180186 LPS Hume: Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (2023S)

David Hume (1711 – 1776) is one of the best-known of the so-called ‘British Empiricists’, a series of thinkers in the 17th and 18th centuries who attempted to show that all knowledge and understanding has its foundation in experience, rather than in reason. In addition to presenting one of the main alternatives to Descartes’ philosophy and to being one of the main motivations behind Kant’s, his most lasting contributions to philosophical debate are his expression of the problem of induction, his scepticism about causation and necessity, his view of value as imposed by the human mind onto a world of facts, and his claim that reason is and ought always to be the slave of the passions.

An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding is Hume’s most considered and mature expression of his empiricist account of human understanding. From basic empiricist principles about how the human mind comes to have ideas at all, it attempts to show that various ways in which we tend to conceive of ourselves and the world are mistaken, and to reshape our conceptions of those things. Hume hoped that the book would serve as a foundation for a science of human nature.

Students in this Lekture Proseminar will study the Enquiry closely, as a means both to acquiring in depth knowledge of a central text in the history of philosophy and to acquiring essential philosophical concepts and skills. Each week, students will read one section of the Enquiry. In class meetings, we will look more closely at particular passages of the text and have discussions and activities to complement them. Reading assignments completed outside of class will be aimed at giving students an opportunity to develop their philosophical and analytical abilities.