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The Great Guide: What David Hume Can Teach Us about Being Human and Living Well
Invaluable wisdom on living a good life from one of the Enlightenment's greatest philosophersDavid Hume (1711-1776) is perhaps best known for his ideas about cause and effect and his criticisms of religion, but he is rarely thought of as a philosopher with practical wisdom to offer. The Great Guide is an engaging and eye-opening account of how Hume's thought should serve as the basis for a complete approach to life. Julian Baggini follows Hume on his life's journey, taking readers to the places that inspired Hume the most. He shows how Hume put his philosophy into practice in a life that blended reason and passion, study and leisure, and relaxation and enjoyment. Masterfully interweaving biography with intellectual history and philosophy, this book shows how life is far richer with Hume as your guide.
328 pages, Paperback
Published June 22, 2021
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About the author
Julian Baggini
78 books600 followersJulian Baggini is a British philosopher and the author of several books about philosophy written for a general audience. He is the author of The Pig that Wants to be Eaten and 99 other thought experiments (2005) and is co-founder and editor of The Philosophers' Magazine. He was awarded his Ph.D. in 1996 from University College London for a thesis on the philosophy of personal identity. In addition to his popular philosophy books, Baggini contributes to The Guardian, The Independent, The Observer, and the BBC. He has been a regular guest on BBC Radio 4's In Our Time.
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June 22, 2021
In a 1776 letter to William Strahan, Adam Smith, reflecting on the life and work of the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume, wrote the following: “Upon the whole, I have always considered him, both in his lifetime and since his death, as approaching as nearly to the idea of a perfectly wise and virtuous man, as perhaps the nature of human frailty will permit.”
While revered in his own time, today Hume is less known outside of academia and is generally underappreciated for his insights into human nature and living the good life. In The Great Guide: What David Hume Can Teach Us about Being Human and Living Well, philosopher Julian Baggini seeks to rectify this oversight by bringing the philosophy of “arguably the greatest philosopher in history” to a general audience.
Mixing biography and philosophy, Baggini explores both the life and work of Hume, with a focus on the Humean maxims and aphorisms (collected at the end of the book in the appendix) that one can use to lead a more rational, moral, and ultimately more satisfying life.
Hume lends himself to this literary approach particularly well because, unlike many philosophers, Hume actually lived his life consistent with his own principles, and considered philosophy to be a way of life rather than an isolated academic exercise. This is why attending to the biographical details is so important for Baggini. As he wrote:
“Philosophy, especially in the English-speaking world, tends to treat ideas and arguments as though they were timeless and placeless….This makes sense if you think that philosophy is a set of discrete intellectual problems to be solved. It makes less sense, however, if you think philosophy is a synoptic discipline, in which all the parts link together to form a (hopefully) coherent whole. And it makes no sense at all if you think that this whole comprises both life and work, ideas and practice. I hope to convince you that attending to a philosopher's life helps to make better sense of their work and that biography is a tool for the study of philosophy, not a distraction from doing it.”
Hume would almost certainly agree. In addition to his own works in philosophy (as we would define the term today, probably too narrowly) Hume also wrote about history, psychology, economics, and politics. Hume believed that “philosophy is either continuous with other disciplines or it is sterile, lifeless, and alone,” and that one should learn from as many sources as possible to attain a deeper understanding of not only how the world works but also how to live well. For Hume, as for the ancients, philosophy was a “way of life,” a systematic endeavor that cannot be disconnected from lived experience.
Hume’s resistance to specialization is one of the first and most important lessons of the book. As Baggini wrote:
“The ability to form an accurate view of reality and human nature requires a willingness to attend to all of experience and how it fits together, not specialized scientific knowledge.”
Hume resisted specialization at every turn. Although considered primarily a philosopher today, Hume wrote a six-volume history of England published from 1754 to 1761. Hume knew that human nature is a messy affair, complicated by a host of biological, social, environmental, and cultural factors, and that constructing a philosophical worldview based on nothing other than one’s imagination (armchair philosophizing)—disconnected from experience, observation, and science—can lead only to “sophistry and illusion.”
As Hume wrote:
“If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.”
Elsewhere, Hume wrote:
“Nothing is more dangerous to reason than the flights of the imagination, and nothing has been the occasion of more mistakes among philosophers.”
Hume saw through the superstitions of his time perhaps better than anyone else. Hume was the first to formulate the problem of induction and later developed several skeptical challenges to religion and the belief in miracles that we still use to this day.
But what makes Hume unique among the skeptics is that he never succumbed to the radical skepticism of the ancients. Faced with insoluble philosophical problems and skeptical challenges, Hume wrote:
“Most fortunately it happens, that since reason is incapable of dispelling these clouds, nature herself suffices to that purpose, and cures me of this philosophical melancholy and delirium, either by relaxing this bent of mind, or by some avocation, and lively impression of my senses, which obliterate all these chimeras. I dine, I play a game of backgammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends; and when after three or four hours' amusement, I would return to these speculations, they appear so cold, and strain'd, and ridiculous, that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any farther.”
Hume’s skepticism told him that the deepest philosophical puzzles are unsolvable, but his cheerful demeanor and enjoyment of life told him that it didn’t matter; that what we can be sure of—i.e., the world of experience and our representations of it—is the only world we can know, and the only world worth trying to understand better. Nature thus dissolves unanswerable philosophical problems, and, while no knowledge can be said to be certain, if we take our experience and common sense seriously, we can focus instead on questions that we can actually make progress in solving, grounded in experience, observation, and evidence. This explains why his philosophical studies led him to the study of history, psychology, and politics rather than to metaphysics or religion.
There is an ethical element to this way of thinking, as well. Hume, for example, had no tolerance for the argument that we need religion to be moral. Quite the opposite, actually. Hume believed that “a morality based on nothing more than human nature is not only possible, but much more humane than most religious or rationalist alternatives.” It is only when we try to “reduce life to exact rule and method”—to ignore the obvious fact that “goodness is multifaceted, and so there is more than one way to live a good life”—that unnecessary harm is inflicted on others, usually by force and coercion rather than persuasion.
Morality was a more straightforward affair for Hume. In fact, the Humean formula is easy to emulate: enjoy life, provide assistance to others so that they may also enjoy life, and do not create undue harm. For Hume, as for Aristotle, being a morally upstanding individual is more a matter of habit and behavior than it is about theory, reflection, and rule-making. As Baggini wrote, in another Humean maxim:
“Practice doing the right thing in every situation, trivial or important, and you will build the kind of character that tends to act well in all situations.”
Hume lived by this maxim in his own life, and as a result was nearly universally revered for being both wise and moral (other than by the religious zealots that felt threatened by him). Hume held to his principles, accepted his imperfections, and strove to build admirable character traits through habitual moral behavior. If you’re looking for a philosopher to actually model your own behavior on, based on how they lived their own life, other than Marcus Aurelius I can think of very few philosophers as worthy as David Hume.
But this comes with its own caveat, one that Baggini formulated as another Humean maxim:
“Never slavishly follow even the greatest minds, for they too have prejudices, weaknesses, and blind spots.”
For all of Hume’s genius, generosity, and good spirit, he was never able to completely break free from the prejudices of his time. As Baggini covers in detail, Hume made some racist comments and adopted some questionable political positions, to be sure. But if we disqualify Hume because he didn’t meet our standards of perfection, we would be forced to conclude that not a single thinker in history is worth reading or learning from, which is absurd.
So while we should not “slavishy follow” Hume in all his thinking, we must also remember that, as Baggini wrote, “we should never completely dismiss even those who are almost always wrong, as they are almost always sometimes right too.” Part of what it means to become an independent thinker is the ability to distinguish what is worth preserving from a range of thinkers and belief systems and what is not—not to outright accept or reject any and all statements from any particular thinker (fans of Jordan Peterson might want to think about this).
Which brings us to the final Humean maxim, one that is especially relevant to the modern world:
“If you forget that we are all somewhat silly, fallible creatures, you become just the kind of dogmatist it is essential not to be.”
While revered in his own time, today Hume is less known outside of academia and is generally underappreciated for his insights into human nature and living the good life. In The Great Guide: What David Hume Can Teach Us about Being Human and Living Well, philosopher Julian Baggini seeks to rectify this oversight by bringing the philosophy of “arguably the greatest philosopher in history” to a general audience.
Mixing biography and philosophy, Baggini explores both the life and work of Hume, with a focus on the Humean maxims and aphorisms (collected at the end of the book in the appendix) that one can use to lead a more rational, moral, and ultimately more satisfying life.
Hume lends himself to this literary approach particularly well because, unlike many philosophers, Hume actually lived his life consistent with his own principles, and considered philosophy to be a way of life rather than an isolated academic exercise. This is why attending to the biographical details is so important for Baggini. As he wrote:
“Philosophy, especially in the English-speaking world, tends to treat ideas and arguments as though they were timeless and placeless….This makes sense if you think that philosophy is a set of discrete intellectual problems to be solved. It makes less sense, however, if you think philosophy is a synoptic discipline, in which all the parts link together to form a (hopefully) coherent whole. And it makes no sense at all if you think that this whole comprises both life and work, ideas and practice. I hope to convince you that attending to a philosopher's life helps to make better sense of their work and that biography is a tool for the study of philosophy, not a distraction from doing it.”
Hume would almost certainly agree. In addition to his own works in philosophy (as we would define the term today, probably too narrowly) Hume also wrote about history, psychology, economics, and politics. Hume believed that “philosophy is either continuous with other disciplines or it is sterile, lifeless, and alone,” and that one should learn from as many sources as possible to attain a deeper understanding of not only how the world works but also how to live well. For Hume, as for the ancients, philosophy was a “way of life,” a systematic endeavor that cannot be disconnected from lived experience.
Hume’s resistance to specialization is one of the first and most important lessons of the book. As Baggini wrote:
“The ability to form an accurate view of reality and human nature requires a willingness to attend to all of experience and how it fits together, not specialized scientific knowledge.”
Hume resisted specialization at every turn. Although considered primarily a philosopher today, Hume wrote a six-volume history of England published from 1754 to 1761. Hume knew that human nature is a messy affair, complicated by a host of biological, social, environmental, and cultural factors, and that constructing a philosophical worldview based on nothing other than one’s imagination (armchair philosophizing)—disconnected from experience, observation, and science—can lead only to “sophistry and illusion.”
As Hume wrote:
“If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.”
Elsewhere, Hume wrote:
“Nothing is more dangerous to reason than the flights of the imagination, and nothing has been the occasion of more mistakes among philosophers.”
Hume saw through the superstitions of his time perhaps better than anyone else. Hume was the first to formulate the problem of induction and later developed several skeptical challenges to religion and the belief in miracles that we still use to this day.
But what makes Hume unique among the skeptics is that he never succumbed to the radical skepticism of the ancients. Faced with insoluble philosophical problems and skeptical challenges, Hume wrote:
“Most fortunately it happens, that since reason is incapable of dispelling these clouds, nature herself suffices to that purpose, and cures me of this philosophical melancholy and delirium, either by relaxing this bent of mind, or by some avocation, and lively impression of my senses, which obliterate all these chimeras. I dine, I play a game of backgammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends; and when after three or four hours' amusement, I would return to these speculations, they appear so cold, and strain'd, and ridiculous, that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any farther.”
