happening in the close vicinity of Hume
very much associated with these topics of free will determinism God and so forth.
We also have some handwritten memoranda of whom we don't know exactly when these were written,
but the evidence seems to be the late 17th thirties or the early 1740.
So either just before the treaties or while the treaties was being published or very soon after,
and these show humans intense interest at the time in precisely this nexus of topics.
So here are three quotes from the memoranda, so the memoranda consist of lots of little sentences or short paragraphs,
noting down points that Hume presumably was planning to take account in later work that that he would write.
Libertine, not a proper solution of moral ill, because it might have been bound down by motives like those of saints and angels.
Did God give liberty to please men themselves, but men are as well pleased to be determined to good?
God could have prevented all abuses of liberty without taking away liberty.
Therefore, liberty, no solution of difficulties. So what you plainly alluding to here?
Is that if you have a compatible list, view of free will?
Then the free will defence cannot save you from the problem of evil.
If God could have made us such that we were free but at the same time determined us to do good.
Then you cannot appeal to free will to explain why there's evil in the world.
OK, that's very clear. Clearly the point that that human is making here.
So he is he is clearly well aware that sorting out issues of free will and determinism are crucial to questions about the existence of God.
OK, so we have this causal nexus, and that's a little bit of a pun because it's both a causal nexus and a nexus about causation.
We've got a whole load of early influences on whom all of them well attested and all
pointing to the same nexus of philosophical questions about the nature of causation,
necessity, freewill and relating those to God.
There's one missing piece in the jigsaw puzzle, and here is where I am putting a hypothesis.
Unfortunately, I've got no clear proof of this,
but I think it makes evident good sense that Hume was strongly motivated at an early stage by the prospect of applying Locke's concept
empiricism to settle the debate over free will in necessity by clarifying and limiting what could possibly be meant by causal necessity.
So just to spell it out a bit. We've got all these debates about free will and causal necessity.
And Hume is interacting with people like Cames, who's intimately linked with this debate.
Came at the same time says that he is crucified by Locke's chapter of power.
The chapter where Locke gives an account of the origin of the idea of causal power.
And we see him giving us his first principle, the first principle of his philosophy.
What is essentially a restatement of Locke's empiricism? So what I'm suggesting here is Hume reads Locke's chapter of power.
This chapter so obsessed canes, he sees that Locke's explanation of the origin of the idea of power is no good.
And we do know that Hume, so read that and said that that it was no good.
And he I thought this is my suggestion, thought if I find the real, genuine origin of the idea of power, causal power,
causal necessity, I will be able to use that to solve these issues about free will determinism and ultimately God.
So let's say it's a a piece of the jigsaw.
I think it makes perfect sense. We've got lots to support it, but I cannot prove that that is exactly the motivation.
No point have any textual evidence saying, you know, this is what brought me in there.
But we do have plenty evidence of evidence from the text that corroborates this thought.
So first of all, treaties, but one part three is where causation is discussed.
That is the most extensive part of the treaties by some distance, and it contains the topics for which Hume is best known.
You know, induction causation probability.
The whole of the but one part three is structured around the search for the origin of the idea of necessarily connexion that is causal,
necessarily connexion. Book one, part one.
The beginning of the treaties gives great prominence to the coffee principle.
Now, if we look at the abstract of the treaties, which I've suggested, it would be a very good idea for you to read before the next lecture.
I mean, I think that that's the the single best thing to read.
To put all this in context here, what I've done is represent all the different paragraphs of the abstract.
And what's striking here is that the vast bulk of the abstract is devoted to the topics of one part three of the treaties.
So the abstract was published after Hume had published books one and two of the treaties.
But you can see that if you compare this very small abstract with the rather large book one and book two of the treaties,
it's striking that the topics of Book one part three still occupy a large part.
In fact, the argument concerning induction, for example, which only occupies one small section of book one part three of the treaties,
is nearly as long in the abstract as it is in the treaties. About 75 per cent of the length,
this discussion of belief and probability of linking up and connecting the discussion of the copy principle in the idea of necessity.
