Locke, Hume, and Reid
Fall 2009

This will be a critical introduction to John Locke (1632 – 1704), David Hume (1711 – 1776), and Thomas Reid (1710 – 1776), with an emphasis on issues in metaphysics, epistemology, and moral psychology.  We will begin with the origins of empiricism in the work of Locke, devote substantial time to Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature (1740), the text that awoke Kant from his “dogmatic slumber,” and look closely at Reid’s “common sense” alternative to Hume’s radical empiricism.

We will devote substantial time to situating these thinkers within the history of philosophy (and the history of ideas more broadly construed), identifying both the historical sources and influences that shaped their thoughts, as well as the inheritance of their ideas by Kant and post-Kantian epistemologists, by Wittgenstein and other 20th century thinkers, and by contemporary anti-Enlightenment philosophers.

Philosophical issues to be discussed will include innate ideas, direct and indirect realism, skepticism, naturalism, causation, the sources of normativity, agency, the nature of practical and theoretical reasoning, rationalism and empiricism, philosophical methodology, and relativism. 

There will be two required texts:

Hume, Treatise of Human Nature (edited by P.H. Nidditch, Oxford, 1978)
Reid, Inquiry and Essays (Hackett, 1983)

And I will recommend these two:

Hume, Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals (edited by P.H. Nidditch, Oxford, 1975)
Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding (edited by P.H. Nidditch, Oxford, 1979)

Assessment will be based on a 5,000-word term paper.  You will be required, as part of this assignment, to prepare a 3,000-word (i.e. conference submission length) version of your paper.  Short writing assignments will be due throughout the semester.

Please feel free to contact me with questions at allanhazlett@gmail.com.  A bit more detail on the seminar follows.
 

In 1739 Hume wrote that “[m[y principles are also so remote from all the vulgar Sentiments on this Subject, that were they to take place, they wou’d produce almost a total Alteration in Philosophy.”  What was supposedly so radical about Hume’s views?  In what ways did they constitute a break from previous philosophers?  And what impact did they have on philosophers after Hume?

Central to Hume’s “total Alteration” was the empiricist epistemology that Reid, one of Hume’s fiercest critics, unsympathetically dubbed “the Way of Ideas.”  On this picture, our awareness of the world is mediated by “ideas,” in the form of sensations, experiences, concepts, or beliefs.  This is in some ways obvious (what could be more hubristic than to claim unmediated access to the world?) but also obviously wrong (what could be more absurd than to claim that I don’t see tables and chairs?).  We will critically examine this view of the mind/world relationship, which Hume drew from Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), and closely examine how and why Locke developed this view, and in what ways it was philosophically novel (as Hume claimed).

Equally important was Hume’s skepticism about the foundations of science and metaphysics.  He based this on a simple thought: that there is no good, non-circular argument that can take us from what we immediately sense (and remember) to any conclusion about the world beyond our senses (and memory).  In this latter category Hume included claims about the external world, about persons, about the future, about causation, and about God.  We will examine Hume’s defense of this view, and its philosophical consequences, and again examine the extent to which this involves a break from the philosophies of the past.  (We will consider some philosophers who presaged some of Hume’s views on theses issues, including William of Okham and Nicholas of Autrecourt, sometimes called “the medieval Hume.”)

Also radical were Hume’s views about the foundations of morality, embodied in his famous claim in Book II of the Treatise that “’tis not contrary to reason for me to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my little finger.”  We will critically examine Hume’s sentimentalism, especially in connection with the rest of his philosophy.

It will be important to situate Locke and Hume’s empiricism in the context of the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment: to reveal the connections between Locke’s epistemology and his political philosophy, between his rejection of innate ideas and the Enlightenment ideal of egalitarianism, between Hume’s methodology and scientific experiementation, and between his austere metaphysical views and the recent successes of science.  In these ways, and others, Locke and Hume were paradigmatic philosophers of their time.

We will also consider Hume’s atheism (which was a minor scandal in his time, and disqualified him for academic employment).  Hume was one of the very first thinkers to develop what we would now call a “naturalistic” philosophical system: a theory of human nature, complete with answers to the big philosophical questions, that makes no mention of God, in which human beings are considered as an unprivileged part of the natural world.  This is surely another respect in which Hume’s philosophy represented a radical break from the past; and in many senses Hume’s secularism makes him the quintessential Modern philosopher.

The philosophy of Hume’s (underappreciated) compatriot Thomas Reid stands in stark contrast to Hume’s austere naturalism.  Reid explicitly rejects each of the central Humean ideas described above: the “Way of Ideas,” skepticism, sentimentalism, and atheism, proposing instead a philosophy of “Common Sense,” as an antidote to the radical revisions offered by Hume and others.  In many ways, Reid is one of the earliest critics of the Enlightenment – an intellectual conservative in a time of scientific and philosophical revolutions.  We’ll take a close look at some important texts from Reid, his defense of “First Principles,” his rejection of skepticism, his philosophy of perception, and his views on free action and causation, and explore the complex relationship between his thought and that of Hume.

“British Empiricism” represented a self-conscious rejection of (what the empiricists perceived to be) the unscientific worldviews of the philosophers that preceded them, and it exemplified various other Enlightenment ideas, both intellectual and political.  The origins and context for the development (and criticism) of this empiricist picture is crucial for understanding its appeal.  But it also essential to explore its legacy.  Kant’s epistemology and metaphysics is explicitly posed as an alternative to Hume’s skepticism, and Kant’s moral philosophy provides an objectivist alternative to Hume’s subjectivism.  We will take special care to compare Reid and Kant.  (Karl Ameriks has recently argued that they have much more in common than most people think.)  We’ll also briefly discuss Hume’s lasting influence on analytic philosophy, from Russell, through the logical positivists, to the present.  And we will examine the affinities between the epistemologies of Hume, Reid, and Wittgenstein, which treat the problem of skepticism in a remarkably similar (and distinctly anti-philosophical) fashion.