The Royal Society of Edinburgh Joint Lecture with The Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH)

and supported by the Journal of Scottish Philosophy The Significance of David Hume: Scepticism, Science and Superstition Dr Peter Millican, Gilbert Ryle Fellow and Reader in Early Modern Philosophy at Hertford College, Oxford and Illumni David Hume Fellow at IASH, Edinburgh University Monday 23 May 2011 Report by Jeremy Watson
David Humes notorious scepticism has seemed hard to reconcile with his enthusiastic advocacy of human science. But recent scholarship has revealed a strikingly modern and coherent thinker, increasingly honoured as arguably the most significant philosopher of all time. Peter Millican presented Hume in this light, as a scientific revolutionary and a crucial influence on Adam Smith, Darwin, Einstein and a host of recent philosophers. He also exhibited for the first time a new electronic edition of Humes posthumous masterpiece, the Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, whose handwritten pages cunningly encode his still-disputed attitude to religion (this can be found at www.davidhume.org). To set Humes revolutionary approach in context, Millican started from Aristotle, whose science was based on the idea that the world is intelligible in a particular way. Aristotle thought that the key to understanding how natural things behave rocks as well as animals was to see them striving to fulfil a particular purpose. Things made of earth fall vertically downwards because they are striving to reach their natural place in the centre of the universe. Above earth we find water, then air, then fire, all seeking their natural place; so air rises through water, and fire through air. Stars and planets, however, move in circles around the Earth, striving towards the eternal perfection of God; they thus show themselves to be made of a quite different, heavenly, element. Though rock, water, air, fire and stars are all inanimate, they all act with a purpose which makes how they behave intelligible. But in the early 17th Century, along came Galileo with his telescope, refuting Aristotles theory that the Earth is at the centre, and providing a quite different explanation of how things behave. One example is the flight of a cannonball. According to Aristotelian theory, the natural movement of the ball is downwards towards the centre of the Earth. So when a cannonball is fired from a gun it keeps going while the impetus is pushing it; when that impetus dies the ball should fall vertically. Galileo pointed out that this isnt so: the ball descends with a parabolic curve, similar to when it ascended. Or take a sledge being pushed on flat ice. When the sledge stops being pushed it keeps going horizontally, even though its natural movement is supposedly downwards. Why? Aristotelians tried to invent explanations like vortices in the air, pushing it along, but Galileo replaced this with an account in terms of inertia. He said things just carry on in the same direction and speed unless they are acted upon by some force: so

what needs explaining is why the sledge stops (due to friction) not why it keeps going. Whereas Aristotelian science tried to explain the behaviour of physical things in terms of their striving to reach an end point or to achieve some purpose, in the new science the outcome depends on where the causal sequence of inertial movement and forces happens to lead. Consider one billiard ball bashing into another: their movement is not to be explained as involving anything like a desire; instead, its explained in terms of inertia and forces acting. Inert matter is being pushed around rather than being driven internally by its own purposes. Galileos science still aspired to intelligibility, but in a different way from Aristotles. One object pushing into another and communicating its motion seems to make good sense to us; moreover the calculation of impacts and forces (especially when later refined by Newton and others) provided predictability in a way that Aristotles theory never could. Intelligibility was very important for philosophers in both the ancient and early modern periods, confirming mans distinctive place in a rationally ordered universe. Unlike the rest of animal creation, man has the power of reason, a reflection of Gods own reason. Man can understand his universe and see the patterns in it, revealing Gods existence and divine ordering. For philosophers such as Descartes, Newton and Leibniz, the paradigm of human understanding the nearest we can get to Gods understanding comes through mathematics and its application to the physical world, which was proving increasingly fruitful in the 17th Century. Another important aspect of intelligibility was the defence it seemed to provide against materialism. Here the villain of the piece was Thomas Hobbes, known as the Monster of Malmesbury and bogey man of the period. He contended that the only things existing in the universe are material including man and (if such exists) God Himself. As Dr Millican explained, this was pretty unsettling. If man is merely material, but dead bodies rot, then the immortality of the soul looks very implausible, and so Hobbess theory robbed central religious doctrines of any plausible basis. It is perhaps no surprise that Hobbes was widely pilloried. In 1666, Parliament debated whether the great plague and fire of London might be Gods punishment for his public atheism. And in Oxford his own university his books were burnt in 1683 for advancing damnable doctrines, false, seditious and impious. The main argument used against Hobbes was precisely the intelligibility of matter. By understanding matter in the way that Galileo did, as something that is pushed around, that is inert and doesnt have active powers of its own, we can see clearly that materialism must be false. For we do have active powers: we are conscious and able to think. Mere matter, inactive and inert, obviously cannot think hence we cannot be mere matter, and immortality is defended. A host of philosophers used this sort of argument against Hobbes in the late 17th Century, leading up to John Locke and Samuel Clarke. Locke was a major influence on Hume, especially through his empiricism (the view that all of our ideas are ultimately copied from sensory experience). But Hume became branded as a notorious sceptic and was deprived of the chance of a Professorship at Edinburgh largely because of his opposition to the basis of Lockes and Clarkes arguments for the existence of God and against Hobbes. One of Humes most central achievements was to show that the ideal of intelligibility as sought in their different ways by philosophers both ancient and modern was an unattainable illusion. His famous argument concerning induction (in Section 4 of his Enquiry of 1748) took the familiar example of two billiard balls colliding, and showed that even in a simple case like this, we dont really have any genuine understanding of why the objects behave as they do. We can observe their behaviour, and find mathematical patterns within it, codified as what we call laws of motion (such as those worked out by Newton). But we cannot aspire to understand why the ultimate laws that govern these things are as they are, and when we make scientific inferences about the future behaviour of objects, we just have to take for