Hume’s skepticism told him that the deepest philosophical puzzles are unsolvable, but his cheerful demeanor and enjoyment of life told him that it didn’t matter; that what we can be sure of—i.e., the world of experience and our representations of it—is the only world we can know, and the only world worth trying to understand better. Nature thus dissolves unanswerable philosophical problems, and, while no knowledge can be said to be certain, if we take our experience and common sense seriously, we can focus instead on questions that we can actually make progress in solving, grounded in experience, observation, and evidence. This explains why his philosophical studies led him to the study of history, psychology, and politics rather than to metaphysics or religion.
There is an ethical element to this way of thinking, as well. Hume, for example, had no tolerance for the argument that we need religion to be moral. Quite the opposite, actually. Hume believed that “a morality based on nothing more than human nature is not only possible, but much more humane than most religious or rationalist alternatives.” It is only when we try to “reduce life to exact rule and method”—to ignore the obvious fact that “goodness is multifaceted, and so there is more than one way to live a good life”—that unnecessary harm is inflicted on others, usually by force and coercion rather than persuasion.
Morality was a more straightforward affair for Hume. In fact, the Humean formula is easy to emulate: enjoy life, provide assistance to others so that they may also enjoy life, and do not create undue harm. For Hume, as for Aristotle, being a morally upstanding individual is more a matter of habit and behavior than it is about theory, reflection, and rule-making. As Baggini wrote, in another Humean maxim:
“Practice doing the right thing in every situation, trivial or important, and you will build the kind of character that tends to act well in all situations.”
Hume lived by this maxim in his own life, and as a result was nearly universally revered for being both wise and moral (other than by the religious zealots that felt threatened by him). Hume held to his principles, accepted his imperfections, and strove to build admirable character traits through habitual moral behavior. If you’re looking for a philosopher to actually model your own behavior on, based on how they lived their own life, other than Marcus Aurelius I can think of very few philosophers as worthy as David Hume.
But this comes with its own caveat, one that Baggini formulated as another Humean maxim:
“Never slavishly follow even the greatest minds, for they too have prejudices, weaknesses, and blind spots.”
For all of Hume’s genius, generosity, and good spirit, he was never able to completely break free from the prejudices of his time. As Baggini covers in detail, Hume made some racist comments and adopted some questionable political positions, to be sure. But if we disqualify Hume because he didn’t meet our standards of perfection, we would be forced to conclude that not a single thinker in history is worth reading or learning from, which is absurd.
So while we should not “slavishy follow” Hume in all his thinking, we must also remember that, as Baggini wrote, “we should never completely dismiss even those who are almost always wrong, as they are almost always sometimes right too.” Part of what it means to become an independent thinker is the ability to distinguish what is worth preserving from a range of thinkers and belief systems and what is not—not to outright accept or reject any and all statements from any particular thinker (fans of Jordan Peterson might want to think about this).
Which brings us to the final Humean maxim, one that is especially relevant to the modern world:
“If you forget that we are all somewhat silly, fallible creatures, you become just the kind of dogmatist it is essential not to be.”
January 26, 2025
This book was not for me.
I picked up this book hoping for some enlightening reading and instead found myself completely out of my depth. I was really looking forward to diving into this one. I’d heard that it was an accessible exploration of David Hume’s philosophy, and as someone who doesn’t have much background in philosophy but is curious about the big questions, I thought it would be right up my alley. Unfortunately, it wasn’t.
Now, I don’t want to be too hard on the book—or on Baggini, for that matter. In many ways, I think the problem was me. I’ll be the first to admit that my knowledge of philosophy is pretty limited, and that lack of foundation made this book feel like trying to read a dense academic journal without the right glasses on.
It felt like I was being dropped into the middle of a conversation where everyone else already knew what was going on, while I was left wondering, “Wait, who’s Hume again, and why is everyone debating this obscure detail about his theories?”
The Great Guide dives deep into some seriously esoteric rabbit holes. Instead of getting a clear and comprehensive look at Hume’s central ideas—his philosophy of empiricism, his views on human nature, his thoughts on morality—I felt like the book was constantly pulling me into tangential debates that seemed, well, obscure.
I think what threw me off the most was the sheer amount of what I can only describe as navel-gazing. Don’t get me wrong—I understand that philosophy often requires a lot of abstract thinking and theoretical debate. But there were times when I felt like the book got so bogged down in splitting hairs over minor points that it lost sight of the bigger picture. I kept thinking, “Okay, but how does this actually help me understand Hume’s ideas in a meaningful way?”
What I was really hoping for was something practical—something that could take Hume’s philosophy and show me how it applies to the real world. After all, isn’t that the point of exploring these big ideas? To better understand ourselves and the world we live in? Instead, the book felt like an intellectual gymnastics lesson—impressive, sure, but exhausting and not particularly useful to someone like me, whose brain was just too tired to keep up.
By the time I finished, I had the unenviable result of realizing that I didn’t actually have a good grasp of what Hume believed. Sure, I picked up on bits and pieces here and there, but I never felt like I got the comprehensive understanding I was hoping for. And that left me feeling more confused than enlightened.
I’m chalking this one up as a learning experience. Maybe next time I’ll pick a book that’s more my speed.
I picked up this book hoping for some enlightening reading and instead found myself completely out of my depth. I was really looking forward to diving into this one. I’d heard that it was an accessible exploration of David Hume’s philosophy, and as someone who doesn’t have much background in philosophy but is curious about the big questions, I thought it would be right up my alley. Unfortunately, it wasn’t.
Now, I don’t want to be too hard on the book—or on Baggini, for that matter. In many ways, I think the problem was me. I’ll be the first to admit that my knowledge of philosophy is pretty limited, and that lack of foundation made this book feel like trying to read a dense academic journal without the right glasses on.
It felt like I was being dropped into the middle of a conversation where everyone else already knew what was going on, while I was left wondering, “Wait, who’s Hume again, and why is everyone debating this obscure detail about his theories?”
The Great Guide dives deep into some seriously esoteric rabbit holes. Instead of getting a clear and comprehensive look at Hume’s central ideas—his philosophy of empiricism, his views on human nature, his thoughts on morality—I felt like the book was constantly pulling me into tangential debates that seemed, well, obscure.
I think what threw me off the most was the sheer amount of what I can only describe as navel-gazing. Don’t get me wrong—I understand that philosophy often requires a lot of abstract thinking and theoretical debate. But there were times when I felt like the book got so bogged down in splitting hairs over minor points that it lost sight of the bigger picture. I kept thinking, “Okay, but how does this actually help me understand Hume’s ideas in a meaningful way?”
What I was really hoping for was something practical—something that could take Hume’s philosophy and show me how it applies to the real world. After all, isn’t that the point of exploring these big ideas? To better understand ourselves and the world we live in? Instead, the book felt like an intellectual gymnastics lesson—impressive, sure, but exhausting and not particularly useful to someone like me, whose brain was just too tired to keep up.
By the time I finished, I had the unenviable result of realizing that I didn’t actually have a good grasp of what Hume believed. Sure, I picked up on bits and pieces here and there, but I never felt like I got the comprehensive understanding I was hoping for. And that left me feeling more confused than enlightened.
I’m chalking this one up as a learning experience. Maybe next time I’ll pick a book that’s more my speed.
July 7, 2021
A masterstroke of a volume like the opening lines of Brahms' Violin Concerto. Hume is a master of argumentative twists: there are many who criticized his arguments but were at a loss when one learns that there is more to his statements. Many things can be learned from him, no wonder Kant 'woke up from his slumber,' such as that a lot of good words of praise can be heaped upon Hume.
One feature of the book that is unique is the maxims and aphorisms from Hume in bold. It captures the essence of Hume's diverse thinking on many subjects and is a great aid to the reader who may find Hume's prose as old-fashioned or difficult to read. But it is actually a challenge to every reader who never read an original Hume to read one after reading Baggini's volume.
Hume is somewhat neglected by many general readers of philosophy who may read the works of the Greeks, the Stoics, or the Existentialists. Hume is a philosopher that ought not to be neglected, his presence could no longer be ignored. His fine contributions to philosophy and other areas of learning breathes life to a world brimming with misery, anxiety, and mistrust. With Baggini's volume, this year is the year of Hume.
One feature of the book that is unique is the maxims and aphorisms from Hume in bold. It captures the essence of Hume's diverse thinking on many subjects and is a great aid to the reader who may find Hume's prose as old-fashioned or difficult to read. But it is actually a challenge to every reader who never read an original Hume to read one after reading Baggini's volume.
Hume is somewhat neglected by many general readers of philosophy who may read the works of the Greeks, the Stoics, or the Existentialists. Hume is a philosopher that ought not to be neglected, his presence could no longer be ignored. His fine contributions to philosophy and other areas of learning breathes life to a world brimming with misery, anxiety, and mistrust. With Baggini's volume, this year is the year of Hume.
March 18, 2025
A good summary of Hume’s ideas but a rather dull read. The elements of the travelogue are distracting to Hume’s main philosophy. Nonetheless, it’s worth a read just to brush up on your Hume (a philosopher everyone should read). I include my notes below on his lifestyle and philosophy.
When thousands of academic philosophers were recently asked which non-living predecessor they most identified with, Hume came a clear first, ahead of Aristotle, Kant, and Wittgenstein.
… he was more fully human than most, nothing more, nothing less. The virtues he exemplified were not extreme ones of daring or courage but quiet ones of amiability, modesty, generosity of spirit, hospitality. Lest this sound like little, consider how difficult it is to live our lives consistently expressing such virtues. Celebrating such a life is difficult because it undeniably depends upon privilege.
He was a genial, cheerful man who died loved and renowned. His ideas are far too sensible to shock or not obviously radical enough to capture our attention. His distaste for “enthusiasts”—by which he meant fanatics of any kind—made him too moderate to inspire zealotry in his admirers. These same qualities that made him a rounded, wise figure prevented him from becoming a cult one.
3.5/5. March 2025 (published in 2021. It’s a fine summary on Hume but the writing could be more engaging given the brilliance of his ideas.)
NOTES
Lifestyle
“For the purpose of life and conduct and society, a little good sense is surely better than all the genius, and a little good humour than this extreme sensibility.”
“There is nothing to be learnt from a Professor, which is not to be met with in Books,”
This was Hume’s first taste of the kind of society he preferred to keep: a select group of intelligent people, convivially gathering with food and drink.
Hume had fallen into a deep depression, what he called the “disease of the learned.” The cure was to study less intensively, to exercise daily, and to make time for relaxation and social intercourse.
Hume didn’t value great luxury or excess but was delighted to have the kind of “modest fortune” that enabled him to pursue his work freely.
Hume, however, was never a zealous atheist. All his life he remained friends with many members of the clergy, relationships that his correspondence showed involved plenty of good-natured teasing.
Hume was a man who valued both solitude and good company and seemed conflicted as to which was preferable.
Philosophy
More haste, less speed is a warning for all areas of life, not just practical or urgent tasks.
Philosophy succeeds when it addresses human beings as they are and fails when it treats them only as philosophers imagine them to be.
do not depend on others or chance more than is necessary for attaining all the satisfaction that life has to offer. This principle acknowledges that some lack of independence is necessary to live a full life, but asks us to constantly check whether or not we have made ourselves too dependent on what is outside of our control.
Voltaire passed on to us the Italian proverb il meglio è l’inimico del bene: the best is the enemy of the good. Hume’s twist is that inhuman perfection is the enemy of humanity’s best.
travel can only expand the mind if the mind is already expansive.
A skeptical, open mind has nothing to fear and much to gain from seeking the company and opinions of those it seriously disagrees with.
Hume was thus bringing the experimental method of natural science into the domain of philosophy. This approach has come to be known as empiricism. Descartes’s method, which started from pure reason, came to be called rationalism.
