Welcome to eight lectures on Hume's Treatise of Human Nature.
I'm Peter Millikan from Hertford College, and HUME is indeed the main focus of my philosophical research.
Today we'll be talking about the treaties in general, something about humans theory of ideas and his view of the faculties.
There we have the front page of the treatment of human nature.
Book one. It came out in three volumes.
This is the first and this is the one that we're mainly going to be focusing on.
Treatise of Human Nature being an attempt to introduce the experimental method of reasoning into moral subjects.
And that's a theme that will come up a bit later. So what is now known as book?
One of the understanding and Book Two of the Passions came out in January 1739.
Book three of Morals was published right at the end of October or beginning of November 1740,
together with an appendix in which HUME gives some corrections to book one and in particular bemoans his failure to get straight on personal identity.
It leaves it rather unclear what his view on personal identity is.
The treatise is Hume's first and most ambitious work, and it brings together things from epistemology, metaphysics, psychology, morals.
Now in order to understand what's going on in quite a bit of treatise book one,
you need to be aware of a pretty pervasive theme, which HUME picks up from John Locke's great work.
So this is a facsimile of the essay concerning human understanding.
Originally published in 1690, a work which cast a long shadow.
Locke was, if you like, the authority figure for modern philosophy and a fair bit of HUME is influenced by him or reacts to him.
So for example, part one of book one ends with an account of general ideas which attacks Locke's account of abstract ideas.
We'll be coming to that next week. Part two talks about ideas of space and time and like Locke's essay.
HUME is very concerned with the origin of our ideas. How do we get those ideas?
And what light does their origin shed on their nature?
We'll be looking at part two next week as well. Part three of book.
One is by far the longest part and almost certainly the most important.
It's mainly devoted to causation and causal inference, what we now call induction, and that is Hume's most famous and enduring legacy.
So I've said a little bit here about the main discussion of part three.
We'll be coming to that in detail in a couple of weeks time,
and you'll see that the main part of it is structured around a search for the origin of the idea of cause.
So again, he's following this Lockean theme of looking at where our ideas come from and what that [INAUDIBLE] like that sheds on their nature,
for one, is the most difficult. It's a complex part.
It's got seven sections, several of which could easily merit a whole lecture course in themselves.
It starts with scepticism with regard to reason. Goes on to scepticism with regard to the sentences.
In other words, concerning the external world discusses the ancient philosophers, the scholastics.
We weren't saying very much about that and then goes on to the modern philosophy.
The modern philosophy here means the Orthodox philosophy of John Locke.
Things like the distinction between primary and secondary qualities, representative theories of perception,
and that he is attacking in particular primary and secondary qualities.
Following on from George Berkeley. Section five of the Materiality of the Soul Again.
We won't be saying very much about that, but there's a very important section part at the end of section five,
a few paragraphs where he discusses materialism, whether matter could think and we will see that that is actually rather an important part.
Section six of personal identity notoriously difficult, made more so by the fact that in the appendix to the treatise,
as I've mentioned, Hugh seems to recant on Section five conclusion of this book.
Now, some of these discussions are very difficult to understand.
They're confusing, arguably even confused in one for two and one for six.
But with regard to the external world and personal identity.
Q It seems to mix talking about the nature of our ideas with the nature of things.
So you can read one, four, six, for example, as saying something about the origin of our idea of personal identity.
But you can also see it as denying that there's any such thing as a self.
So interpreting these is quite difficult in one for two and one for seven.
There's a dynamic quality to human thought. He starts out apparently fairly confident, then gets into sceptical dilemmas and seems to despair.
Is that genuine or is it just put off? Well, it's all viewed and very arguable.
So understanding things. Treaties is difficult. It's not an easy work.
There is a lot of controversy about it. Traditionally, HUME is taken to be essentially a destructive sceptic,
someone who really is just throwing a lot of standard philosophy into the dustbin and
saying that we can't know all sorts of things that previous philosophers thought we could.
Obsessive about ideas, impressions, association, it's psychology, explaining lots of things away as due to faults in our reasoning.
So our minds work as association machines.
They lead us to make all sorts of mistakes. They lead us to believe in an external world when there isn't really one.
They lead us to believe in a self when there isn't really one, and so forth.
Induction famously. Reasoning from past to future is just reduced to this sort of association of ideas.
