David Hume
Paperback | Pages: 96 pages Rating: 3.92 | 16351 Users | 432 Reviews
Specify Regarding Books An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
| Title | : | An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding |
| Author | : | David Hume |
| Book Format | : | Paperback |
| Book Edition | : | First Edition |
| Pages | : | Pages: 96 pages |
| Published | : | January 1st 2006 by Digireads.com (first published 1748) |
| Categories | : | Philosophy. Nonfiction. Classics. Psychology |
Description Conducive To Books An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
I had seen so many references to Hume's Enquiry that I almost thought I had read it; but, when I actually got around to opening the book, I found as usual that things were not quite as I had imagined. I was not surprised by his relentless scepticism, or by his insistence on basing all reasoning on empirical evidence. These qualities, after all, have become proverbial. I was, however, surprised to find that I hadn't correctly grasped the essence of his argument concerning the nature of knowledge. In case you are as poorly informed as I was, let me summarise it here.Hume's position is wonderfully simple. He asks what grounds we have for supposing that multiple repetitions of an experiment justify us in inferring a necessary law. If we note, on many occasions, that hot objects burn our hands when we touch them, what logical reason do we have for assuming that we should not touch the next candle flame we happen to see?
The answer is that we have no logical grounds at all for making such an inference. Of course, as a matter of observed fact, we do assume, after a small number of trials, that touching hot objects will hurt us. Hume says this is nothing to do with logic; we are simply designed in such a way that we cannot help being influenced by our experience to adopt such rules. As he points out, many other living creatures do the same. It is impossible to believe that a dog or a horse is performing any kind of logical deduction when they learn to avoid touching naked flames. They simply acquire the habit of behaving in this way. The most economical explanation of what we see is that human beings are doing the same thing.
A mountain of discussion has accumulated since Hume published his book, and it would be presumptuous of me to give my opinions when so many extremely clever people have already done so. I am, however, struck by something I have noticed in the course of my professional career. I have worked in Artificial Intelligence and related subjects since the early 80s, and during that period the field has suffered a profound change. In 1980, most AI research was related to logic. People assumed that the notion of intelligence was in some essential way based on the notion of deduction. Making machines intelligent was a question of making them capable of performing the right kinds of logical inferences. This tempting approach was, unfortunately, a resounding failure.
Somewhere towards the end of the last century, a different way of looking at things started to become fashionable, and quickly gained ground. Instead of thinking about logic, people began more and more to think about probability. They collected data and extracted various kinds of statistical regularities. The new AI systems made no attempt to think logically; their decisions were based on associations acquired from their experience. At first, the AI community was scornful, but it was soon found that "data-driven" systems worked quite well. They made stupid mistakes sometimes; but so did the logic-based systems, and the mechanical logicians tended to make more stupid mistakes. They could reason, but they had no common sense. Today, data-driven systems have taken over the field, and the approach has been shown to work well for many problems which had once been considered impossible challenges. Particularly striking successes have been notched up in machine translation, speech recognition, computer vision, and allied fields.
If David Hume came back today, I have no idea whether he'd be offered a chair at a philosophy department. But I'm fairly sure that Google would be interested in hiring him.
Details Books Supposing An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
| Original Title: | An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding |
| ISBN: | 1420926993 (ISBN13: 9781420926996) |
| Edition Language: | English |
Rating Regarding Books An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
Ratings: 3.92 From 16351 Users | 432 ReviewsArticle Regarding Books An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
"Be a philosopher; but amidst all your philosophy, be still a man".This is David Hume's summary of his central doctrines and themes of his empiricist philosophy. It was a revision of an earlier effort, A Treatise of Human Nature, published anonymously in London in 173940. Hume was disappointed with the reception of the Treatise, which "fell stillborn from the press," as he put it, and so he tried again to disseminate a more developed version of his ideas to the public by writing a shorter and more polemical work.The end product of his labours was the Enquiry
So I had to read this for my class "A Prehistory of Affect: Reading the Passions." It was a pretty panicked situation: I got randomly chosen to do a 30 minute presentation on this text... in the first week of my Masters. I had one week to read the Enquiry and prepare my presentation. It was incredibly stressful. I've never read philosophy, I'm very unfamiliar with the 18th century, and I had been out of school for year and a half. Talk about being kicked back into gear.I don't know how to "rate"
Bertrand Russell famously summarized Hume's contribution to philosophy, saying that he "developed to its logical conclusion the empiricist philosophy of Locke and Berkeley, and by making it self-consistent made it incredible." Hume is remarkable in that he does not shy away from conclusions that might seem unlikely or unreasonable. Ultimately, he concludes that we have no good reason to believe almost everything we believe about the world, but that this is not such a bad thing. Nature helps us
It was recommended that I read this because David Hume influenced Kant and it would help me understand the concepts in Critique of Pure Reason. He's certainly an influential figure; in fact, without him, there would probably be no Arthur Schopenhauer, my favorite philosopher ever. He also influenced Albert Einstein, and I can see how this book was revolutionary in the science world. Sometimes it seemed more like a science book than a philosophy book. But I felt as if I was already familiar with
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748) was David Hume's second attempt to offer readers his view on epistemology. A Treatise of Human Nature (1739) was no succes and Hume even suffered from a depression following this failure. Nevertheless, he was convinced of the importance of the message, so he decided to publish its contents in two new, thinner and more accessible books.In order to understand Hume's message, we have to understand the historical context of the book. In the 17th
Hume's classic philosphical investigation into the nature and limits of human knowledge and its acquisition.
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