Empiricism. The ability to form an accurate view of reality and human nature requires a willingness to attend to all of experience and how it fits together, not specialized scientific knowledge.
habit was the key to virtuous behavior: practice doing the right thing in every situation, trivial or important, and you will build the kind of character that tends to act well in all situations.
for Hume, the best means of changing our own behavior for the better is not simply to convince ourselves rationally that we ought to do so but to change our habits so that the behavior we desire becomes automatic. “Habit is another powerful means of reforming the mind, and implanting in it good dispositions and inclinations.”
Hence Hume’s claim that “no quality, it is allowed, is absolutely either blameable or praise-worthy. It is all according to its degree.” Confucius developed almost the exact same concept, completely independently.
For Hume, all reasoning is of these two kinds, concerning the relations of ideas or matters of fact. This principle is known as “Hume’s fork.”
“the problem of induction.” Induction is reasoning that generalizes from a limited number of particular, past cases to general rules that also hold in the future. The “problem” is that logically there is no way of getting from premises about the past to conclusions about the future. From a logical point of view, no argument that begins with claims about what has been can jump to conclusions about what will be.
Hume’s skepticism is therefore not a serious doubt about the power of cause and effect but a fatal doubt in our ability to rationally justify our belief in it other than by appealing to the absolute necessity of believing in it.
We have only a fragile grip on reality, one we cling to by custom, habit, and instinct.
It is partly for that reason that Hume places so little importance on deductive reasoning. A logical argument is only as good as its premises, and when it comes to how the world is, no premise is so secure as to allow us to make secure logical deductions from it.
Take it as a Humean maxim that “rational” is not the same as “logical.” Although logic is algorithmic, meaning that it follows strict rules, reasoning in general is not. There is no algorithm for good reasoning.
You cannot judge a good argument by an absolute standard. The best argument is simply the one that has no better rival.
So Confidence degenerated into Impudence and Diffidence mellowed into Modesty. The allegory is a warning that confidence should always be treated with suspicion and be guarded against.
impressions and ideas. The most natural way to distinguish the two is to say that impressions are firsthand perceptions whereas ideas are the mind’s secondhand copies of them. So, before I went to La Flèche I had vague ideas about it, conjured by imagination. While I was there, I had impressions of the town and area, produced by the place itself. And when I returned, I retained ideas formed from these impressions about La Flèche in the form of my memories.
Impressions strike us with “force and violence” whereas ideas are faint and weak in comparison. “The most lively thought is still inferior to the dullest sensation.”95
It does this by means of three “principles of association” that link ideas: contiguity in time and space, resemblance, and causation. There was, he argued, no association we make between ideas in the mind that is not based on some version of these three.
Hume, as an advocate of empiricism, thus wanted nothing to do with innate ideas. He followed John Locke, one of the first empiricists, who compared the human mind at birth to a tabula rasa: a blank slate or white sheet of paper.
Far from being a tabula rasa, the mind comes equipped at the very least with an instinct to perceive causation. Hume explicitly acknowledges this in the Enquiry when he says our inferences from cause to effect “are a species of natural instincts, which no reasoning or process of the thought and understanding is able, either to produce, or to prevent.”
Modesty then, and Humility, with regard to the Operations of our natural Faculties, is the Result of Scepticism; not an universal Doubt, which it is impossible for any Man to support, and which the first and most trivial Accident in Life must immediately disconcert and destroy.”
One is the role of chance in life. Anyone who looks back at their own past will see that so many key changes in direction were the result of pure chance. In his letters he often makes passing reference to his good fortune, mainly in having a cheerful temperament.
Most notably, he seemed to accept that material wealth is more often down to chance than merit: possession of a large fortune is largely dependent on fortune.
Proper pride is taking satisfaction from having done what you judge to be right or of value, without the vanity of believing that makes you superior or special.
Unaware of all the hidden causes of our actions, it feels to us as though the only thing causing our actions is our willing them. Indeed, this feeling that we are the originating causes of actions is the source of the concept of the will. “By the will,” says Hume, “I mean nothing but the internal impression we feel and are conscious of, when we knowingly give rise to any new motion of our body, or new perception of our mind.”
The idea here is that he is showing us that we can have everything we want and need from the idea of free will without a mistaken belief in “liberty of indifference.” This general approach has been called “compatibilism” and remains the most popular position on free will held by philosophers in the English-speaking world today.
neither poverty nor riches are conducive to a virtuous and happy life. “The Great are too much immers’d in Pleasure; and the Poor too much occupy’d in providing for the Necessities of Life, to hearken to the calm Voice of Reason.”
Even the keenest eye has blind spots: no one’s field of vision is entirely in focus. (tendency both to overestimate our own abilities and to attribute more of what happens to us to our characters than to chance or outside events, a bias known as fundamental attribution error.)
To put it another way, we say the self has experiences but the self is actually just an ordered collection of experiences. When we truly realize this, the self becomes so light as to almost vanish.
The self simply is all the properties of the self, which are essentially psychological ones: perception, memory, desire, and so on. There is no “self-substance” in addition to this.
Of all the factors that enable these relations, Hume singles out memory “chiefly, as the source of personal identity.” Without memory there is nothing to make us aware of the “continuance and extent of this succession of perceptions.”
Memory helps create the sense of sameness over time by unifying the “bundle of perceptions.” However, it is also the case that we do not remember everything, yet what we count as our past does not consist only of what we remember. In this sense, then, “memory does not so much produce as discover personal identity, by shewing us the relation of cause and effect among our different perceptions.”
Hume’s view is actually very close to that of the Buddha, who argued that there was no “ātman” (attā in Pali), the immaterial essence of self postulated by all orthodox Indian schools of philosophy. Instead, there were only the “aggregates”: body, feelings, perception, mental formations, and consciousness. The permanent, abiding self was an illusion. This doctrine is known as anattā, not-self.
To never compromise is a mark of excessive rigidity, to always compromise an even surer sign of having no standards at all.
History is therefore a means to discover what is constant and unchanging in human nature and what is subject to alteration by our cultures and political situations. “The advantages found in history seem to be of three kinds,” Hume wrote, “as it amuses the fancy, as it improves the understanding, and as it strengthens virtue.”
In other words, being right shows the quality of your intellect; being wrong but able to acknowledge and learn from your mistakes shows the quality of your character.
evolutionary psychology, before there was even a theory of evolution. Without the specific insights of Darwin, he had a sense that certain principles of thought had developed over the course of human history in response to certain needs that emerged purely out of our biological and social situation.
To understand how you should best think, you need to understand how you actually think. Doing philosophy without psychology is like trying to sail around the world with no knowledge of how boats work.
The study of nature shows us that “nothing in this world is perpetual, every thing however seemingly firm is in continual flux and change, the world itself gives symptoms of frailty and dissolution.”
when people strongly disagree, try to find what they haven’t noticed unites them, not what they already know divides them.
He did not believe that death should mean nothing to a philosopher. The more a person is “possessed of virtue in its entirety and the happier he is, the more he will be pained at the thought of death; for life is best worth living for such a man, and he is knowingly losing the greatest goods, and this is painful.”
For Hume, however, his ability to face death well is in part due to his natural disposition—“a man of mild disposition, of command of temper, of an open, social, and cheerful humour”—and the good fortune not to have suffered any great calamities.
The greatest example of this vice is anthropomorphism: seeing God in our own image. “By representing the Deity as so intelligible, and comprehensible, and so similar to a human mind,” argues Philo, “we are guilty of the grossest and most narrow partiality, and make ourselves the model of the whole universe.”
For Hume, the root of morality is not reason but sympathy. “No quality of human nature is more remarkable, both in itself and in its consequences, than that propensity we have to sympathize with others, and to receive by communication their inclinations and sentiments, however different from, or even contrary to our own.”
ethics without empathy is a contradiction in terms.
Right and wrong are not found in acts or in objects but in our feelings toward them. “Every passion, habit, or turn of character … which has a tendency to our advantage or prejudice, gives a delight or uneasiness and ’tis from thence the approbation or dis-approbation arises.”
Reason tells us what is logically possible or impossible, consistent or contradictory. But it cannot tell us what is good, what we ought to do. “Happiness is good” is not a truth established by logic but a principle we agree with on the basis of our experience of happiness and its alternatives.
Hume’s own account shows that emotion and reason are not entirely separate and many of our emotions contain rational judgments. That is why reason is so important for overcoming prejudice, because prejudice is often no more than a negative emotional reaction based on false ideas.
Hume is here expressing an idea that has come to be known as moral pluralism. This is not an anything-goes relativism but a recognition that there are many things that make for a good life and it is not possible for any one life or any one society to have them all in full.
“theology … admits of no terms of composition, but bends every branch of knowledge to its own purpose, without much regard to the phænomena of nature,
Truth is not always more important than courtesy, or even sometimes entertainment. “There is a sort of harmless liar, frequently to be met with in company, who deal much in the marvellous.”
Justice only exists because we needed to invent it in order to manage harmonious societies. Justice is made to fit human beings, not the other way around. (robbers and pirates have their own code and laws)
Learning should be part of a life well-lived, not something we do as though we were mere learning machines.
When thousands of academic philosophers were recently asked which non-living predecessor they most identified with, Hume came a clear first, ahead of Aristotle, Kant, and Wittgenstein.
… he was more fully human than most, nothing more, nothing less. The virtues he exemplified were not extreme ones of daring or courage but quiet ones of amiability, modesty, generosity of spirit, hospitality. Lest this sound like little, consider how difficult it is to live our lives consistently expressing such virtues. Celebrating such a life is difficult because it undeniably depends upon privilege.
He was a genial, cheerful man who died loved and renowned. His ideas are far too sensible to shock or not obviously radical enough to capture our attention. His distaste for “enthusiasts”—by which he meant fanatics of any kind—made him too moderate to inspire zealotry in his admirers. These same qualities that made him a rounded, wise figure prevented him from becoming a cult one.
3.5/5. March 2025 (published in 2021. It’s a fine summary on Hume but the writing could be more engaging given the brilliance of his ideas.)
NOTES
Lifestyle
“For the purpose of life and conduct and society, a little good sense is surely better than all the genius, and a little good humour than this extreme sensibility.”
“There is nothing to be learnt from a Professor, which is not to be met with in Books,”
This was Hume’s first taste of the kind of society he preferred to keep: a select group of intelligent people, convivially gathering with food and drink.
Hume had fallen into a deep depression, what he called the “disease of the learned.” The cure was to study less intensively, to exercise daily, and to make time for relaxation and social intercourse.
Hume didn’t value great luxury or excess but was delighted to have the kind of “modest fortune” that enabled him to pursue his work freely.
Hume, however, was never a zealous atheist. All his life he remained friends with many members of the clergy, relationships that his correspondence showed involved plenty of good-natured teasing.
Hume was a man who valued both solitude and good company and seemed conflicted as to which was preferable.
Philosophy
More haste, less speed is a warning for all areas of life, not just practical or urgent tasks.
Philosophy succeeds when it addresses human beings as they are and fails when it treats them only as philosophers imagine them to be.
do not depend on others or chance more than is necessary for attaining all the satisfaction that life has to offer. This principle acknowledges that some lack of independence is necessary to live a full life, but asks us to constantly check whether or not we have made ourselves too dependent on what is outside of our control.
Voltaire passed on to us the Italian proverb il meglio è l’inimico del bene: the best is the enemy of the good. Hume’s twist is that inhuman perfection is the enemy of humanity’s best.
travel can only expand the mind if the mind is already expansive.