When we infer that a billiard ball will move when it's hit by another one,
all we're doing is a kind of animal instinct, just basing simple mindedly our inferences about the future on the past.
And there's no good reason for that at all. It's irrational. So in this sort of attempt, we get a very negative picture of the treaties.
But it can't be the whole story.
Think back to that subtitle of the treaties and attempt to introduce the experimental method of reasoning into moral subjects.
In other words, what Him wants to do is take the sorts of inductive methods of experimental reasoning that's doing experiments,
looking at what's happened in the past and using it to draw inferences about the future.
And he wants to apply that to moral subjects. In other words, human science, the world of humans, the world of the mind.
Just as Newton and others have applied it so successfully to the physical world, that doesn't sound like the complete sceptic.
In book two, we get a systematic account of the passions, our feelings and emotions.
Again, we seem to have a scientific ambition and ambition to explain how our minds work.
Book three We get a systematic account of morals. Now, I'm not going to be saying very much about those two parts.
In these lectures, I will a bit. I will see that Hume's account of liberty in necessity is very pertinent.
I'll also be saying a little bit about Hume's famous arguments regarding motivation and the origin of morality,
because they bear a lot on the understanding of HUME more generally.
But at any rate, if we're trying to interpret HUME, seeing him just as a destructive sceptic doesn't seem very adequate.
Now, some years later, HUME recast the treaties and in particular the very famous work of his.
The inquiry concerning human understanding came out in 1748.
In fact, it was originally called philosophical essays concerning human understanding, but we now know it as the first inquiry.
Now, this covers a lot of the central ground of the treaties.
It also leaves out a lot. It leaves out most of those bits that in the treaties are most confusing.
And again, we've gotten into the problem. What do we make of that?
Is HUME just serving up the more palatable bits? Does he still believe all those things that are so difficult?
In which case we've still got the problem? How do we understand them? Or has he come to see them as inadequate?
Has he rejected them because of the confusions to which they led?
Well, we don't know. And scholars can argue about this and do argue about it endlessly.
But what I want to point out here is that the theme of the inquiry is very far from being destructive.
So if we try to look for a major purpose behind Hume's book Wall,
it seems rather implausible to say to see it in the destructive light, or at least to see it predominantly in that way.
I personally think that Hume's inquiry can be seen as something like a manifesto for inductive science.
I'm not going to go into that in detail now.
If you want to read about it in the Oxford World's Classics edition, my introduction takes you through that in detail.
It goes through the work's work. It also points out a lot about previous influences and explains how HUME can be seen as reacting to them and
essentially making a case for inductive science as the way we should go to understanding the world in order.
If we want to understand how things work, we have to base our conclusions on experience.
We cannot rely on either a priori stick metaphysics or religious authority.
So there is a negative message there. A priori metaphysics won't work.
Religious authority is generally bunk, but there's also a very strong, positive message the possibilities and recommendation of inductive science.
Incidentally, the introduction is also available from this website.
David HUME dot org. Now understanding exactly the relationship between the Treaties and the inquiry must take into account the timeline.
So here I've done it to scale timeline of human's life.
So we've got his birth in 1711. As I said, next year, 2011 is the tercentenary of his birth.
So a very big event. He tells us that in around 1729 he was engaged by a new scene of thought.
He was excited by new philosophical ideas which transported him beyond measure.
We don't actually know whether that's the scene of thought that led to the treatise, but at any rate, he got very excited by philosophy.
After trying various other things, he decided to become a philosopher.
He had a small private income, went over to France and for three years there he wrote the treatise.
He then came back to Britain and published it.
So treatise, book one, as I said, published at the end of January, 1739.
Now, these little dots that I put in the diagram are places where HUME expressed regret for publishing the treatise.
When you said I'd gone to the press too soon,
I wait with impatience for a second edition because there's lots of corrections I want to make or after he's published the inquiry.
So the inquiry is here in 1748. He's writing to friends saying Don't bother about the treaties, read the inquiry.
So clearly this poses a question what are we to make of these recommendations of humans?
Does it mean that he thinks the treaties is rubbish?
Incidentally, I also the abstract of the treaties that came out in 1740 was probably written around September,
October 1739, so just eight months or so after writing the treaty,
after having published the treaty treaties book one and book two, humans writing the abstract of the treaties as a sort of pot for it.
