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1-Page Summary of An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
Hume begins by differentiating between impressions and ideas. Impressions are sensory experiences, emotions, or other vivid mental phenomena; ideas are thoughts related to those impressions. We build up all our ideas from simple impressions with the help of three laws: resemblance (the association of two things because they resemble each other), contiguity (when two things occur at the same time), and cause-and-effect (a belief that one thing causes another).
Hume then distinguishes between two kinds of truths: matters of fact and relations of ideas. Matters of fact are those things we learn from experience. Relations of ideas, on the other hand, are mathematical truths that cannot be denied without a contradiction.
We generally understand matters of fact based on cause and effect. For example, we know that the sun will rise tomorrow because it has risen in the past and is part of cosmology. We can infer something even though we have not observed it directly.
Hume suggests that we cannot justify ideas of cause and effect. There is no contradiction in denying a causal connection, so we cannot do so through relations of ideas. Also, we cannot justify future predictions from past experience without some principle that dictates that the future will always resemble the past. This principle can also be denied without contradiction, and there is no way it can be justified in experience. Therefore, we have no rational justification for believing in cause and effect. Hume suggests habit instead of reason to enforce our perception of necessary connection between events when they are constantly conjoined with each other over time; this is why even if you don’t know why two events occur together all the time, your imagination still infers a necessary connection between them even if it has no rational grounds for doing so because you’re used to seeing them together all the time.
Our judgements about matters of fact are based on probability. If we experience a certain event frequently, the mind will infer a causal link between it and another event.
Hume asserts that all meaningful terms must be reducible to simple impressions. Since the impression of cause and effect isn’t a simple one, it doesn’t make sense to talk about it in this way. Instead, Hume says we should just observe how often two events happen together and call that “cause” or “effect.”
Hume’s compatibilist view of free will and determinism is that we should not worry about being determined if we perceive no necessary connection between events. He says that our actions are causally predetermined, but it doesn’t matter because everyone can act according to their own determinations.
Near the end of his book, Hume discusses a number of tangential topics that are related to reason and religion. He argues that human and animal reasoning are similar, as well as there being no rational justification for miracles or religious philosophy. It is only sensible to think about things in terms of “relations of ideas” (i.e., logic) and matters of fact (i.e., what can be observed). We should not think about metaphysics because it’s nonsensical to do so.
Context
David Hume was unique amongst philosophers in that he was very sociable. He turned towards philosophy after studying law, but he didn’t like it and instead wrote a book about human nature. The book received little attention upon its publication, which disappointed him. He never held a university post because of his atheism, so he made money by working as a writer for various publications and living in France.
Throughout his life, Hume was interested in philosophy. His philosophical works included the Treatise on Human Nature (1739–40) and A Treatise of Human Nature: Being an Attempt to Introduce the Experimental Method of Reasoning into Moral Subjects (1740). In addition, he wrote numerous shorter works that expanded upon ideas presented in those books. The Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding is a reworking of his first book from the Treatise, which was written about 1748. It focuses on empirical philosophy and attacks rationalism.