granted since we cannot prove the inductive assumption that they will indeed continue to act according to the same laws that we have observed in the past. Many philosophers since Hume have considered it a scandal of philosophy that we cannot apparently give any solid reason whatever to justify our belief in inductive uniformity, but this result is now widely accepted and provides the basis for much contemporary philosophy of science. Rather than appealing to any sort of ultimate intelligibility, Hume concludes that what makes us reason inductively in both science and everyday life is habit, or what he calls custom, meaning our natural tendency to assume that things will go on in the same way as in the past. Custom, he says, is the great guide of human life. It is that principle alone, which renders our experience useful to us, and makes us expect, for the future, a similar train of events with those which have appeared in the past. It follows that human reason is only different in degree from that of other animals, for they too learn from experience through custom. Neither they nor we have any ultimate insight into why things act according to the laws they do; but we are cleverer at identifying, codifying and working out the implications of the apparent laws that we observe operating. This view of humans as essentially clever animals (rather than imperfect angels or pure intellects) runs through much of Humes philosophy, including his moral theory which is built on natural human feeling rather than on rational insight. When we see someone suffer, we share their suffering; when they are happy, we are happy too. It is empathy what Hume calls sympathy which he considers the basis of human morality. This view of mans place in the natural world had an influence on Charles Darwin, who read a lot of Humes books at exactly the time in the late 1830s when he was working on the theory of evolution. He later described that period as giving him at last a theory by which to work, and there is a note from 1839 in which he refers specifically to Humes discussion of the reason of animals. He also mentions Hume on scepticism and the origins of religion, and there are further signs of influence in The Origin of Species of 1859, in the form of passages that seem to echo ideas and phrases from Hume. Although Hume denies that we can achieve ultimate understanding of the world, and he sees our discovery of natural laws as based fundamentally on a brute assumption of uniformity, this does not mean that he is anti-scientific. On the contrary, he is a great advocate of inductive science and basing our predictions on experience. Indeed, since we cannot achieve insight into the world by pure reason, learning from experience has to be the touchstone of rational science. The force of his position is much easier for us to appreciate in the wake of Quantum Mechanics and Relativity Theory, than it was in the 18th Century, when philosophers (such as Immanuel Kant) imagined that Newtonian physics should be provable by metaphysical reasoning. Dr Millican gave a computer simulation of the famous Two-Slit Experiment to illustrate the weirdness of Quantum Mechanics. Nobody would be tempted to suppose that this theory could be arrived at by armchair metaphysics: physicists were forced towards it by experiment and observation, as Humes view of science would imply. Einstein himself praised Hume and said that his own study of the 1739 Treatise decisively furthered his development of the Theory of Relativity (apparently by encouraging him to reconsider the supposed absolute character of time, and how this is manifested in experience). This illustrates how Humes thought retains its power over the centuries, and still has a great deal to teach us. Dr Millican ended his lecture by unveiling the new website at www.davidhume.org which displays all of Humes great philosophical works, authoritatively edited and faithful to their original form (even using an 18th-Century-style font). Humes Dialogues concerning Natural Religion (described by Millican as the funniest great work of philosophy ever written) is also presented in coordinated text and manuscript versions, thanks to the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the National Library of Scotland, who kindly provided high-quality images of

Humes original handwritten sheets. The Dialogues was not published during Humes lifetime as he realised that it would be very controversial, so he left the manuscript to Adam Smith with the proviso that after two years, if not yet published, it should go to his nephew also named David Hume whose duty in publishing it as the last wish of his uncle would be entirely above reproach. David Hume the younger accordingly published the Dialogues in 1779, and it is this published version which is shown in the website alongside the manuscript images. Dr Millican gave examples to show how Humes handwritten insertions and crossings out including one made on his deathbed in 1776 can be of particular significance, holding clues to future readers on how to interpret Humes final thoughts on religion.