A skeptical, open mind has nothing to fear and much to gain from seeking the company and opinions of those it seriously disagrees with.
Hume was thus bringing the experimental method of natural science into the domain of philosophy. This approach has come to be known as empiricism. Descartes’s method, which started from pure reason, came to be called rationalism.
Empiricism. The ability to form an accurate view of reality and human nature requires a willingness to attend to all of experience and how it fits together, not specialized scientific knowledge.
habit was the key to virtuous behavior: practice doing the right thing in every situation, trivial or important, and you will build the kind of character that tends to act well in all situations.
for Hume, the best means of changing our own behavior for the better is not simply to convince ourselves rationally that we ought to do so but to change our habits so that the behavior we desire becomes automatic. “Habit is another powerful means of reforming the mind, and implanting in it good dispositions and inclinations.”
Hence Hume’s claim that “no quality, it is allowed, is absolutely either blameable or praise-worthy. It is all according to its degree.” Confucius developed almost the exact same concept, completely independently.
For Hume, all reasoning is of these two kinds, concerning the relations of ideas or matters of fact. This principle is known as “Hume’s fork.”
“the problem of induction.” Induction is reasoning that generalizes from a limited number of particular, past cases to general rules that also hold in the future. The “problem” is that logically there is no way of getting from premises about the past to conclusions about the future. From a logical point of view, no argument that begins with claims about what has been can jump to conclusions about what will be.
Hume’s skepticism is therefore not a serious doubt about the power of cause and effect but a fatal doubt in our ability to rationally justify our belief in it other than by appealing to the absolute necessity of believing in it.
We have only a fragile grip on reality, one we cling to by custom, habit, and instinct.
It is partly for that reason that Hume places so little importance on deductive reasoning. A logical argument is only as good as its premises, and when it comes to how the world is, no premise is so secure as to allow us to make secure logical deductions from it.
Take it as a Humean maxim that “rational” is not the same as “logical.” Although logic is algorithmic, meaning that it follows strict rules, reasoning in general is not. There is no algorithm for good reasoning.
You cannot judge a good argument by an absolute standard. The best argument is simply the one that has no better rival.
So Confidence degenerated into Impudence and Diffidence mellowed into Modesty. The allegory is a warning that confidence should always be treated with suspicion and be guarded against.
impressions and ideas. The most natural way to distinguish the two is to say that impressions are firsthand perceptions whereas ideas are the mind’s secondhand copies of them. So, before I went to La Flèche I had vague ideas about it, conjured by imagination. While I was there, I had impressions of the town and area, produced by the place itself. And when I returned, I retained ideas formed from these impressions about La Flèche in the form of my memories.
Impressions strike us with “force and violence” whereas ideas are faint and weak in comparison. “The most lively thought is still inferior to the dullest sensation.”95
It does this by means of three “principles of association” that link ideas: contiguity in time and space, resemblance, and causation. There was, he argued, no association we make between ideas in the mind that is not based on some version of these three.
Hume, as an advocate of empiricism, thus wanted nothing to do with innate ideas. He followed John Locke, one of the first empiricists, who compared the human mind at birth to a tabula rasa: a blank slate or white sheet of paper.
Far from being a tabula rasa, the mind comes equipped at the very least with an instinct to perceive causation. Hume explicitly acknowledges this in the Enquiry when he says our inferences from cause to effect “are a species of natural instincts, which no reasoning or process of the thought and understanding is able, either to produce, or to prevent.”
Modesty then, and Humility, with regard to the Operations of our natural Faculties, is the Result of Scepticism; not an universal Doubt, which it is impossible for any Man to support, and which the first and most trivial Accident in Life must immediately disconcert and destroy.”
One is the role of chance in life. Anyone who looks back at their own past will see that so many key changes in direction were the result of pure chance. In his letters he often makes passing reference to his good fortune, mainly in having a cheerful temperament.
Most notably, he seemed to accept that material wealth is more often down to chance than merit: possession of a large fortune is largely dependent on fortune.
Proper pride is taking satisfaction from having done what you judge to be right or of value, without the vanity of believing that makes you superior or special.
Unaware of all the hidden causes of our actions, it feels to us as though the only thing causing our actions is our willing them. Indeed, this feeling that we are the originating causes of actions is the source of the concept of the will. “By the will,” says Hume, “I mean nothing but the internal impression we feel and are conscious of, when we knowingly give rise to any new motion of our body, or new perception of our mind.”
The idea here is that he is showing us that we can have everything we want and need from the idea of free will without a mistaken belief in “liberty of indifference.” This general approach has been called “compatibilism” and remains the most popular position on free will held by philosophers in the English-speaking world today.
neither poverty nor riches are conducive to a virtuous and happy life. “The Great are too much immers’d in Pleasure; and the Poor too much occupy’d in providing for the Necessities of Life, to hearken to the calm Voice of Reason.”
Even the keenest eye has blind spots: no one’s field of vision is entirely in focus. (tendency both to overestimate our own abilities and to attribute more of what happens to us to our characters than to chance or outside events, a bias known as fundamental attribution error.)
To put it another way, we say the self has experiences but the self is actually just an ordered collection of experiences. When we truly realize this, the self becomes so light as to almost vanish.
The self simply is all the properties of the self, which are essentially psychological ones: perception, memory, desire, and so on. There is no “self-substance” in addition to this.
Of all the factors that enable these relations, Hume singles out memory “chiefly, as the source of personal identity.” Without memory there is nothing to make us aware of the “continuance and extent of this succession of perceptions.”
Memory helps create the sense of sameness over time by unifying the “bundle of perceptions.” However, it is also the case that we do not remember everything, yet what we count as our past does not consist only of what we remember. In this sense, then, “memory does not so much produce as discover personal identity, by shewing us the relation of cause and effect among our different perceptions.”
Hume’s view is actually very close to that of the Buddha, who argued that there was no “ātman” (attā in Pali), the immaterial essence of self postulated by all orthodox Indian schools of philosophy. Instead, there were only the “aggregates”: body, feelings, perception, mental formations, and consciousness. The permanent, abiding self was an illusion. This doctrine is known as anattā, not-self.
To never compromise is a mark of excessive rigidity, to always compromise an even surer sign of having no standards at all.
History is therefore a means to discover what is constant and unchanging in human nature and what is subject to alteration by our cultures and political situations. “The advantages found in history seem to be of three kinds,” Hume wrote, “as it amuses the fancy, as it improves the understanding, and as it strengthens virtue.”
In other words, being right shows the quality of your intellect; being wrong but able to acknowledge and learn from your mistakes shows the quality of your character.
evolutionary psychology, before there was even a theory of evolution. Without the specific insights of Darwin, he had a sense that certain principles of thought had developed over the course of human history in response to certain needs that emerged purely out of our biological and social situation.
To understand how you should best think, you need to understand how you actually think. Doing philosophy without psychology is like trying to sail around the world with no knowledge of how boats work.
The study of nature shows us that “nothing in this world is perpetual, every thing however seemingly firm is in continual flux and change, the world itself gives symptoms of frailty and dissolution.”
when people strongly disagree, try to find what they haven’t noticed unites them, not what they already know divides them.
He did not believe that death should mean nothing to a philosopher. The more a person is “possessed of virtue in its entirety and the happier he is, the more he will be pained at the thought of death; for life is best worth living for such a man, and he is knowingly losing the greatest goods, and this is painful.”
For Hume, however, his ability to face death well is in part due to his natural disposition—“a man of mild disposition, of command of temper, of an open, social, and cheerful humour”—and the good fortune not to have suffered any great calamities.
The greatest example of this vice is anthropomorphism: seeing God in our own image. “By representing the Deity as so intelligible, and comprehensible, and so similar to a human mind,” argues Philo, “we are guilty of the grossest and most narrow partiality, and make ourselves the model of the whole universe.”
For Hume, the root of morality is not reason but sympathy. “No quality of human nature is more remarkable, both in itself and in its consequences, than that propensity we have to sympathize with others, and to receive by communication their inclinations and sentiments, however different from, or even contrary to our own.”
ethics without empathy is a contradiction in terms.
Right and wrong are not found in acts or in objects but in our feelings toward them. “Every passion, habit, or turn of character … which has a tendency to our advantage or prejudice, gives a delight or uneasiness and ’tis from thence the approbation or dis-approbation arises.”
Reason tells us what is logically possible or impossible, consistent or contradictory. But it cannot tell us what is good, what we ought to do. “Happiness is good” is not a truth established by logic but a principle we agree with on the basis of our experience of happiness and its alternatives.
Hume’s own account shows that emotion and reason are not entirely separate and many of our emotions contain rational judgments. That is why reason is so important for overcoming prejudice, because prejudice is often no more than a negative emotional reaction based on false ideas.
Hume is here expressing an idea that has come to be known as moral pluralism. This is not an anything-goes relativism but a recognition that there are many things that make for a good life and it is not possible for any one life or any one society to have them all in full.
“theology … admits of no terms of composition, but bends every branch of knowledge to its own purpose, without much regard to the phænomena of nature,
Truth is not always more important than courtesy, or even sometimes entertainment. “There is a sort of harmless liar, frequently to be met with in company, who deal much in the marvellous.”
Justice only exists because we needed to invent it in order to manage harmonious societies. Justice is made to fit human beings, not the other way around. (robbers and pirates have their own code and laws)
Learning should be part of a life well-lived, not something we do as though we were mere learning machines.
August 20, 2022
Sane reflections from the life and works of perhaps my favorite philosopher.
March 19, 2022
The Great Guide : What David Hume Can Teach Us About Being Human and Living Well (2021) by David Baggini is an excellent book on the life and thought of David Hume. Baggini has a PhD in Philosophy and is a professional philosopher.
Hume is an incredibly important philosopher. He showed that you could not derive from pure reason values. His empiricism became the philosophy that later greats in philosophy, Kant and Nietzsche among them, would react against. He statement that reason is a slave to the passions is deeply insightful. Hume was not a tortured soul. He ate well, lived well, had many friends and was regarded as fine company.
Baggini’s book goes over Hume’s life and the places where he lived it while going through Hume’s philosophy. Baggini visits many of the places that Hume lived and worked.
The explanations of Hume’s philosophy and his comments on life are well chosen and provide a great overview of Hume’s life and work.
The Great Guide is an excellent book on Hume. It’s well written and provides insight into why Hume is still relevant and also points out how Hume does have lessons for all of us.
Hume is an incredibly important philosopher. He showed that you could not derive from pure reason values. His empiricism became the philosophy that later greats in philosophy, Kant and Nietzsche among them, would react against. He statement that reason is a slave to the passions is deeply insightful. Hume was not a tortured soul. He ate well, lived well, had many friends and was regarded as fine company.
Baggini’s book goes over Hume’s life and the places where he lived it while going through Hume’s philosophy. Baggini visits many of the places that Hume lived and worked.
The explanations of Hume’s philosophy and his comments on life are well chosen and provide a great overview of Hume’s life and work.
The Great Guide is an excellent book on Hume. It’s well written and provides insight into why Hume is still relevant and also points out how Hume does have lessons for all of us.
May 28, 2022
The author offers an easily digestible if relatively modest introduction to great philosopher and historian’s life and work. The author also recounts his personal travels to the French and Scottish sites of Hume’s life. The book has given me the confidence to at least try to read Hume’s philosophy. It’s also made me more interested in the Scottish Enlightenment.
February 1, 2022
David Hume believed that, for something to be virtuous, it had to be agreeable and that wasn’t true for celibacy, fasting, penance, mortifications, self-denial, humility, silence, solitude, and the whole train of what he referred to as “monkish virtues”. Hume opposed the idea that we should impose suffering upon ourselves.
