8/12/2019 Curs 3-David Hume http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/curs-3-david-hume 1/14 David Hume David Hume (April 26, 1711 –August 25, 1776) was a Scottish philosopher, economist, and historian, as well as an important figure of Western philosophy and of the Scottish Enlightenment
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Understanding“By the term impression, then, I mean all our more lively
perceptions, when we hear, or see, or feel, or love, orhate, or desire, or will. And impressions aredistinguished from ideas, which are the less lively
perceptions, of which we are conscious, when we reflecton any of those sensations or movements abovementioned.“
“It seems a proposition, which will not admit of muchdispute, that all our ideas are nothing but copies of our
impressions, or, in other words, that it is impossible forus to think of anything, which we have not antecedentlyfelt, either by our external or internal senses.”
It was probably Hume who, along with his fellow membersof the Scottish Enlightenment, first advanced the ideathat the explanation of moral principles is to be sought inthe utility they tend to promote. On the contrary, Humewas a moral sentimentalist and, as such, thought that
moral principles could not be intellectually justified.Some principles simply appeal to us and others don't;and the reason why utilitarian moral principles do appealto us is that they promote our interests and those of ourfellows, with whom we sympathize. Humans are hard-
wired to approve of things that help society – publicutility. Hume used this insight to explain how we evaluatea wide array of phenomena, ranging from socialinstitutions and government policies to character traitsand talents
Enlightenment philosophers chose a short history ofscientific predecessors—Galileo, Boyle, and Newtonprincipally—as the guides and guarantors of theirapplications of the singular concept of Nature andNatural Law to every physical and social field of the day.
In this respect, the lessons of history and the socialstructures built upon it could be discarded.
It was Newton’s conception of the universe based uponNatural and rationally understandable laws that becamethe seed for Enlightenment ideology. Locke and Voltaire
applied concepts of Natural Law to political systemsadvocating intrinsic rights; the physiocrats and AdamSmith applied Natural conceptions of psychology andself-interest to economic systems and the sociologists criticised the current social order for trying to fit historyinto Natural models of progress