The Scottish philosopher David Hume has fascinated scholars and the wider public for three centuries. He continues to attract attention not only because of his views, some of which are controversial today, but also because, in the 18th century, he introduced a new and more radical conception of philosophy that profoundly shaped the development of European thought.
“He stands at the threshold between older modes of thinking and something we call European modernity,” says Hynek Janoušek of the Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences, who is also one of the main organizers of an international conference dedicated to David Hume. This year’s conference, subtitled The New Life of David Hume, will take place in Prague from 29 June to 3 July and will cover topics ranging from history and the history of ideas to the reconstruction of Hume’s biographies.
One of the conference’s main aims is to present Hume’s thought in its full complexity and subject it to critical reflection. “Hume made a fundamental contribution to theories of the soul and consciousness, moral and political philosophy, legal theory, and aesthetics,” Janoušek adds. In his own time, however, Hume was best known as a founder of modern historiography, having written the first multi-volume history of England, which was quickly translated into several foreign languages.
On Human Nature
According to Janoušek, what draws scholars to Hume today is his radical understanding of human nature. In exploring it, Hume returned to fundamental questions and approached them in a new way, while drawing inspiration from classical philosophy written in Latin. These included questions such as suicide and the immortality of the soul, on which he took positions opposed to Christian doctrine. He did so using concepts and methods that may seem almost self-evident today, yet in ways that remain striking. On the one hand, he shared the optimism of emerging modernity and the belief that both nature and culture could be studied experimentally and that their empirical regularities could be described. On the other hand, he argued that, in the process of cognition, the human mind itself helps shape the world of experience and the regularities it perceives within it. It does so on the basis of principles that cannot themselves be rationally justified. For Hume, the basic categories through which we understand reality therefore have the character of necessary fictions.
Although Hume is one of the great figures of the Enlightenment, some of his views are deeply troubling from today’s perspective. While he was relatively progressive in his views on women and condemned the slave system of ancient Rome, he also accepted the slave trade of his own time, regarded Black Africans as inferior, and invested in sugarcane plantations. Janoušek points out, however, that Hume’s positions need to be understood in the context of his era. “You can condemn him as a historical figure, but you do so using the very tools he himself helped to provide,” he adds.
This year’s 52nd Annual Hume Society Conference, titled The New Life of David Hume, will bring together eighty participants from eighteen countries, including Canada, Ireland, and Brazil. The conference is organized by the Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences and the Faculty of Humanities at Charles University. The event is supported by Strategy AV21, the Hume Society, and the Faculty of Arts at Charles University.
About the Hume Society
Founded in 1974, the Hume Society is an international organization of scholars from dozens of countries. Its mission is to support research on all aspects of the thought and work of David Hume, the 18th-century Scottish philosopher, historian, and essayist. Membership is open to anyone interested in Hume and his philosophical and literary contemporaries.