Cause and Effect
Our normal perception is that we can endure present suffering in order to effectuate future good, such as in exercising, dieting, saving, working, etc. However, Hume doubted our ability to exert freewill, suggesting that we really have very little ability to truly determine what will be. Hume perceived that an unseen cause exists for all events and that it is just because we are ignorant of certain causes that we attribute things to chance. Certainly, there are automated, internal bodily operations that affect our respiration, pulse and digestion, as well as our energy levels, ambitions, health, and mental attitudes. Hume believed that the universe is governed by laws, not chance.
Of course, most people believe that effects always correspond to causes. We do not doubt that we have in fact observed causes and effects in action, such as the fact that a bat propels a baseball into the air. However, Hume argues that all we have observed is one event following another and that we can never really see all of the necessary connections, leaving us ignorant of preliminary causes.
We assume that we see cause and effect because the mind instinctively fills in the gaps, attributing causal connections between events, in a sequence that we cannot fully observe. Because of this, Hume asserts that we have only experience, custom, and habit for our guides. We can predict that a bat will propel the ball, but we can never be sure if it will miss the mark entirely, propel only a grounder, or send the ball whizzing out of the park.
Customs and Habits
One can see Hume’s point more clearly when we think of imagined effects instead of experiential effects. The latter would be something like our repetitive observations that a bat can cause a baseball to fly. The former would be like a witch doctor guessing that a certain dance around a campfire causes it to rain. The witch doctor’s imagination may instigate dancing among the people, but repetitive experiences will not affirm it as sustained truth, and therefore it will not survive long in human tradition. In this way, Hume believes that affirmed customs and habits are superior guides (detectors) than random imaginings.
However, even though we may evolve through scientific experimentation to learn that the witch doctor’s dance is not really causing it to rain, we’ll only succeed in imagining some other idea about the cause for precipitation, such as seasonal variation. Hume asserted that, regardless of what we believe, it is always an imaginative process, as we well know from our often-inaccurate weather forecasts. It only becomes experiential when we subject our hypotheses to trial and error and develop confirmations that may endure as seemingly affirmed truths. But, because we cannot see the entirety of causes, such truths will endure only until more precise postulations are substantiated (those more preliminary in the chain of causal reactions) that offer greater clarity, such as condensation causing the rain. Hume contends that the chain of causes is too long for us to observe, but if we could see it, we would also see that we have no free will.
Hume points out that we must nevertheless hypothesize and make explanatory assumptions regarding causes because, if we assume nothing, we are left in total skepticism, without any basis from which to draw inferences about the world. We have no choice but to live empirically, via our observations and our imagined reasons for the causes, some of which are obviously more substantiated than others. Even though the witch doctor’s assertions are wrong, the process of guessing is vital to and deeply characteristic of human consciousness.
Instinct and Sensory Perceptions
Hume disagrees with the Stoics, who believed that human beings should learn to detach themselves from emotions and rationalize away their animal instincts. Hume asserted that it is our “feelings”, as opposed to our “rationalizations”, that are at the root of morality, as for example, in feelings of compassion for our fellow creatures. Conversely, pure reason might allow for murderous burnings, persecutions, indulgences, abuses, and other deviant practices, such as we have seen in the operative history of the Catholic Church.
Hume’s contention is that our moral sense is derived from our judgement, which he identifies as a sensory preceptor, just like our other five senses. Just as we perceive blue to be blue, a horn to be loud, saltiness salty, or a light to be bright, so we also distinguish between right and wrong. And, just as blue can fade, a horn become distant, saltiness diluted, or a light dim, so too do the gray areas within morality become less easily discerned until, at some extent, they are no longer detectable. However, the fact that we no longer detect them doesn’t mean they are nonexistent; they remain present, still lurking just beyond our sensory perceptions, like an alternative dimension. This is where strict empiricism starts to break down and one is forced to acknowledge and deal with existences beyond our immediate recognition. Hume recognized that, even with all of our sensory perceptions fully activated, we still have but a fragile grip upon reality.
For this reason, Hume believed that we must develop and refine our instincts, not deny them; because they are our primary means of perception. Hume suggested the best way for bettering our behavior was through establishment of new habits, passions, and customs, as opposed to deep rationalizations. Hume saw that too much rationalizing instigates compliance with dogmatic opinions, makes one blind to counter arguments, and leads to the sort of superstitious nonsense promulgated in religious fundamentalism.
Hume preceded Darwin in recognizing that we all possess a sense of judgement that has developed and refined itself over the course of human history, and that this sense has resulted from our biological and social situations. Hume supported this with his contention that most of our decision-making involves quick assumptions about things, not any sort of sustained logical inference. The famous psychiatrist, Carl Jung, would later expand this idea way beyond just a mere sense of judgement and refer to this innateness as the collective unconsciousness, which he identified as a realm from which dreams, intuition, synchronicity, and even archetypical beings may emerge.
Judgement
We can do a lot of things to test the reasonableness of a particular belief, but in the end, we have to exercise our judgement in deciding what to believe. Hume sees the imposition of our judgement as a sixth sense, no different than our other five senses. We use judgement just as we use sight, smell, taste, feeling, and hearing, in our attempts to comprehend the world.
Our senses are not individually reliable. For example, something may look pretty, like a boiling hot spring, but when we jump into it our sense of feeling immediately tells us it’s too hot for us. We derive contradictory information from our senses and then make judgements based upon the concerted evidence rendered from them. We ultimately decide about things using our judgement, as opposed to developing absolute proofs through reasoning. In fact, Hume contended that sometimes a total lack of reason is absolutely necessary in order to live a full life, such as experiencing the phenomenon of falling in love. Even though it may be unreasonable to have an extramarital affair or marry outside of one’s socioeconomic status, it happens all the time, because authentic love is not something that we can rationally control. True love just happens to us when the love experience becomes more potent than any rational reservations we may have about it.
Imagination, Empiricism & Miracles
Hume was a contrast to Descartes who sought to establish knowledge on the basis of reason alone (rationalism). Unfortunately, the works of both Descartes and Hume were officially condemned by the Catholic Church and put on the list of banned books. Notice that it was the Church’s imagination that Hume’s and Descartes’ writings were the cause of “ill effects”, which contributed to the ultimate effect of retarding subsequent readers from learning important philosophic principals. In this way, we can see Hume’s point that our imagination, customs, and preconceived ideas must be persistently tested via the experimental method. Just as the witch doctor’s explanation for rain caused later generations to dance, so the church’s proclamations retarded science, delayed the Enlightenment, and instigated persecutions upon people. And yet, Hume recognizes that we have no other choice but to learn through postulating and testing against our experiences.
Hume always deferred to experience, or what has become known as empiricism. Hume deeply criticized superstition and wanted to bring the experimental method into the domain of philosophy, religion, and all other disciplines. Ultimately Hume disavowed preexisting, innate knowledge, such as Jung’s collective unconsciousness. Hume followed John Locke’s idea that the human mind is a blank slate at birth and must be furnished with experiences, hence Hume’s term empiricism. In contrast, ideas that can be deduced independently of experience have come to be referred to as “a priori”.
Hume thought his empiricism required the rejection of all innate ideas; however, we now know that not all of our ideas come from personal experiences in the world. Carl Jung would later postulate an even deeper instinctual readiness, suggesting that consciousness was just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the information available to us.
This author also reviews Hume’s dated arguments against the existence of miracles; but it is very difficult for anyone to deny the existence of planet earth and its life forms as anything less than an outright miracle. There is no other planet like earth. Everything we see about us in the cosmos is cold, dead, or burning. The stronger evidence is that our existence is indeed a miracle, and this contention survives all the empirical evidence available to us today. We don’t have to have faith to believe our existence is a miracle; we can come to that conclusion empirically by studying the cosmos and seeing that we are absolutely unique in the universe. As Descartes proclaimed, we experience this miracle because we are the miracle; no one can deny that they are consciously experiencing the miracle of life. Contentions to the contrary are what requires speculative faith.
Free Will
Humans commonly suppose they have a capacity for free will, which allows them to make choices that affect future outcomes. That is, a capacity to make choices that are undetermined by prior causes. If this is true, it essentially makes humans into creators. If you believe in free will then you must ultimately ask yourself what it is that you are creating with your decisions.
Even though most people believe they have free will, most do not see themselves as creators. Hume believed that we fail to recognize the absence of free will because the determinants of human behavior are highly complicated and the chain of causation precedes our lifetimes.
Indeed, it is hard to believe that we are governed solely by predetermined and hidden causes; but Hume believed it impossible to act free from cause and effect. One common objection to Hume’s reasoning is that if we are not the ultimate causes of our actions, how can we be held responsible for them? Hume responds that motivations are inbred into our character, and disposition, thus predetermining our actions. Hume sees the self as nothing but an ordered collection of experiences and memory coalesced collectively to form our personal identity.
And even though our identity accrues from these predetermined external experiences, we nevertheless attempt to persuade the world that what we say and do is entirely of our own volition. We relish in the idea that we are creators when in fact we are merely cogs in a much greater wheel.
Memory
Interestingly, as Hume points out, we do not remember all of our experiences and it is only the ones that we do remember that comprise our identify. But if what we remember constitutes what we are, then what accounts for what we forget? Can we control what we forget? Carl Jung suggested that people purposefully forget many things, particularly those things they dislike about themselves, filing them away into what he called our personal unconsciousness, which is sort of like a digital archive. However, Jung believed these suppressed experiences could be activated, particularly in stressful situations, such as anger or fear.
Everyone knows that we can retain certain experiences through memorization, documentation, habit, customs, etc. It is by attending to what is happening that we become more conscious, and it is through our sense of judgement that we decide what to retain and what to relegate into the unconsciousness. Hume’s idea is that the preserved self, the remembered bundle of thoughts, passions, feelings, memories, desires, and sensations, is what constitutes our being.
Many believe this bundle of thoughts, this non-physical stuff, to be transmissible into an afterlife; and that we are here, in this physical realm, essentially, to comprise ourselves spiritually to an extent sufficient to allow us to remember ourselves after our physical demise. The question then becomes whether or not what we have relegated into the personal unconsciousness will outweigh that which we have actively used to comprise ourselves while in physical existence? If the deleted archive (personal unconsciousness) outweighs what we have chosen to retain, then we must wonder whether or not we would have any enduring motive for remembering ourselves in an afterlife? Ultimately, we judge ourselves.
To understand the importance of this, one might think of what things would be like if we could circumvent the time necessary for reading a book by quickly uploading its contents into our brains via wireless connections. Imagining this scenario exemplifies for us how important selectivity is for active memory. Certainly, we would not upload books of an inimical nature because everything we ingest becomes a part of our person. We would not use our mental space for frivolous writings that expound absurd notions. We would want to upload books that provide valuable information and discard those we dislike. Such is the case with the experiences we choose to remember in our active memory and those we dispose of by relegating them into the personal unconsciousness.
This author remarks, “I am staggered how it is even possible that I, a creature made up of the same fundamental stuff as stones and grass, can be conscious of it at all.” Once we get our mind around how miraculous consciousness truly is, we can more easily conceive of consciousness in an afterlife, even more so because of its preliminary preexistence in the here and now. It is within speculation, hypothesizing, and judging that we figure out the constitution of our spiritual selves.
God
Hume denied an afterlife only because he had yet to experience it. This author remarks that Hume’s metaphysical work ended early in his life because: “Having torn everything down, Hume had to either build it up again or walk away from the devastation”. This is indicative of the atheistic dilemma, of refusing any spiritual hypothesis, which leaves only the void.
