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Welcome to eight lectures on Hume's Treatise of Human Nature.

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I'm Peter Millikan from Hertford College, and HUME is indeed the main focus of my philosophical research.

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Today we'll be talking about the treaties in general, something about humans theory of ideas and his view of the faculties.

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There we have the front page of the treatment of human nature.

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Book one. It came out in three volumes.

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This is the first and this is the one that we're mainly going to be focusing on.

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Treatise of Human Nature being an attempt to introduce the experimental method of reasoning into moral subjects.

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And that's a theme that will come up a bit later. So what is now known as book?

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One of the understanding and Book Two of the Passions came out in January 1739.

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Book three of Morals was published right at the end of October or beginning of November 1740,

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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.

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It leaves it rather unclear what his view on personal identity is.

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The treatise is Hume's first and most ambitious work, and it brings together things from epistemology, metaphysics, psychology, morals.

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Now in order to understand what's going on in quite a bit of treatise book one,

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you need to be aware of a pretty pervasive theme, which HUME picks up from John Locke's great work.

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So this is a facsimile of the essay concerning human understanding.

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Originally published in 1690, a work which cast a long shadow.

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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.

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So for example, part one of book one ends with an account of general ideas which attacks Locke's account of abstract ideas.

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We'll be coming to that next week. Part two talks about ideas of space and time and like Locke's essay.

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HUME is very concerned with the origin of our ideas. How do we get those ideas?

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And what light does their origin shed on their nature?

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We'll be looking at part two next week as well. Part three of book.

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One is by far the longest part and almost certainly the most important.

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It's mainly devoted to causation and causal inference, what we now call induction, and that is Hume's most famous and enduring legacy.

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So I've said a little bit here about the main discussion of part three.

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We'll be coming to that in detail in a couple of weeks time,

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and you'll see that the main part of it is structured around a search for the origin of the idea of cause.

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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,

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for one, is the most difficult. It's a complex part.

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It's got seven sections, several of which could easily merit a whole lecture course in themselves.

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It starts with scepticism with regard to reason. Goes on to scepticism with regard to the sentences.

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In other words, concerning the external world discusses the ancient philosophers, the scholastics.

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We weren't saying very much about that and then goes on to the modern philosophy.

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The modern philosophy here means the Orthodox philosophy of John Locke.

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Things like the distinction between primary and secondary qualities, representative theories of perception,

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and that he is attacking in particular primary and secondary qualities.

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Following on from George Berkeley. Section five of the Materiality of the Soul Again.

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We won't be saying very much about that, but there's a very important section part at the end of section five,

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a few paragraphs where he discusses materialism, whether matter could think and we will see that that is actually rather an important part.

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Section six of personal identity notoriously difficult, made more so by the fact that in the appendix to the treatise,

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as I've mentioned, Hugh seems to recant on Section five conclusion of this book.

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Now, some of these discussions are very difficult to understand.

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They're confusing, arguably even confused in one for two and one for six.

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But with regard to the external world and personal identity.

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Q It seems to mix talking about the nature of our ideas with the nature of things.

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So you can read one, four, six, for example, as saying something about the origin of our idea of personal identity.

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But you can also see it as denying that there's any such thing as a self.

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So interpreting these is quite difficult in one for two and one for seven.

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There's a dynamic quality to human thought. He starts out apparently fairly confident, then gets into sceptical dilemmas and seems to despair.

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Is that genuine or is it just put off? Well, it's all viewed and very arguable.

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So understanding things. Treaties is difficult. It's not an easy work.

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There is a lot of controversy about it. Traditionally, HUME is taken to be essentially a destructive sceptic,

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someone who really is just throwing a lot of standard philosophy into the dustbin and

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saying that we can't know all sorts of things that previous philosophers thought we could.

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Obsessive about ideas, impressions, association, it's psychology, explaining lots of things away as due to faults in our reasoning.

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So our minds work as association machines.

