David Hume

In Our Time: Philosophy

BBC

History

4.5 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 6 October 2011

⏱️ 42 minutes

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Summary

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the work of the philosopher David Hume. A key figure in the Scottish Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, Hume was an empiricist who believed that humans can only have knowledge of things they have themselves experienced. Hume made a number of significant contributions to philosophy. He saw human nature as a manifestation of the natural world, rather than something above and beyond it. He gave a sceptical account of religion, which caused many to suspect him of atheism. He was also the author of a bestselling History of England. His works, beginning in 1740 with A Treatise of Human Nature, have influenced thinkers from Adam Smith to Immanuel Kant and Charles Darwin, and today he is regarded by some scholars as the most important philosopher ever to write in English.With:Peter MillicanProfessor of Philosophy at the University of OxfordHelen BeebeeProfessor of Philosophy at the University of BirminghamJames HarrisSenior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of St AndrewsProducer: Thomas Morris.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.uk.
0:09.2	I hope you enjoy the program.
0:11.2	Hello in 18th century the city of Edinburgh became the center for an intellectual movement which has come to be known as the Scottish Enlightenment.
0:19.0	At its heart were a group of radical thinkers, people like Adam Smith and James Hutton, whose advances
0:24.2	profoundly influenced fields ranging from economics to geology, medicine to agriculture.
0:30.0	But perhaps the most significant figure of the Scottish Enlightenment was David Hume.
0:34.4	In his lifetime, Hume was best known as the author of a best-selling history of England,
0:38.4	but today he's acknowledged as one of the giants of Western philosophy.
0:42.2	Hume wrote about a wide range of philosophical topics, including
0:45.2	religion and ethics, and in his 20s produced a revolutionary account of human nature,
0:49.7	our reason and emotions. Hume's work was credited as an influence by Charles Darwin
0:54.4	and Albert Einstein and is still the subject of intense debate today. With me to
0:58.4	discuss David Hume, I Peter Millicham, professor philosophy at Hartford College at the University of Oxford, Helen
1:04.6	Beebe Professor of Philosophy at the University of Birmingham and James Harris, senior lecturer
1:08.7	in Philosophy at the University of St Andrews.
1:11.0	Peter Milliken, David Hume was born 300 years ago in 1711. Could you give us some
1:15.6	sense of the intellectual landscape into which he was born?
1:19.2	Yes, certainly. I'll focus mainly on the theoretical background which I think had a very major influence on him.
1:26.0	He's only about a century after Galileo had turned his telescope to the sky and refuted the Aristotelian view of the world and about 50 years after the formation
1:37.4	of the Royal Society of London.
1:39.8	So it's quite early in the Scientific Revolution. It's an age of scientific confidence especially in the wake of Newton
1:47.0	so Newton's Principia was 1687 and that was greatly admired. So the predominant scientific view then was the so-called mechanical philosophy.
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