Deep down, Hume knew that, in order to be actively conscious, our judgement necessitates that we believe in things. Perhaps that is the reason that Hume remarked that he “did not believe in atheists” and never identified as an atheist himself (another reason is that he didn’t want to be burned alive as a heretic). What Hume disbelieved was not God, but rather the superstitions of the Catholic Church: rituals of communion, belief in miracles, praying to Saints, the holiness of blessed water, the burning of heretics, and the sacredness of relics.
Hume was living in 1727 when Janet Horne was burned alive for being a witch under accusations that she had turned her daughter into a pony. Future generations will look back and wonder how we could be so stupid as to believe many of the modern church’s ridiculous assertions, just as we today are appalled by book burnings, people burnings, crusades, monetary indulgences, magical relics, and be-robed magicians.
The great misconception of our times is that we have to embrace superstition to believe in a God-Creator, which is simply false. We can oppose ritualistic nonsense and still believe in God. We find God by gaining spiritual awareness, not through intemperate zeal, rapturous ecstasies, mysterious rituals, and frivolous observances.
Hume’s only problem with religion was the way in which people abused it. True religion exists amidst the common ground that is naturally shared by all reasonable people. Modern astrophysicists are unable to ignore the signs that the universe was created but similarly cannot say anything definite about its creator, whom we must therefore conclude to be ineffable. Many see the degrading of this ineffability into a resemblance of ourselves as a kind of blasphemy.
Those of us who believe that “God is Good” can understand that goodness is something that becomes manifest in human beings. We essentially become good by allowing what is good to become manifest within us. In so doing, we accept goodness. If “God is Good” then we accept God. We become good (or at least in pursuit of goodness) through this sort of acceptance. If “God is Good”, and we become more good, then we become more Godly. This is the symbology of Jesus as a man who becomes Good (God), as an example to all mankind as to “the way, the truth, and the life”, for manifesting God in the world.
CONTINUED IN COMMENTS SECTION BELOW
Cause and Effect
Our normal perception is that we can endure present suffering in order to effectuate future good, such as in exercising, dieting, saving, working, etc. However, Hume doubted our ability to exert freewill, suggesting that we really have very little ability to truly determine what will be. Hume perceived that an unseen cause exists for all events and that it is just because we are ignorant of certain causes that we attribute things to chance. Certainly, there are automated, internal bodily operations that affect our respiration, pulse and digestion, as well as our energy levels, ambitions, health, and mental attitudes. Hume believed that the universe is governed by laws, not chance.
Of course, most people believe that effects always correspond to causes. We do not doubt that we have in fact observed causes and effects in action, such as the fact that a bat propels a baseball into the air. However, Hume argues that all we have observed is one event following another and that we can never really see all of the necessary connections, leaving us ignorant of preliminary causes.
We assume that we see cause and effect because the mind instinctively fills in the gaps, attributing causal connections between events, in a sequence that we cannot fully observe. Because of this, Hume asserts that we have only experience, custom, and habit for our guides. We can predict that a bat will propel the ball, but we can never be sure if it will miss the mark entirely, propel only a grounder, or send the ball whizzing out of the park.
Customs and Habits
One can see Hume’s point more clearly when we think of imagined effects instead of experiential effects. The latter would be something like our repetitive observations that a bat can cause a baseball to fly. The former would be like a witch doctor guessing that a certain dance around a campfire causes it to rain. The witch doctor’s imagination may instigate dancing among the people, but repetitive experiences will not affirm it as sustained truth, and therefore it will not survive long in human tradition. In this way, Hume believes that affirmed customs and habits are superior guides (detectors) than random imaginings.
However, even though we may evolve through scientific experimentation to learn that the witch doctor’s dance is not really causing it to rain, we’ll only succeed in imagining some other idea about the cause for precipitation, such as seasonal variation. Hume asserted that, regardless of what we believe, it is always an imaginative process, as we well know from our often-inaccurate weather forecasts. It only becomes experiential when we subject our hypotheses to trial and error and develop confirmations that may endure as seemingly affirmed truths. But, because we cannot see the entirety of causes, such truths will endure only until more precise postulations are substantiated (those more preliminary in the chain of causal reactions) that offer greater clarity, such as condensation causing the rain. Hume contends that the chain of causes is too long for us to observe, but if we could see it, we would also see that we have no free will.
Hume points out that we must nevertheless hypothesize and make explanatory assumptions regarding causes because, if we assume nothing, we are left in total skepticism, without any basis from which to draw inferences about the world. We have no choice but to live empirically, via our observations and our imagined reasons for the causes, some of which are obviously more substantiated than others. Even though the witch doctor’s assertions are wrong, the process of guessing is vital to and deeply characteristic of human consciousness.
Instinct and Sensory Perceptions
Hume disagrees with the Stoics, who believed that human beings should learn to detach themselves from emotions and rationalize away their animal instincts. Hume asserted that it is our “feelings”, as opposed to our “rationalizations”, that are at the root of morality, as for example, in feelings of compassion for our fellow creatures. Conversely, pure reason might allow for murderous burnings, persecutions, indulgences, abuses, and other deviant practices, such as we have seen in the operative history of the Catholic Church.
Hume’s contention is that our moral sense is derived from our judgement, which he identifies as a sensory preceptor, just like our other five senses. Just as we perceive blue to be blue, a horn to be loud, saltiness salty, or a light to be bright, so we also distinguish between right and wrong. And, just as blue can fade, a horn become distant, saltiness diluted, or a light dim, so too do the gray areas within morality become less easily discerned until, at some extent, they are no longer detectable. However, the fact that we no longer detect them doesn’t mean they are nonexistent; they remain present, still lurking just beyond our sensory perceptions, like an alternative dimension. This is where strict empiricism starts to break down and one is forced to acknowledge and deal with existences beyond our immediate recognition. Hume recognized that, even with all of our sensory perceptions fully activated, we still have but a fragile grip upon reality.
For this reason, Hume believed that we must develop and refine our instincts, not deny them; because they are our primary means of perception. Hume suggested the best way for bettering our behavior was through establishment of new habits, passions, and customs, as opposed to deep rationalizations. Hume saw that too much rationalizing instigates compliance with dogmatic opinions, makes one blind to counter arguments, and leads to the sort of superstitious nonsense promulgated in religious fundamentalism.
Hume preceded Darwin in recognizing that we all possess a sense of judgement that has developed and refined itself over the course of human history, and that this sense has resulted from our biological and social situations. Hume supported this with his contention that most of our decision-making involves quick assumptions about things, not any sort of sustained logical inference. The famous psychiatrist, Carl Jung, would later expand this idea way beyond just a mere sense of judgement and refer to this innateness as the collective unconsciousness, which he identified as a realm from which dreams, intuition, synchronicity, and even archetypical beings may emerge.
Judgement
We can do a lot of things to test the reasonableness of a particular belief, but in the end, we have to exercise our judgement in deciding what to believe. Hume sees the imposition of our judgement as a sixth sense, no different than our other five senses. We use judgement just as we use sight, smell, taste, feeling, and hearing, in our attempts to comprehend the world.
Our senses are not individually reliable. For example, something may look pretty, like a boiling hot spring, but when we jump into it our sense of feeling immediately tells us it’s too hot for us. We derive contradictory information from our senses and then make judgements based upon the concerted evidence rendered from them. We ultimately decide about things using our judgement, as opposed to developing absolute proofs through reasoning. In fact, Hume contended that sometimes a total lack of reason is absolutely necessary in order to live a full life, such as experiencing the phenomenon of falling in love. Even though it may be unreasonable to have an extramarital affair or marry outside of one’s socioeconomic status, it happens all the time, because authentic love is not something that we can rationally control. True love just happens to us when the love experience becomes more potent than any rational reservations we may have about it.
Imagination, Empiricism & Miracles
Hume was a contrast to Descartes who sought to establish knowledge on the basis of reason alone (rationalism). Unfortunately, the works of both Descartes and Hume were officially condemned by the Catholic Church and put on the list of banned books. Notice that it was the Church’s imagination that Hume’s and Descartes’ writings were the cause of “ill effects”, which contributed to the ultimate effect of retarding subsequent readers from learning important philosophic principals. In this way, we can see Hume’s point that our imagination, customs, and preconceived ideas must be persistently tested via the experimental method. Just as the witch doctor’s explanation for rain caused later generations to dance, so the church’s proclamations retarded science, delayed the Enlightenment, and instigated persecutions upon people. And yet, Hume recognizes that we have no other choice but to learn through postulating and testing against our experiences.
Hume always deferred to experience, or what has become known as empiricism. Hume deeply criticized superstition and wanted to bring the experimental method into the domain of philosophy, religion, and all other disciplines. Ultimately Hume disavowed preexisting, innate knowledge, such as Jung’s collective unconsciousness. Hume followed John Locke’s idea that the human mind is a blank slate at birth and must be furnished with experiences, hence Hume’s term empiricism. In contrast, ideas that can be deduced independently of experience have come to be referred to as “a priori”.
Hume thought his empiricism required the rejection of all innate ideas; however, we now know that not all of our ideas come from personal experiences in the world. Carl Jung would later postulate an even deeper instinctual readiness, suggesting that consciousness was just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the information available to us.
This author also reviews Hume’s dated arguments against the existence of miracles; but it is very difficult for anyone to deny the existence of planet earth and its life forms as anything less than an outright miracle. There is no other planet like earth. Everything we see about us in the cosmos is cold, dead, or burning. The stronger evidence is that our existence is indeed a miracle, and this contention survives all the empirical evidence available to us today. We don’t have to have faith to believe our existence is a miracle; we can come to that conclusion empirically by studying the cosmos and seeing that we are absolutely unique in the universe. As Descartes proclaimed, we experience this miracle because we are the miracle; no one can deny that they are consciously experiencing the miracle of life. Contentions to the contrary are what requires speculative faith.
Free Will
Humans commonly suppose they have a capacity for free will, which allows them to make choices that affect future outcomes. That is, a capacity to make choices that are undetermined by prior causes. If this is true, it essentially makes humans into creators. If you believe in free will then you must ultimately ask yourself what it is that you are creating with your decisions.
Even though most people believe they have free will, most do not see themselves as creators. Hume believed that we fail to recognize the absence of free will because the determinants of human behavior are highly complicated and the chain of causation precedes our lifetimes.
Indeed, it is hard to believe that we are governed solely by predetermined and hidden causes; but Hume believed it impossible to act free from cause and effect. One common objection to Hume’s reasoning is that if we are not the ultimate causes of our actions, how can we be held responsible for them? Hume responds that motivations are inbred into our character, and disposition, thus predetermining our actions. Hume sees the self as nothing but an ordered collection of experiences and memory coalesced collectively to form our personal identity.
And even though our identity accrues from these predetermined external experiences, we nevertheless attempt to persuade the world that what we say and do is entirely of our own volition. We relish in the idea that we are creators when in fact we are merely cogs in a much greater wheel.
Memory
Interestingly, as Hume points out, we do not remember all of our experiences and it is only the ones that we do remember that comprise our identify. But if what we remember constitutes what we are, then what accounts for what we forget? Can we control what we forget? Carl Jung suggested that people purposefully forget many things, particularly those things they dislike about themselves, filing them away into what he called our personal unconsciousness, which is sort of like a digital archive. However, Jung believed these suppressed experiences could be activated, particularly in stressful situations, such as anger or fear.