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They lead us to make all sorts of mistakes. They lead us to believe in an external world when there isn't really one.

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They lead us to believe in a self when there isn't really one, and so forth.

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Induction famously. Reasoning from past to future is just reduced to this sort of association of ideas.

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When we infer that a billiard ball will move when it's hit by another one,

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all we're doing is a kind of animal instinct, just basing simple mindedly our inferences about the future on the past.

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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.

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But it can't be the whole story.

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Think back to that subtitle of the treaties and attempt to introduce the experimental method of reasoning into moral subjects.

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In other words, what Him wants to do is take the sorts of inductive methods of experimental reasoning that's doing experiments,

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looking at what's happened in the past and using it to draw inferences about the future.

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And he wants to apply that to moral subjects. In other words, human science, the world of humans, the world of the mind.

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Just as Newton and others have applied it so successfully to the physical world, that doesn't sound like the complete sceptic.

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In book two, we get a systematic account of the passions, our feelings and emotions.

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Again, we seem to have a scientific ambition and ambition to explain how our minds work.

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Book three We get a systematic account of morals. Now, I'm not going to be saying very much about those two parts.

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In these lectures, I will a bit. I will see that Hume's account of liberty in necessity is very pertinent.

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I'll also be saying a little bit about Hume's famous arguments regarding motivation and the origin of morality,

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because they bear a lot on the understanding of HUME more generally.

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But at any rate, if we're trying to interpret HUME, seeing him just as a destructive sceptic doesn't seem very adequate.

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Now, some years later, HUME recast the treaties and in particular the very famous work of his.

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The inquiry concerning human understanding came out in 1748.

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In fact, it was originally called philosophical essays concerning human understanding, but we now know it as the first inquiry.

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Now, this covers a lot of the central ground of the treaties.

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It also leaves out a lot. It leaves out most of those bits that in the treaties are most confusing.

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And again, we've gotten into the problem. What do we make of that?

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Is HUME just serving up the more palatable bits? Does he still believe all those things that are so difficult?

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In which case we've still got the problem? How do we understand them? Or has he come to see them as inadequate?

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Has he rejected them because of the confusions to which they led?

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Well, we don't know. And scholars can argue about this and do argue about it endlessly.

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But what I want to point out here is that the theme of the inquiry is very far from being destructive.

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So if we try to look for a major purpose behind Hume's book Wall,

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it seems rather implausible to say to see it in the destructive light, or at least to see it predominantly in that way.

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I personally think that Hume's inquiry can be seen as something like a manifesto for inductive science.

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I'm not going to go into that in detail now.

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If you want to read about it in the Oxford World's Classics edition, my introduction takes you through that in detail.

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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

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essentially making a case for inductive science as the way we should go to understanding the world in order.

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If we want to understand how things work, we have to base our conclusions on experience.

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We cannot rely on either a priori stick metaphysics or religious authority.

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So there is a negative message there. A priori metaphysics won't work.

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Religious authority is generally bunk, but there's also a very strong, positive message the possibilities and recommendation of inductive science.

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Incidentally, the introduction is also available from this website.

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David HUME dot org. Now understanding exactly the relationship between the Treaties and the inquiry must take into account the timeline.

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So here I've done it to scale timeline of human's life.

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So we've got his birth in 1711. As I said, next year, 2011 is the tercentenary of his birth.

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So a very big event. He tells us that in around 1729 he was engaged by a new scene of thought.

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He was excited by new philosophical ideas which transported him beyond measure.

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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.

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After trying various other things, he decided to become a philosopher.

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He had a small private income, went over to France and for three years there he wrote the treatise.

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He then came back to Britain and published it.

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So treatise, book one, as I said, published at the end of January, 1739.

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Now, these little dots that I put in the diagram are places where HUME expressed regret for publishing the treatise.

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When you said I'd gone to the press too soon,

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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.

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So the inquiry is here in 1748. He's writing to friends saying Don't bother about the treaties, read the inquiry.

