Hume

This unit examines Hume’s reasons for being complacent in the face of death, as these are laid out in his suppressed essay of 1755, ‘Of the immortality of the soul’. More generally, they examine some of the shifts in attitude concerning death and religious belief that were taking place in Europe at the end of [...]

In mid-August 1776 crowds formed outside the family home of David Hume. Hume was a pivotal figure in the Scottish Enlightenment, and his imminent death was widely anticipated. The crowds were anxious to know how he was facing up to his coming demise.
Hume is best known today as a historian (through his History of England [...]

2 From enlightenment to romanticism
You will be looking at two short texts by David Hume (1711–76) Unlike the letters seen in the prelude, these pieces do not address one another explicitly. That said, many of the notions, arguments and assertions discussed were in the air at the time, and at a number of points they [...]

3 The intellectual background
The Enlightenment is also known as the Age of Reason, but it was a very specific conception of reason that held sway. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe had seen a boom in knowledge brought about by the birth of modern science. This boom was accompanied by both optimism and a wish to identify [...]

3 The intellectual background
In the readings you will often come across allusions to the contrast between revealed religion and natural religion (or deism). The distinction turns on what the nature of the evidence is for a particular religious outlook. Deism is a form of natural religion that was prevalent in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe.
The evidence [...]

3 The intellectual background
Deists had at their disposal three traditional ways of arguing for the existence of God.
The most popular in the late eighteenth century was the argument from design (also known as the teleological argument, from the Greek word telos, meaning end or purpose). This argument begins with an observation: the world around us [...]

4 Hume on life after death
When reading about Hume’s death you may have been puzzled as to why people became so worked up about Hume’s attitude. The question of what, if anything, happens after death is something most of us are at least curious about, just as most of us are curious to know what [...]

4 Hume on life after death
The moral reason (as Hume calls it) for thinking that there is an afterlife has already been touched on. God, being just, would surely see to it that we are punished or rewarded for our aberrant or commendable actions; this punishment or reward doesn’t take place in this life, so [...]

4 Hume on life after death
In section III Hume discusses what he calls physical reasons for thinking there is an afterlife. A sensible guess as to what he means by a physical reason is that it is one based on observation and experience of the physical world. He begins by asserting that physical reasons are [...]

5 Hume on suicide
‘Of suicide’ was received with the same degree of public hostility as his essay on immortality. Here is what an anonymous reviewer of the 1777 posthumous edition of both essays had to say in the Monthly Review (1784, vol.70, pp.427–8):

Were a drunken libertine to throw out such nauseous stuff in the presence [...]