Everyone knows that we can retain certain experiences through memorization, documentation, habit, customs, etc. It is by attending to what is happening that we become more conscious, and it is through our sense of judgement that we decide what to retain and what to relegate into the unconsciousness. Hume’s idea is that the preserved self, the remembered bundle of thoughts, passions, feelings, memories, desires, and sensations, is what constitutes our being.
Many believe this bundle of thoughts, this non-physical stuff, to be transmissible into an afterlife; and that we are here, in this physical realm, essentially, to comprise ourselves spiritually to an extent sufficient to allow us to remember ourselves after our physical demise. The question then becomes whether or not what we have relegated into the personal unconsciousness will outweigh that which we have actively used to comprise ourselves while in physical existence? If the deleted archive (personal unconsciousness) outweighs what we have chosen to retain, then we must wonder whether or not we would have any enduring motive for remembering ourselves in an afterlife? Ultimately, we judge ourselves.
To understand the importance of this, one might think of what things would be like if we could circumvent the time necessary for reading a book by quickly uploading its contents into our brains via wireless connections. Imagining this scenario exemplifies for us how important selectivity is for active memory. Certainly, we would not upload books of an inimical nature because everything we ingest becomes a part of our person. We would not use our mental space for frivolous writings that expound absurd notions. We would want to upload books that provide valuable information and discard those we dislike. Such is the case with the experiences we choose to remember in our active memory and those we dispose of by relegating them into the personal unconsciousness.
This author remarks, “I am staggered how it is even possible that I, a creature made up of the same fundamental stuff as stones and grass, can be conscious of it at all.” Once we get our mind around how miraculous consciousness truly is, we can more easily conceive of consciousness in an afterlife, even more so because of its preliminary preexistence in the here and now. It is within speculation, hypothesizing, and judging that we figure out the constitution of our spiritual selves.
God
Hume denied an afterlife only because he had yet to experience it. This author remarks that Hume’s metaphysical work ended early in his life because: “Having torn everything down, Hume had to either build it up again or walk away from the devastation”. This is indicative of the atheistic dilemma, of refusing any spiritual hypothesis, which leaves only the void.
Deep down, Hume knew that, in order to be actively conscious, our judgement necessitates that we believe in things. Perhaps that is the reason that Hume remarked that he “did not believe in atheists” and never identified as an atheist himself (another reason is that he didn’t want to be burned alive as a heretic). What Hume disbelieved was not God, but rather the superstitions of the Catholic Church: rituals of communion, belief in miracles, praying to Saints, the holiness of blessed water, the burning of heretics, and the sacredness of relics.
Hume was living in 1727 when Janet Horne was burned alive for being a witch under accusations that she had turned her daughter into a pony. Future generations will look back and wonder how we could be so stupid as to believe many of the modern church’s ridiculous assertions, just as we today are appalled by book burnings, people burnings, crusades, monetary indulgences, magical relics, and be-robed magicians.
The great misconception of our times is that we have to embrace superstition to believe in a God-Creator, which is simply false. We can oppose ritualistic nonsense and still believe in God. We find God by gaining spiritual awareness, not through intemperate zeal, rapturous ecstasies, mysterious rituals, and frivolous observances.
Hume’s only problem with religion was the way in which people abused it. True religion exists amidst the common ground that is naturally shared by all reasonable people. Modern astrophysicists are unable to ignore the signs that the universe was created but similarly cannot say anything definite about its creator, whom we must therefore conclude to be ineffable. Many see the degrading of this ineffability into a resemblance of ourselves as a kind of blasphemy.
Those of us who believe that “God is Good” can understand that goodness is something that becomes manifest in human beings. We essentially become good by allowing what is good to become manifest within us. In so doing, we accept goodness. If “God is Good” then we accept God. We become good (or at least in pursuit of goodness) through this sort of acceptance. If “God is Good”, and we become more good, then we become more Godly. This is the symbology of Jesus as a man who becomes Good (God), as an example to all mankind as to “the way, the truth, and the life”, for manifesting God in the world.
CONTINUED IN COMMENTS SECTION BELOW
June 20, 2021
I love learning about different ways philosophers see the world, and I’ve been meaning to learn more about David Hume. Unfortunately, I’m not a fan of biographies, so when I tried reading
The Infidel and the Professor, I was only able to read a few chapters before losing interest (and that’s just my personal preference. This is a great book if you’re into those types of books). This book from Julian Baggini was much more to my liking. The book is part biography, but throughout the book, Baggini takes many of Hume’s writings and breaks them down in a way that is comprehensible, so I really enjoyed those parts of the book. Baggini has chapters on Hume’s views about thinking, natural wisdom, success, death, and more. There was a little more biography than is to my liking, but it still managed to keep me engaged until the end, and I learned a ton.
The Infidel and the Professor, I was only able to read a few chapters before losing interest (and that’s just my personal preference. This is a great book if you’re into those types of books). This book from Julian Baggini was much more to my liking. The book is part biography, but throughout the book, Baggini takes many of Hume’s writings and breaks them down in a way that is comprehensible, so I really enjoyed those parts of the book. Baggini has chapters on Hume’s views about thinking, natural wisdom, success, death, and more. There was a little more biography than is to my liking, but it still managed to keep me engaged until the end, and I learned a ton.
September 23, 2025
pretty little big book
July 10, 2022
Well done
The Great Guide is, indeed, an excellent guide to David Hume's thought. Baggini has an uncanny ability to bring difficult ideas and concepts into the world of the everyday person; he's done this, once again, with David Hume's thought and philosophy.
Without apologizing for Hume's eccentricities and prejudices, Baggini addresses these items face on, he explicates Hume's thought from his early years to the end, all the while taking us on a travelogue from Hume's home in Scotland through London and to France and back again, visiting places that Hume had lived, breathed, and thought.
Baggini is an excellent writer and communicator which makes this an absolute joy to read, I highly recommend it.
The Great Guide is, indeed, an excellent guide to David Hume's thought. Baggini has an uncanny ability to bring difficult ideas and concepts into the world of the everyday person; he's done this, once again, with David Hume's thought and philosophy.
Without apologizing for Hume's eccentricities and prejudices, Baggini addresses these items face on, he explicates Hume's thought from his early years to the end, all the while taking us on a travelogue from Hume's home in Scotland through London and to France and back again, visiting places that Hume had lived, breathed, and thought.
Baggini is an excellent writer and communicator which makes this an absolute joy to read, I highly recommend it.
February 19, 2022
About David Hume the scottish enlightenment philosopher no matter how you spell it or pronounce it. Baggini things, with others, that his philosophy is great, if not the greatest, with rare or no peers.
Very good stuff on thinking, problem solving, and how to live well. Religious non believer.
to understand how we should live--as individuals and as a society -- learn from every source that offers something to teach you. p. 21
Money never made anyone rich: al it does is infect everyone who touches it with a lot for more * * * one man and one man only is truly wealthy -- he who leans to want nothing in every circumstance. p. 23 !!!!!
Your sorrow is fruitless, and will not change the course of destiny" p. 25
You can only follow your dreams is you're completely awake. p. 35
. . . we cannot doubt that we think. . . . p. 42
. . . a miracle is a violation of the laws of nature. p. 53 !!!!!
Assume no more and no less than you have to assume. p. 74
. . . the world of experience and our representations of it is the only world we can know, and so that has to be the world we seek to understand better. p. 91 !!!!!!
Salus populi suprema Lex, the safety of the people is the supreme law. p. 113
Theseus ship (from Thos.Hobbes) ship repaired so much that it is totally replaced (basis perhaps of Lincoln's rail splitting ax which has had the handle replaced thrice and the blade replaced twice.p.120
To never compromise is a mark of excessive rigidity, to always compromise an ever surer sign of having no standards at all. p. 135 !!!!
I cannot find any blessing of consequence which I am not possessed of, in a greater or lesser degree; and without any great effort of philosophy I may be easy and satisfied. p. 137 !!!!!!!! contentment
Generally speaking, the errors in religion are dangerous; those in philosophy only ridiculous. p. 149
. . . be as willing to share your friends loves as you are reluctant to embrace their hatreds. p. 163 !!!!
Do not be fooled by the apparent ubiquity of rational thought; we use reason more than we are governed by it. p. 166 !!!!!
To understand how you should best think, you need to understand how you actually think. p. 168
In 1727, when Hume was sixteen years old, the last woman to be convicted of witchcraft in Scotland was burned alive. p. 173
Belief in an eternal life is a lie we comfort ourselves with, knowing in our hearts it is a lie, but preferring the comfort to the truth. This is a specific instance of a more general principle: "All diatribes are to be suspected, which are favored by our passions." p. 178 !!!!!!
. . . Hume . . . problem of evil. . . No one, he argued , who looked at the world with all its suffering would reach the conclusion that it was made by a good God. Worse, " the true conclusion is, that the original source of all things is entirely indifferent to all these principles, and has no more regard to good above ill than to heat above cold, or to drought above moisture, or to light above heavy." p. 189
!!!!!!!
We always have more reason to believe in natural causes than supernatural ones. p. 190
Wittgenstein . . . "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." p. 191
For the purpose of life and conduct and society, a little good sense is surely better than all the genius, and a little good humor than this extreme sensibility. p. 204
. . . infamous calumniator . . . p. 205
If you want to get someone to do something, it is quicker to work on their passions than their intellect, and the more violent the passion, the better. p. 215
Perfectibility is a chimera, human weakness unavoidable. All human beings can do is "endeavor to palliate what they cannot cure." p. 218
When life on earth is good, we have no need to gaze longingly to imaginary heavens. p. 232
Life can be too long as well as too short. p. 242 !!!!!!
He then said flatly that the morality of every religion was bad, and, I really thought, was not jocular when he said that when he heard a man was religious, he concluded he was a rascal, though he had known some instances of very good men being religious. This was just an extravagant reverse of the common remark as to infidels. p. 245
Without life, there is neither peace nor disturbance, only nothing. * * *
Accepting death is not the same as welcoming it; loving life does not mean clinging to it. p. 248
6. has never been hurt by his enemies, because he never hated [hatred malignant] any one of them. p. 261
. . . philosopher, one who tried to understand things better. p. 263 !!!!!!!
You cannot argue against reason without employing reason, since argument requires reason or it is nothing but ungrounded assertion. p. 269
. . . learn from every source that offers something to teach you. p. 272
The soul . . . if immortal, existed before our birth. And if the former state of existence no wise concerned us, neither will the latter. p. 277
Very good stuff on thinking, problem solving, and how to live well. Religious non believer.
to understand how we should live--as individuals and as a society -- learn from every source that offers something to teach you. p. 21
Money never made anyone rich: al it does is infect everyone who touches it with a lot for more * * * one man and one man only is truly wealthy -- he who leans to want nothing in every circumstance. p. 23 !!!!!
Your sorrow is fruitless, and will not change the course of destiny" p. 25
You can only follow your dreams is you're completely awake. p. 35
. . . we cannot doubt that we think. . . . p. 42
. . . a miracle is a violation of the laws of nature. p. 53 !!!!!
Assume no more and no less than you have to assume. p. 74
. . . the world of experience and our representations of it is the only world we can know, and so that has to be the world we seek to understand better. p. 91 !!!!!!
Salus populi suprema Lex, the safety of the people is the supreme law. p. 113
Theseus ship (from Thos.Hobbes) ship repaired so much that it is totally replaced (basis perhaps of Lincoln's rail splitting ax which has had the handle replaced thrice and the blade replaced twice.p.120
To never compromise is a mark of excessive rigidity, to always compromise an ever surer sign of having no standards at all. p. 135 !!!!
