David Hume (1711-1776) was one of Britain’s greatest philosophers. Although he’s currently out of fashion in many college philosophy departments for his aversion to abstractions, obscurantism and fancy talk of all kinds, his empirical method makes him popular among science majors.
As Julian Baggini writes in The Great Guide, Hume’s biography and his books are inseparable. He was the philosopher of how to lead a decent life and his reflections were linked to the places where he lived and the people he met. He opposed René
Descartes, who tried apprehending reality through reasoning, and emphasized instead the importance of experience.
Hume advocated balance and sought the middle way between extremes. For him, courage is “the mean between cowardice and rashness” and “flexibility the mean between rigidity and spinelessness.” He was opposed to “enthusiasts”—fanatics on any issue—and proposed avoiding both zealotry and apathy in favor of sympathetic engagement. Baggini shows that Hume would be appalled by the current state of politics—he warned of men who “without shame or remorse … neglect all the ties of honour and morality, in order to serve their party.” Read that, Mitch McConnel and friends. Hume hated factionalism and encouraged dialogue. He was skeptical on the claims of religion (because they can’t be proved empirically) but enjoyed the company of religious colleagues.
Hume notoriously disregarded his own advice on understanding their empiricism and experience in his one remark on race. In a footnote, he declared his suspicion that “the negroes and in general all other species of men (for there are four or five different kinds) to be naturally inferior to whites.” Baggini puts the unfortunate remark in context: Hume echoed the European science of his day, which suspected that humanity did not derive from common ancestors and included superior and inferior species.
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Controversy over Hume’s lone digression into racism fueled a campaign to rename the David Hume Tower at the University of Edinburgh (his alma matter). A petition circulated to name the architecturally uninspired structure for Tanzanian anti-colonialist Julius Nyere—until someone realized that Nyere was dictator once in power and a homophobe. To quote Hume: “No quality is absolutely either blamable or praise-worthy. It is all according to its degree.”
Baggini has written that rarity—a book about philosophy that’s a pleasure to read as he describes the people and places as well as the ideas of Hume’s life.
