Episode 29: Peter Kail discusses Hume's legacy
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Hello and welcome to Elucidations, a philosophy podcast recorded at the University of Chicago. I'm Matt Teichman. And I'm Jamie Edwards. With us today is Peter Kael, University Lecturer in the History of Modern Philosophy at St. Peter's College, Oxford University, and he's here to discuss the legacy of David Hume. Peter Kael, welcome.
Thank you, and thank you very much for inviting me. It's a pleasure to be here.
So I guess we could just begin by saying something about who David Hume was. When and where did he live?
Okay. He was born almost 300 years ago on the 26th of April, 1711, into quite a respected family in Edinburgh. His name actually is properly spelt H-O-M-E, but the English couldn't deal with it, so he changed it to H-U-M-E, and that's what we have. He went up to Edinburgh when he was quite young, Edinburgh University, to study law, but found it rather dull. He was secretly devouring the classics and other works of philosophy. But he was so ardent in his studies that he had a breakdown. And there's a letter to a physician discovering the disease of the learned that he had. One of the cures he prescribed to himself was to ride 10 miles every day and drink a quart of wine, which seems to be a very good cure for that kind of thing.
Immensely precocious. After this disease of the learned, he tried working in Bristol, but that didn't work out, so he just went to France on a small sum of money where he wrote Atreides of Human Nature, this vast three-volume masterpiece that he published anonymously. The first two volumes came out in 1739, and the third volume came out in 1740. It wasn't very well received. He famously said it fell dead-born from the press and didn't reach the distinction of exciting a murmur amongst the zealots, which is a slight over-exaggeration. But nevertheless, it wasn't a top ten bestseller, put it like that. So he returned to his home at Edinburgh, slightly chastened, and then started writing short essays and published the first volume of Essays, Moral and Political in the 40s, and then a second volume, and that actually was quite successful.
Who was David Hume and what were the major milestones of his life?
So successful that he was emboldened to apply for the chair in pneumatical philosophy, as it was called then in Edinburgh in 1744. But his allegedly unread treatise, they already knew it was him. and the contents were thought to be too incendiary. The people who actually denied him were not the Orthodox Church in Scotland so much as the liberal end of philosophy who found his own sceptical views, or as they took them to be, to be too corrosive, so he was effectively barred from the chair. So after that, he traveled around Europe as an attache to a military ambassador and went to Turin and then returned to Edinburgh. At about the same time, he'd recast the first book of the Treatise in what was then called the Philosophical Essays Concerning Human Understanding, but it's now better known as the Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding.
That was published in 1748. And the moral part of the treaties was recast as the Inquiry Concerning Principles of Morals, which was recast in 51. He then got a job at the Advocates Library for 10 years, which was a small sum of money, but it allowed Hume to write. And he wrote what was the thing for which he was most famous during his lifetime, which is a six-volume History of England, which is a massive bestseller. and allowed Hume to live independently. He was one of the first people actually to make a living from a literary career. His tenure here at the Advocates Library was cut short because he was fired for ordering some improper books, which turned out to be three volumes of French erotica, which is not the average thing that a philosopher gets fired for on things.
After that, he returned briefly to his role as an ambassador and went to Paris and was feted by the nobles in Paris at the time.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–2:57
2
Who was David Hume and what were the major milestones of his life?
2:57–8:18
3
How did Hume’s early works, like *A Treatise of Human Nature*, shape his philosophical reputation?
8:18–12:20
4
What is Hume’s problem of induction and why does it matter for scientific reasoning?
12:20–16:51
5
How does Hume distinguish between skeptical and naturalistic interpretations of induction?
16:51–21:41
6
What is Hume’s belief‑desire model of motivation and how does it challenge the idea that reason alone drives action?
21:41–27:17
7
In what ways does Hume link human psychology to naturalistic explanations of religion?
27:17–32:13
8
How does Hume critique miracles and the arguments for the existence of God?
32:13–33:42
Speakers
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