And you can see the issue of liberty in the necessity that is free.
Will and determinism is also quite prominent there.
So the only topic that gets significant coverage other than those in book one part three is the coffee principle from book one, part one.
And that prepares the way for Hume's denouement,
where he explains the origin of the idea of necessity and how that applies to the question of liberty in necessity.
So what does Hume have to say about the origin of the idea of necessity? I've said he rejects Locke's account.
He and this is putting it very crudely, will be coming back and discussing this in detail.
It's one of the most important areas of Hume's philosophy. He essentially argues that the impression of necessary connexion,
that's the impression from which the idea of causal necessity is copied arises in our minds when we perform inductive inferences.
So when we see one thing followed by another again and again and again say A,
followed by B and then we observe an A, we just find ourselves naturally inferring a b, we can't help it.
That's the way our minds are made. And when we find ourselves inferring B, that is what gives us the impression of necessarily connexion.
And that's where the idea of causal necessity comes from. So the idea of causal necessity actually comes from a kind of inferential necessity.
It's very novel, very odd, uh, not entirely convincing, perhaps, but.
That's Hume's theory, and clearly it has been very influential.
His discussion of this theory culminates with two famous definitions of calls in and I'm mentioning here,
by the way, parallels sections of the enquiry.
The enquiry concerning human understanding published in 1748 will get a fair amount of reference to that in future lectures.
But on these topics, the enquiry is essentially saying the same as the treaties.
I think it's saying it rather better. It's more polished, which is indeed what you'd expect.
But essentially, the treaties and the enquiry are very, very similar here.
The two definitions, of course, and one can ask,
why are there two different definitions that's a famous puzzle in human scholarship that I'll be saying something about in a later lecture.
For now, just take it. There are two definitions. One is based on constant conjunction.
We see a followed by B constantly. That's what Hume calls a constant conjunction.
And the other definition is based on the fact that when we do observe a constant
conjunction between A and B and then we observe and we find ourselves inferring the B.
So one of the definitions is based on the constant conjunction of one of them focuses on the natural inference of the mind.
And having derived these definitions, humour immediately applies them.
All causes are of the same kind. This is the only way we can get an idea of a cause from this impression.
Therefore, the only idea, of course, we can have is this same one.
So the common distinction between moral and physical necessity is without any foundation in nature, clock is wrong.
You cannot distinguish between physical and moral necessity.
The necessity that applies to human actions is exactly the same necessity as applies to billiard balls.
He also mentions the causal maxim here, incidentally, immediately after having provided his definitions,
one of the corollaries he draws is now we can see why the causal maxim wasn't provable.
So you can see these topics are all linking together.
If you look at passenger sections later in the treaties that refer back to the definitions, of course, there are basically two topics.
One of them is of the emitter reality of the soul. Near the end of that section, where humans discussing where the matter could cause thought.
Remember that same issue that so many people raised against Hobbs, the same issue, which is prominent in lochs and Clark's cosmological argument.
And here is Hume applying his definitions of calls to resolving that.
And then the other one is, of course, the discussions of liberty of necessity.
Notice, by the way, that these sections are in book two of the treaties.
But in the enquiry concerning human understanding, which is largely a rewrite of book one,
he very appropriately brought the discussion of liberty and necessity and put it in that book.
So I certainly think of liberty and necessity as really a book one topic rather than a book two topic.
Even though it's eight, it's actually there in Book two. So do not neglect that.
But the the the version of that discussion in the treaties is much less good than the version in the enquiry.
So if you want to see how Hume's view of causation impacts on liberty in the society,
you're actually better reading sections seven and eight of the enquiry where they're very intimately linked.
Anyway, both of these arguments, crucially, turn on Hume's definitions,
vindicating my suggestion that Hume started out trying to analyse the origin of the idea of necessary connexion in order to solve these problems.
That's exactly what he does, though I can't prove that was his original aim.
It seems highly plausible. So here he is discussing.
The cause, a mental causation, whether a matter.
Motion of matter can cause thought.