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So clearly this poses a question what are we to make of these recommendations of humans?

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Does it mean that he thinks the treaties is rubbish?

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Incidentally, I also the abstract of the treaties that came out in 1740 was probably written around September,

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October 1739, so just eight months or so after writing the treaty,

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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.

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It's a summary saying his this treatise of human nature.

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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.

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Now, what's particularly interesting is that if you look at the abstract of the treatise,

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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.

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It's more similar to the inquiry than it is to the treatise.

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Now that suggests that the main underlying thoughts that were animating HUME in 1739 were better expressed in the inquiry in 1748.

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But let's look at the lesson of that.

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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.

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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.

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So that kind of cuts both ways. On the one hand, you could say, Oh, it's a sign of abandoning the treaties.

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On the other hand, you could say it's a sign of an overall coherent view being maintained.

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These, by the way, editions of the inquiry.

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And you can see that the inquiry went through a lot of them. HUME was very careful about correcting his works.

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So by the time of the posthumous 1777 edition, we have, as it were,

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Hume's definitive statement on these topics in the inquiry, he never had a second edition of the treaties.

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We only have the first edition. So who knows what he would have done had someone twisted his arm into producing?

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What? Oh, this is the famous advertisement which you sent to his printer, William Strathern,

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in 1775 and asked to have put in the front of the second volume of the essays and treatises on several subjects.

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That's the volume that included the enquiry concerning human understanding.

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The dissertation on the passions, the inquiry concerning the principles of morals and the natural history of religion.

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And HUME again here seems to be saying, I renounce the treatise, read these works.

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But we should not abandon the treaties.

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And it is not a mistake on this university's part that you have been asked to study the treaties rather than the inquiry.

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Let's see why. Well, the inquiry is more polished.

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I personally think that it is, without doubt, more consistently excellent.

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Humes Pick the best bits, the stuff for which he is enduringly known.

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There are more polished discussions of many central topics induction of causation, free will, scepticism.

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He puts in important stuff on God, miracles and the design argument which didn't get there in the treaties.

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He admitted them because he didn't want to cause offence to certain influential people such as Bishop Joseph Butler.

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On the other hand, in general, the treatise is far more ambitious.

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It covers a lot more ground and it gives much more detail of the underlying theory, and it is more systematic.

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It endeavours to explain things comprehensively, as we'll see when he goes through the theory of ideas.

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He's trying to build a systematic theory in a way that he never attempted the inquiry.

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It raises a lot of philosophical problems far more than the inquiry,

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and it contributes to discussion, including modern day discussion of a lot of them.

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A lot of people discussing these ideas today will still take inspiration from what been said.

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Ironically, perhaps one of the particular interests with the treaties is that it is less carefully edited.

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There are more loose ends. By looking at those, we can see more diffuse mind and what's going on.

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Sometimes dying of philosophies, problems and mistakes.

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This is just as revealing as seeing the things they've got right in the inquiry.

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You don't get so many loose ends. You don't get many.

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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.

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We see the philosophical genius at work. So although I personally am a big fan of the inquiry,

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if I were abandoned on a desert island with one human book to read, it would have to be the treatise.

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It would have to be the treatise. The so much in it. A rich work very well worthy of study.

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So how should we interpret the treaties?

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I've mentioned there are a lot of problems and a lot of interpretive difficulties.

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Scholars debate seemingly endlessly. HUME Conference Year after year.

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Edition after edition of that of Human Studies. I may ask whether HUME is really a sceptic, really a naturalistic scientist.

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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.

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Essentially, HUME is engaged on an attack on religious arguments throughout.

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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.

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The approach I'm going to take in these lectures is looking pretty carefully at the text.

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I think it's a bad mistake to try to go into these interpretive debates until we know the text pretty well.

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So I'm going to be avoiding them as much as possible.

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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.

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I will be talking you through the text so that you can understand how it goes.

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Only then will we come to look at the big picture.