Socrates and Hume

Socrates and Hume | Peter Kreeft | The Introduction to Socrates Meets Hume: The Father of Philosophy Meets the Father of Modern Skepticism | Ignatius Insight

Hume is the most formidable, serious, difficult-to-refute skeptic in the history of human thought. I will never forget my first exposure to him, in a seminar in Modern Philosophy at Calvin College taught by William Harry Jellema, who was the best teacher I ever had but who, like Socrates, never wrote a book. All ten of us in the seminar were philosophy majors and friends. We had to read Hume over vacation week. We took this great skeptic very seriously, because we were more concerned with finding the truth than with finding an A, and Hume deeply disturbed us because we could not refute his arguments, yet could not accept his skeptical conclusions. For if we did, what would become of philosophy? What would become of science and common sense and religion and morality and education and human knowledge in general? The whole process of liberation from the cave of ignorance would be merely another cave.

We shared our anguish with the professor when classes resumed, but instead of "telling us the answers", he simply sent us back to Hume again, with the reminder to remember our logic. If we did not accept Hume's conclusion, we had to find either an ambiguously used term, or a false premise, expressed or implied, or a logical fallacy. It was not sufficient simply to say we disagreed with his conclusion; we had to refute his argument.

That is the process you are invited to participate in, with the aid of Socrates.

No one wants to be a skeptic; no one is happy as a skeptic, except the unpleasant type who just want to shock and upset people. Happy skeptics are dishonest; unhappy skeptics are honest. (The same is true of atheists. Only idiots, masochists, or immoralists want to be atheists. Contrast Sartre, the happy hypocritical atheist, with Camus, the unhappy, honest atheist.) Hume is an unhappy skeptic, an honest skeptic, and he demands and deserves to be taken very seriously and answered very carefully.

He also deserves this because of his continuing, enormous influence on English-speaking philosophy today. Hume's immediate thought-child was the extreme, dogmatic, reductionistic form of "analytic philosophy" that called itself "logical positivism", as summarized in A. J. Ayer's Language, Truth and Logic. This is no longer in vogue, but softer, modified versions of it are, and they all go back to Hume, especially his reduction of all objects of human reason to "matters of fact" and "relations of ideas". These are approximately what Kant later called "synthetic a posteriori propositions" and "analytic a priori propositions". But please don't close this book and run when you see these verbal monsters. Hume uses a minimum of such technical terms and gives clear, common-sense definitions of each of them. Hume may be disturbing, and he may be disturbed, 'and he may even be dull sometimes (I tried to omit all the dull passages), but he is always clear.

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Comments

[Manuel G. Daugherty Razetto]

Someone claimed that all men are born with abilities nearly equal; I dont think so. La Bruyere said: "The same judgment which enables an author to write well makes him value his work modestly. A person of middling abilities believes that he writes divinely; while a man of real talent thinks his production but tolerable".

I wish I could agree more with Dr. Peter Kreeft on Hume; I shall briefly state some questions.

Circumscribing the substantial character of a notable philosopher as in the case of Socrates or Hume here, may be difficult to ascertain on account that it is practically impossible to escape from knowledge that had preceeded; Socrates benefited from Anaxagoras in some way. Hume was indirectly influenced as well, by Locke and Berkeley when he caused their empirical philosophy to be reasonably believed.

The assertion that some of the great philosophers had in common the settled tendency to write one large treatise and another small one that were considered of relevance, may be also disputed if we regard that in Hume's case, his leader philosophical book was "The Treatise of Human Nature", written during the years 1734 to 1737; the first two volumes being published in 1739 and the last in 1740 when he was only 29 years old, but unfortunately the book was ignored. Later on he reduced this work, and entitled it "Inquiring with Human Understanding"where Hume avoided the excellent parts and a great deal of the justification for his conclusions. Such was the book that influenced Kant.

Hume's important contribution requires the attention of those who feel the need to understand the transition from Scholasticism to Modern Philosophy. By dividing the impressions or ideas created by an external world he demonstrated that almost everything in it was taken for granted for which he required proof not yet in existence. That stirred and prompted much challenge for metaphysicians.