Quotes About Hume

On David Hume] Although he never admitted to being an atheist as such, he was clearly and unquestionably the most vividly elegant skeptic of them all.

Kant had disproved the ontological argument. Hume had shown that for any supposed miracle, the evidence that it had not happened was always greater than the evidence that it had. Darwin had shown the error in the 'argument from design'.

It was left to Hume, once again, to completely circumscribe reason. "Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions," Hume famously wrote, taking to its logical extreme the thought of his predecessors. "[Reason] cannot be the source of moral good or evil, which are found to have that influence."24

Nella vita di tutti i giorni [i francesi] hanno portato al massimo grado di perfezione quell'arte che, fra tutte, è la più utile e la più gradevole, l' art de vivre , l'arte della società e della conversazione. - David Hume, The Philosophical Works

Hume is thus led to the view that, when we say 'A causes B', we mean only that A and B are constantly conjoined in fact, not that there is some necessary connection between them.

Philiosophers like Hume and Descartes and Hobbes saw things similarly. They thought that mental images and ideas were actually the same thing. There are those today that dispute that, and lots of debates about how the mind works, but for me it's simple: Mental images, for most of us, are central in inventive and creative thinking.

I think that what people want from cable news channels is the sense that if there's hard news, it's going to come up immediately.

Hume came to warn us against such knowledge, and to stress the need for some rigor in the gathering and interpretation of knowledge

From the beginnings of modern monetary theory, in David Hume's marvelous essays of 1752, 'Of Money and Of Interest,' conclusions about the effect of changes in money have seemed to depend critically on the way in which the change is effected.

Qabalists assert that Reason is a weapon inadequate to the Search for Reality since its nature is essentially self-contradictory. Hume and Kant both saw this; but the one became a sceptic in the widest sense of the term, and with the other, the conclusion hid itself behind a verbose transcendentalism.

These three laws, by which our thinking is naturally impelled from one idea to another which resembles it, or which is next to it, or is its effect—these three laws characterize all our mental operations, including all our reasoning, and specifically they characterize our scientific ideas. Of the three laws of association of ideas, the association or connection of ideas by cause and effect, says Hume, is the most powerful connection between our ideas.

Hume's notion that we are nothing but a bundle of sensations succeeding one another with inconceivable rapidity, that any coherent sense of personhood is hence sort of overarching fiction, a state of affairs that may or may not be the case on average.

No real blood flows in the veins of the knowing subject constructed by Locke, Hume, and Kant, but rather the diluted extract of reason as a mere activity of thought.

That's the strategy that myself and my party have pursued and are pursuing.

There's a certain elitism that has crept into the attitudes of some in journalism, and it played out perfectly over the issue of these little [American flag] lapel pins.

For many philosophers, causation is a suspicious metaphysical concept that we do best to avoid when trying to understand science. This suspicion is, again, common within the empiricist tradition. It derives from the work of Hume. The suspicion is directed especially at the idea of causation as a sort of hidden connection between things, unobservable but essential to the operation of the universe.

Of course, in meeting Hume's challenge, we do have to concede that he was right in that no degree of evidence can confirm a universal generalization. However, it does not follow that we are slobbering dogs.

In An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, published in 1748, the Scottish philosopher David Hume reduced the principles of association to three: resemblance, contiguity in time and place, and causality. Our concept of association has changed radically since Hume's days, but his three principles still provide a good start.

Nevertheless statesmen are still greatly exercised by the problem of the international distribution of money. For hundreds of years, the Midas Theory, systematized by Mercantilism, has been the rule followed by governments in taking measures of commercial policy. In spite of Hume, Smith, and Ricardo, it still dominates men's minds more than would be expected. Phoenix-like, it rises again and again from its own ashes.

It was not reason but rather custom that was, Hume claimed, 'the guide of life' (T 652).

Worries about the reliability of the understanding arose only when Hume realized that, properly speaking, we have no idea at all what we are talking about when we call one thing the cause of another. We come to believe that one thing is the cause of another when the two things in question have presented themselves in our experience in a particular way.

Sympathy—not here a form of compassion, but rather a kind of attunement to the states of mind of other people—is absolutely central to the world of the passions as Hume describes it. It gives us the vivid, sometimes pleasurable, sometimes painful, sense we always have of ourselves as standing in relation with other people.

Hume was especially interested in how the relation of ownership, or property, insinuates itself into our emotional lives to the point where it is the principal cause of these 'indirect' passions.

Sympathy combines with our interest in property to generate a form of love or esteem which Hume took to be particularly prevalent in human nature. This is the admiration we feel for the rich and powerful.