It's a summary saying his this treatise of human nature.
It's a wonderful work. Anonymous. And here's an anonymous puff for it, which is going to explain a little bit more engagingly some of the main ideas.
Now, what's particularly interesting is that if you look at the abstract of the treatise,
the idea is that it picks out and the flow of them, the direction in which it goes is very, very similar to the inquiry.
It's more similar to the inquiry than it is to the treatise.
Now that suggests that the main underlying thoughts that were animating HUME in 1739 were better expressed in the inquiry in 1748.
But let's look at the lesson of that.
What that implies is that probably a lot of those ideas that are there in the treaties weren't abandoned by the time of the inquiry.
No reason for thinking they would have been. Because back in 1739, he held them together with the ideas that he retained in the inquiry.
So that kind of cuts both ways. On the one hand, you could say, Oh, it's a sign of abandoning the treaties.
On the other hand, you could say it's a sign of an overall coherent view being maintained.
These, by the way, editions of the inquiry.
And you can see that the inquiry went through a lot of them. HUME was very careful about correcting his works.
So by the time of the posthumous 1777 edition, we have, as it were,
Hume's definitive statement on these topics in the inquiry, he never had a second edition of the treaties.
We only have the first edition. So who knows what he would have done had someone twisted his arm into producing?
What? Oh, this is the famous advertisement which you sent to his printer, William Strathern,
in 1775 and asked to have put in the front of the second volume of the essays and treatises on several subjects.
That's the volume that included the enquiry concerning human understanding.
The dissertation on the passions, the inquiry concerning the principles of morals and the natural history of religion.
And HUME again here seems to be saying, I renounce the treatise, read these works.
But we should not abandon the treaties.
And it is not a mistake on this university's part that you have been asked to study the treaties rather than the inquiry.
Let's see why. Well, the inquiry is more polished.
I personally think that it is, without doubt, more consistently excellent.
Humes Pick the best bits, the stuff for which he is enduringly known.
There are more polished discussions of many central topics induction of causation, free will, scepticism.
He puts in important stuff on God, miracles and the design argument which didn't get there in the treaties.
He admitted them because he didn't want to cause offence to certain influential people such as Bishop Joseph Butler.
On the other hand, in general, the treatise is far more ambitious.
It covers a lot more ground and it gives much more detail of the underlying theory, and it is more systematic.
It endeavours to explain things comprehensively, as we'll see when he goes through the theory of ideas.
He's trying to build a systematic theory in a way that he never attempted the inquiry.
It raises a lot of philosophical problems far more than the inquiry,
and it contributes to discussion, including modern day discussion of a lot of them.
A lot of people discussing these ideas today will still take inspiration from what been said.
Ironically, perhaps one of the particular interests with the treaties is that it is less carefully edited.
There are more loose ends. By looking at those, we can see more diffuse mind and what's going on.
Sometimes dying of philosophies, problems and mistakes.
This is just as revealing as seeing the things they've got right in the inquiry.
You don't get so many loose ends. You don't get many.
It's all, in my view, in the treatise you get bundles of them and it makes it a very interesting thing and rewarding work.
We see the philosophical genius at work. So although I personally am a big fan of the inquiry,
if I were abandoned on a desert island with one human book to read, it would have to be the treatise.
It would have to be the treatise. The so much in it. A rich work very well worthy of study.
So how should we interpret the treaties?
I've mentioned there are a lot of problems and a lot of interpretive difficulties.
Scholars debate seemingly endlessly. HUME Conference Year after year.
Edition after edition of that of Human Studies. I may ask whether HUME is really a sceptic, really a naturalistic scientist.
Recently, Paul Russell has argued in a major book that the unifying theme of the treatise is neither of these, but it's a religion.
Essentially, HUME is engaged on an attack on religious arguments throughout.
Now, I don't want to get bogged down in these debates. I'll be saying a little bit about them in the eighth lecture.
The approach I'm going to take in these lectures is looking pretty carefully at the text.
I think it's a bad mistake to try to go into these interpretive debates until we know the text pretty well.
So I'm going to be avoiding them as much as possible.
I mean, I will be saying some things that are controversial, but I'm not deliberately going to be seeking controversy as far as possible.
I will be talking you through the text so that you can understand how it goes.
Only then will we come to look at the big picture.