Questions and Answers

Q) It came across very well in the lecture that one of Humes premises, custom, was that human nature is always the same. But is it possible still to engage with Hume if this is considered true across all ages and types? A) Hume tends to assume that there is more similarity in human judgements than we might think today, especially in aesthetics, where he supposes that careful, thoughtful critics will come to agree much more than they seem to. Here, perhaps, Hume went too far: tastes in music, for example, vary a lot between older and younger people, or different societies. But custom in Humes main sense as the assumption that natures fundamental laws are uniform is different, and doesnt seem to be so relative to culture. Animals assume the future will resemble the past, and its difficult to see how they could survive without that. Moreover we can use empirical investigation, based on this assumption, to investigate how far aesthetic judgments are (or are not) common across cultures, and even if they turned out to vary a lot, that sort of lack of uniformity would not undermine Humes fundamental principles. Q) When it comes to custom, what would be your view on Humes take on exponential rate of change? Custom could not have forecast five years ago the impact of Twitter on international law, for example. A) Hume is often thought to be an advocate of custom in the sense of conservative tradition (as well as in his own special sense of uniformity of underlying laws). He is very suspicious of revolutionary theories, and he thinks that social organisation tends to develop best by evolving over time. But this is quite consistent with large-scale change, and Hume as an historian is well aware that there have been major changes in the past, sometimes quite dramatic. Q) When it comes to events such as climate change, could it be that the future may not resemble the past? A) Climate change is a major problem because one cant assume that things wont change in respects that are vital to life on the planet, even if we assume as we do that the laws of nature remain constant. If Hume were alive now, he would say that we should be doing the science. But this sort of futuristic science probably has to rely on interpretation of computer models of events that have not yet occurred, because its not a problem of induction, but of complexity. Even if the underlying rules are exactly the same, things interact so much that everyday inferences cannot be relied upon, and theyre far too complicated for us to work out. Hume of course didnt foresee this, but if he were alive now I think he would be a great fan of empirical computer modelling!

Q) At the end of the Dialogues, one of the points is that in a way, with irony, you dont have to do the Dawkins thing and put a stake through the heart of Christianity. Isnt it true that what Hume most wanted was to tease apart morality and religion so that morality can stand independently? A) There is a lot to be said for that view, and in the Dialogues there is a fair amount of discussion about morality. Hume wants what he says to be taken seriously rather than rejected outright, so that religious people will not see him as being against religion in itself, but against the excesses of fanatics who burn each other or fight wars over their beliefs. He draws a distinction between true religion and superstition, apparently largely for this reason, and sees true religion as morally sensible and benign. Q) Can we pursue that difference between morality and religion and rewards for good behaviour? A) Hume thinks that religion has a dangerous tendency to erect completely spurious virtues. If there were a God who gave us rewards just for acting well towards each other, that could obviously be a spur for good behaviour (in the spirit of true religion). But then the problem is that if you are considering doing a good turn for your neighbour, thats a good thing to do quite independently of God even an atheist could agree that its virtuous. So if youre devoted to your religion and want to show some special commitment to God, then you have to invent some way of doing it that couldnt possibly be seen as good or desirable from an atheistic point of view, such as self-flagellation or the wearing of sackcloth and ashes. Hume thought that in this way religion often corrupts morality, by erecting a spurious category of monkish virtues that are really vices rather than virtues. (Dr Millican then used www.davidhume.org to show, on the lecture display, the passage from the Enquiry concerning the Principle of Morals Section 9 paragraph 3 where Hume most forcibly states this view.)

VOTE OF THANKS
The vote of thanks was given by Professor Susan Manning, Professor of English Literature and Director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Humanities at Edinburgh University. Professor Manning said that she considered it a privilege to propose a vote of thanks on behalf of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, to Peter Millican in view of the treat the audience had been given that evening. Peter has given a tour de force of the history of philosophy all the way from Aristotle to quantum physics, via Darwin and Einstein. He gave a sense of the important issues that Hume engaged with and why those issues continue to matter today. More than that, he presented an example of a certain kind of thinking associated with Hume ambitious, learned, current, accessible and attractive. There are not many people who could address Humes work with such authority.

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