I cannot find any blessing of consequence which I am not possessed of, in a greater or lesser degree; and without any great effort of philosophy I may be easy and satisfied. p. 137 !!!!!!!! contentment
Generally speaking, the errors in religion are dangerous; those in philosophy only ridiculous. p. 149
. . . be as willing to share your friends loves as you are reluctant to embrace their hatreds. p. 163 !!!!
Do not be fooled by the apparent ubiquity of rational thought; we use reason more than we are governed by it. p. 166 !!!!!
To understand how you should best think, you need to understand how you actually think. p. 168
In 1727, when Hume was sixteen years old, the last woman to be convicted of witchcraft in Scotland was burned alive. p. 173
Belief in an eternal life is a lie we comfort ourselves with, knowing in our hearts it is a lie, but preferring the comfort to the truth. This is a specific instance of a more general principle: "All diatribes are to be suspected, which are favored by our passions." p. 178 !!!!!!
. . . Hume . . . problem of evil. . . No one, he argued , who looked at the world with all its suffering would reach the conclusion that it was made by a good God. Worse, " the true conclusion is, that the original source of all things is entirely indifferent to all these principles, and has no more regard to good above ill than to heat above cold, or to drought above moisture, or to light above heavy." p. 189
!!!!!!!
We always have more reason to believe in natural causes than supernatural ones. p. 190
Wittgenstein . . . "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." p. 191
For the purpose of life and conduct and society, a little good sense is surely better than all the genius, and a little good humor than this extreme sensibility. p. 204
. . . infamous calumniator . . . p. 205
If you want to get someone to do something, it is quicker to work on their passions than their intellect, and the more violent the passion, the better. p. 215
Perfectibility is a chimera, human weakness unavoidable. All human beings can do is "endeavor to palliate what they cannot cure." p. 218
When life on earth is good, we have no need to gaze longingly to imaginary heavens. p. 232
Life can be too long as well as too short. p. 242 !!!!!!
He then said flatly that the morality of every religion was bad, and, I really thought, was not jocular when he said that when he heard a man was religious, he concluded he was a rascal, though he had known some instances of very good men being religious. This was just an extravagant reverse of the common remark as to infidels. p. 245
Without life, there is neither peace nor disturbance, only nothing. * * *
Accepting death is not the same as welcoming it; loving life does not mean clinging to it. p. 248
6. has never been hurt by his enemies, because he never hated [hatred malignant] any one of them. p. 261
. . . philosopher, one who tried to understand things better. p. 263 !!!!!!!
You cannot argue against reason without employing reason, since argument requires reason or it is nothing but ungrounded assertion. p. 269
. . . learn from every source that offers something to teach you. p. 272
The soul . . . if immortal, existed before our birth. And if the former state of existence no wise concerned us, neither will the latter. p. 277
March 29, 2023
A great read about a great man. The book is a biography but a very "light touch" one. It takes the reader by the hand as it guides them through the places where David Hume lived and worked and the ideas he developed in those places.
David Hume (or "Bon David" as his French colleagues would call him) has made enormous contributions to philosophy (although perhaps his contributions have only really been recognized since the 20th century). With his contemporary Adam Smith he was at the vanguard of the Scottish Enlightenment - though always somewhat controversial due to his skepticism of superstition (and religion). I very much enjoyed reading this book, which intertwines episodes of Hume's life with ideas he developed at that time and quotes/aphorisms from his published works. It almost feels like a long walk in the company of Hume where background is provided to some of his most interesting ideas and some of the most important events in his life. Especially his ideas on on superstition and religion were very interesting to read, and the fact he continued to cultivate friendships with members of the Church of Scotland says much about his openness of character. His racist remarks (which led to the removal of his name from the tower that was named for him at Edinburgh University) are also discussed and explained (and do not diminish his character I feel).
A man who can write important philosophical ideas, produce a great work of historical research and take on the task of writing a cookbook is a man second (in talents) only to Da Vinci. Hume comes across as a humble, friendly, cheerful and utterly likable man. I wish I could have spent some time in his company, but I guess this book will have to do. This book is definitely worth a read.
David Hume (or "Bon David" as his French colleagues would call him) has made enormous contributions to philosophy (although perhaps his contributions have only really been recognized since the 20th century). With his contemporary Adam Smith he was at the vanguard of the Scottish Enlightenment - though always somewhat controversial due to his skepticism of superstition (and religion). I very much enjoyed reading this book, which intertwines episodes of Hume's life with ideas he developed at that time and quotes/aphorisms from his published works. It almost feels like a long walk in the company of Hume where background is provided to some of his most interesting ideas and some of the most important events in his life. Especially his ideas on on superstition and religion were very interesting to read, and the fact he continued to cultivate friendships with members of the Church of Scotland says much about his openness of character. His racist remarks (which led to the removal of his name from the tower that was named for him at Edinburgh University) are also discussed and explained (and do not diminish his character I feel).
A man who can write important philosophical ideas, produce a great work of historical research and take on the task of writing a cookbook is a man second (in talents) only to Da Vinci. Hume comes across as a humble, friendly, cheerful and utterly likable man. I wish I could have spent some time in his company, but I guess this book will have to do. This book is definitely worth a read.
February 19, 2025
David Hume was a philosopher that I only had a vague understanding of. Spending some time in Edinburgh a few years ago, I had become more aware of the impact he had on philosophy and reasoning.
The way this book weaved biographical information into a review of his thinkings was quite enjoyable. It did not shy away from some of the more unacceptable (by today’s standards) positions, especially those related to race and racism. However, it did humanize Hume in a way that many other books about great thinkers fail to.
In general, I find that Hume’s perspectives on Empiricism, Skepticism, Problem of the Self, and the Critique of Religion are still as important as ever.
When reason has nothing to do with why people hold their beliefs, reason is powerless to change them.
The way this book weaved biographical information into a review of his thinkings was quite enjoyable. It did not shy away from some of the more unacceptable (by today’s standards) positions, especially those related to race and racism. However, it did humanize Hume in a way that many other books about great thinkers fail to.
In general, I find that Hume’s perspectives on Empiricism, Skepticism, Problem of the Self, and the Critique of Religion are still as important as ever.
When reason has nothing to do with why people hold their beliefs, reason is powerless to change them.
November 14, 2021
Not Bad
Not surprisingly, the author tends toward hagiography in his view of Hume. While this is to be expected, he strives a little too hard.
He often discusses stoicism and how it differs from Hume’s views. This would be more helpful if he provided a less superficial discussion of stoicism.
The book is certainly appropriately focused on Hume, but it totally ignores point from Kant etc that are relevant to Hume.
One thing that does detract from this book is the author’s habit of puttin aphorisms, some from Hume, some of his own, in bold and italic type. It is distracting and confusing.
Not surprisingly, the author tends toward hagiography in his view of Hume. While this is to be expected, he strives a little too hard.
He often discusses stoicism and how it differs from Hume’s views. This would be more helpful if he provided a less superficial discussion of stoicism.
The book is certainly appropriately focused on Hume, but it totally ignores point from Kant etc that are relevant to Hume.
One thing that does detract from this book is the author’s habit of puttin aphorisms, some from Hume, some of his own, in bold and italic type. It is distracting and confusing.
September 25, 2021
How to spend your life
Julian Baggini takes on us on a marvelous illuminating trip into the life and times of David Hume-and how what he thought about is useful to humanity. There is much to say-and the book will say it better than I can in this brief review. Suffice it to say that spending time with the amiable Julian and his wise life guide David Hume is exactly the kind of thing Hume found valuable. It is hard to know how to hold on to the life we have. David and Julian know exactly how to find the right grip. Thank you to both of you.
Julian Baggini takes on us on a marvelous illuminating trip into the life and times of David Hume-and how what he thought about is useful to humanity. There is much to say-and the book will say it better than I can in this brief review. Suffice it to say that spending time with the amiable Julian and his wise life guide David Hume is exactly the kind of thing Hume found valuable. It is hard to know how to hold on to the life we have. David and Julian know exactly how to find the right grip. Thank you to both of you.
March 9, 2022
This was good. However, it wasn't really much about life lessons as much as just describing Hume's life and philosophies. I've read other "how to live" books based on famous philosophers (stoics, Montaigne, William James, etc) which better integrated the life of the philosopher with a philosophy of how to live well. It was not a bad book, I enjoyed it well enough. Sadly, it just did not fulfill its claim.
June 4, 2022
Since I have not read David Hume directly, I thought Baggini's book would be a great introduction and I was not disappointed. Baggini includes enough biographical details to describe this as a biography. Still, since he also inserts multiple quotes and references to his works, it gave significant information about his philosophy and writings.
I consider myself ready to start reading Hume directly now.
I consider myself ready to start reading Hume directly now.
August 2, 2022
An interesting introduction to David Hume--part biography, part travelogue, part philosophy (both Hume's and the author's, which you would expect from an author who is also a philosopher). I didn't think that the book quite lived up to its subtitle, but it whetted my appetite for more Hume. I listened to the audiobook (which was not one of the editions listed on Goodreads), and the narration was superb.
July 18, 2023
Vey good book with a excellent narrator. Unfortunately it was frequently difficult to understand where a Hume quote began or ended, as so many were densely integrated throughout the text. It would probably be better to read the written book, and then re-read/listen to the audio. If, like me, the audio is your first introduction it will certainly whet your appetite for also obtaining a written copy.
March 7, 2025
A very nice crossover of a biography of Hume, introduction to his philosophy, and even a travel guide to locations that featured prominently in his life. It's actually very masterful how the author managed to mix these genres, I've never seen it before.
The author doesn't engage critically with Hume's philosophy, but that's to be expected of an introductory work.
The author doesn't engage critically with Hume's philosophy, but that's to be expected of an introductory work.
September 5, 2022
This combination of biography and philosophy is a super-duper look at the world of David Hume. Not only am I really persuaded by Hume's beliefs and reasoning, but I really loved this book. Highly recommended, even for the non-Philosophy inclined.
April 26, 2023
Baggini has again given a brilliant resource to those interested in learning more about philosophy. He reflects on Humes life and thought and draws out some profound lessons. I would really recommend this, one can't help but feel an instant desire to read more Hume after finishing it.
September 20, 2023
A wonderful traipse through the philosophy of one of the English speaking world’s most treasured and clear thinking philosophers and men of letters. Highly recommended for philosophy buffs and those seeking a better historical understanding of Hume, both the man and the thinker.
January 3, 2024
Prior to this reading, I was only familiar with Humes skepticism and theories on personal identity. This was an excellent, digestable introduction connecting Hume's beliefs and linking them to his life as well. At times it feels a little elementary, but overall is a wonderful, interesting read.
December 28, 2024
A guide through Humes thought. Doesn't shy away from the uglier elements, but touches on how he was ahead of his time in many ways in understanding the human condition. Really practical and clear with some useful tips of how to live well, what to value and how to think.
October 14, 2021
A highly readable review of a life dedicated to truth, the book makes the key philosophical themes of the ‘Great Infidel’ of the Scottish Enlightenment applicable to anyone’s day-to-day living.
January 1, 2022
Reading about the life of the philosopher was unique. Visiting the places lived and been was insightful. The author had an ability to educate meanings and theories of Hume. Thanks, a good read.
January 27, 2022
This was an interesting book but more of a biography than an explication of Hume's core ideas.
February 16, 2022
I thoroughly enjoyed listening to this audiobook. I wasn't familiar with Hume, other than hearing him mentioned with respect to his skepticism. I recommend this book: 4 5 stars.
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