How to Read Hume

How to Read...

by Simon Blackburn

David Hume is generally recognized as England's greatest philosopher, as well as a notable historian and essayist. Yet his work is delicately poised between scepticism and naturalism, between despair at the limited powers of the mind and optimism at the progress we can make by understanding it. This difficult balancing act has given rise to a multitude of different interpretations: reading Hume has never been free of controversy. In this new approach to his writings Simon Blackburn describes how Hume can be placed as one of the earliest, and most successful, evolutionary psychologists, weaving plausible natural accounts of the way we should think of ourselves, and of how we have come to be what we are.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction

128 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 2008

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.

Simon Blackburn FBA is an English academic philosopher known for his work in metaethics, where he defends quasi-realism, and in the philosophy of language; more recently, he has gained a large general audience from his efforts to popularise philosophy.

He retired as the professor of philosophy at the University of Cambridge in 2011, but remains a distinguished research professor of philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, teaching every fall semester. He is also a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and a member of the professoriate of New College of the Humanities. He was previously a Fellow of Pembroke College, Oxford and has also taught full-time at the University of North Carolina as an Edna J. Koury Professor. He is a former president of the Aristotelian Society, having served the 2009–2010 term. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2002 and a Foreign Honorary Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2008.

Reviews

[Richard Newton · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found this to be a rather good summary of Hume's thinking. Blackburn has a pleasant writing style and has avoided the academic's trap of using inaccessible language. As philosophy books go, it is an easy read, (although to be honest this may be because I have read a reasonable amount of Hume already). It is very short, but Blackburn packs in lots of value in the hundred or so pages. The result is a helpful summary, with some interesting views on Hume.

This could appeal to someone coming afresh to Hume, although it probably helps to have read some Hume at least, a few bits of the Treatise or parts from the Enquiries first. For me personally, it was useful as a revision aid, taking me through the key points of Hume's thinking in a structured way.

[Tom Pepper · Rating 2 out of 5]

Hume is the great sophist and ideologue of British capitalism. Blackburn’s short book on “how to read” his work is the very opposite of how we ought to read it. That is to say, rather than point out all the sophistry and specious arguments advanced as philosophy, Blackburn simply doubles down on them, and declares Hume “the most profound thinker of the modern world.” I would love to see a book that takes us through a careful reading of one of Hume’s works (say, the second enquiry) and points up every flawed argument, every clever bit of sophistry. After all, Hume does exemplify all the errors of thought necessary to capitalism.

To offer just one, brief, example: the final chapter on Hume’s theory of “taste.” Hume suggests that certain judgments of taste are too obviously apodeictic to need defending, thus defeating the relativist claims that aesthetic taste us socially constructed. He offers the example that nobody would ever doubt the supremacy of Milton and Addison as the greatest possible writers of English. Today, of course, it is easy enough to doubt this—almost nobody would, as Addison did, consider Milton the great English Bard while relegating Shakespeare to the status of third-rate playwright below Thomas Nash or the great and timeless Beaumont and Fletcher. And almost nobody today would suffer through Addison’s essays (twenty years ago, the last time I taught a course in 18th-century Lit, there was not edition of Addison in print). Blackburn merely suggests that this fact is “irrelevant to Hume’s general concern,” but clearly it is not. In fact, it proves his central claim to be false.

Hume could not arrive at any clear idea of the purpose of art, including Literature, and so makes a few lame suggestions as to what it might do. It might, he suggests, “draw off the mind mind from the hurry of business” and create a mood of “tranquility” and “agreeable melancholy.” In addition, it will “sensitize us to the declamatory falsities of demagogues and charlatans,” leaving us able to appreciate, it seems, the subtle truths of those who agree with our own political and social agendas. In other words, the function of art is clearly to produce a subject thoroughly interpellated into the hegemonic ideology—but to do so in such a way that it seems completely natural, that it seems to be merely an appeal to one’s superior aesthetic sensibility. Blackburn, like Hume, wants us to fail to notice this function of art, and so resorts to the common analogies to subtlety of sense perception. A better way to read Hume would seem to be to draw out all the obscure assumptions and sophistical arguments by which he works to naturalize, as a universal property of “taste,” a proper interpellation into British capitalist ideology.

Reading Hume with due attention to his poor reasoning is a challenge, since the kinds of errors he makes are very much the “common sense” of today’s reasoning. Blackburn’s little book works to make critical thought about this master ideologue just that much more difficult.

[José Pereira · Rating 3 out of 5]

Helpful, thorough enough for non-specialists. I was hoping for some more contrasting with contemporary views, though. Blackburn mostly compares Hume to his contemporaries and close successors and to some ineffable rationalist enemy. It becomes a bit too much history of phil., verging on hagiography.

[Phantom · Rating 3 out of 5]

Blackburn covers many of Hume's ideas in 10 page snippets. The book is laden with quote by Hume and follow up commentary by Blackburn. It defintely got me more excited to read Hume, I have a copy of the Enquiry ordered. I defintely see myself rereading sections of this book for future refrence.

[Pete daPixie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another in the very readable 'How to Read' series, Simon Blackburn's intro to the philosopher David Hume is a concise and easily digested primer covering Hume's writings.
David Hume was born in 1711 in Scotland, and lived through a period of European Enlightenment in the sciences. He published his 'A Treatise of Human Nature' in 1739. He followed this with his 'An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals' in 1751 and a six volume work on the 'History of England' between 1754 and 1762. In 1757 he published 'The Natural History of Religion' and after his death in 1776 his 'Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion' was published. Extracts from these main works are featured in Blackburn's examination of Hume's science of human nature.
As well as philosophy, this great man made valuable contributions to history, as well as economics, political science and demography.
I found this short window to Hume to just get better the further through that I read. Of the ten chapters that this book contains the latter half were very interesting, particularly 'Convention and Obligation', 'Of Miracles' and 'Natural Religion'.

[Michael Baranowski · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good, short introduction to key concepts in the work of the greatest philosopher the English-speaking world has ever produced.