All objects which are found to be constantly conjoined are upon that account, only to be regarded as causes and effects,
the constant conjunction of objects constitutes the very essence of cause and effect.
And here is a passage from his discussion of liberty in the society.
Free will and determinism to particulars are essential to necessity these the constant union and the
influence of the mind as the two definitions one based on the conjunction one based on inference.
Wherever we discover these, we must acknowledge a necessity.
So in a bit more detail now of the materiality of the soul, this is section one, 145 five.
Here's this argument against hopes that motion and matter cannot possibly cause thought, well, that may seem a very plausible argument.
Nothing in the world is more easy than to refute it.
We need only to reflect on what's been proved at large that to consider the matter a priori, anything may produce anything,
and we'll never discover a reason why any object may or may not be the cause of any other,
however great or however little the resemblance may be between them.
Because as I've shown with my definitions,
the essence of causation is constant conjunction and where you've got constant conjunction, you've got causation.
It doesn't matter. That motion and matter seem to be very different from thinking.
We find by experience that they're constantly united, which being all the circumstances that enter into the idea of cause and effect.
We may certainly conclude that motion may be and actually is the cause of thought and perception.
So and there's another passage they're making the same message, so it's a direct application of Hume's understanding of causation,
which he has pursued through his empiricism by looking for the impression from which the idea of causal necessity is derived.
And there he is, applying it to refute the critique of Hobbs.
Of liberty and necessity here, he's more clearly attacking clock.
The plot to remember thinks that the kind of necessity or so-called necessity that is applied to human action is quite different from real,
genuine physical necessity. And we've already seen Hume denying that there is any such distinction.
And here, his argument spelled out in more length is that because our only understanding of causal necessity comes from the two definitions,
the constant conjunction and the inference those apply to human action, they apply to the motion of billiard balls.
Same necessity. And actually, this argument really is very, very nicely encapsulated in the abstract.
So this is a quotation from paragraph 34 of the abstract.
I've noted there some other references to the treaties and to the enquiry where essentially the same point is made.
The advocates for free will like Clarke, who think that free will is something different that mark the the moral necessity
of human action is quite different from the real necessity of billiard balls.
They must allow this union and inference with regard to human actions, right?
Human actions do do show constant conjunction. We are able to predict human actions.
They follow patterns and we draw inferences accordingly. People like Clarke will only deny that this makes the whole of necessity.
They will say the real necessity involves something more than these two factors.
But then they must show that we have an idea of something else in the in the actions of matter.
Which, according to the foregoing reasoning, is impossible.
In other words, they can't even form an idea of what they're trying to think of that extra thing that supposedly makes physical necessity.
They can't form any idea because they haven't got any impression of it, so therefore they cannot draw that distinction.
Again, it's a direct application of Hume's analysis of causation on a major debate of the time refuting the major advocate of the contrary position.
So what we end up with is an integrated vision of where Hume's philosophy is coming from and a lot of the way in which it's going,
why is causation so prominent in the treaties?
Why is the largest section but one part three overwhelmingly devoted to that topic?
Why is the abstract, which is supposed to supposedly summarising the treaties so focus on but one part three
to the exclusion of nearly everything else or almost exclusion of everything else?
Well. This makes sense of it, I think we've got a nexus of very important topics which are clarified,
and Hume sees his analysis of causation as a yielding attacks on the cosmological argument,
the anti materialist argument, the free will, the odyssey, the problem, the terrible defence.
The problem of evil is a tax, a priority, causal metaphysics in general,
the only way you can know what causes what is by experience, by finding out what is constantly conjoined.
Because a priori anything could produce anything. So actually, we get a vindication of empirical science as the only kind of science that is workable,
trying to work out a priori what will cause what you know, e.g. where the matter could go slow.
That's a non-starter. And also, this causal science is extended into the moral realm,
and that is very important to whom he is attempting to introduce the experimental method of reasoning into moral subjects,
in other words, human science. That's the subtitle of the treatise.
It fits perfectly, I think, with this vision of where he started and where he saw himself as going and.
That's it. Thank you.