Subscribe to Read | $0.00
Join today and start reading your favorite books for Free!
Quick and Easy Sign Up!
It takes less then 1 minute to sign up, then you can enjoy Unlimited eBooks.
Join today and start reading your favorite books for Free!
Quick and Easy Sign Up!
It takes less then 1 minute to sign up, then you can enjoy Unlimited eBooks.
Read Anywhere and on Any Device!
Rate this book!
Write a review?
Hume investigates how moral judgments are made...
David Hume could have saved himself a lot of time if he had just admitted right away that the only true foundation for morals is GOD> any other answer is a waste of time,
Ridiculous. How convenient that the best customs and habits are exactly those Hume finds most pleasing. The arch skeptic in his works on metaphysics and science, becomes the arch conservative in a book devoid of even an iota of cultural skepticism.
Well, this was disappointing.I say this because Hume’s first Enquiry was brilliant, unforgettably so. There, we see Hume as one of the most subtle, most penetrating, and most profound thinkers in Western history. Here we see him don the hat of a common moralist:“Instance, briefly; come, instance” (As You Like It)Hume apparently shared the English love for instances. He fills up entire chapters with example after example of moral and immoral acts. He drones away like a pontificating prefect. It’s...
It would be one thing if all Hume did was ask the question, instead, he gives some quite pathetic answers that professors still cram down student's throats.
This is one giant of a book, not for its length nor heaviness of subject, but the themes it touches and its argument. If Hume's first enquiry about human understanding (the book) is about the limit and nature of factual knowledge, this second enquiry is about the origin of morality. Encountering its arguments feels like getting hit by a brick. I never thought some of these things seriously. All this time I thought morality originated in reason. All of us have some sort of innate capacity to judg...
After A Treatise of Human Nature (1739), according to David Hume himself, "fell dead-bron from the press" he decided to lay out the two main themes of this huge work - epistemology and morality - in two new works. In An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), Hume gives an overview on his epistemology, while in An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751) he sets out his theory of human emotions.Hume's main thoughts on ethics are easy to summarize. He thinks human nature is the o...
It had been some time since I had last visited 221B Baker Street, and when I entered I found my friend engrossed in the study of a slim volume. "Watson!" he said, without lifting his eyes from the text. "Pray tell me, are you by any chance familiar with Mr. Hume's Enquiry into the Principles of Morals?"I could not hide a smile of modest self-congratulation. "Indeed, Holmes," I said, "I know the book very well. I wrote an essay on it during my final year at Oxford, and was fortunate enough to be
Hume is the moral philosopher who is most recognizable as a fellow modern human being. In his short autobiographical "My Own Life", he says that the Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals is "incomparably the best" of all his writings (though he admits that he isn't the one to judge that). Reading this for the first time, I was surprised at how little "philosophy" is in it--by that, I mean how little complicated argumentation there is. Most of the arguments are short and direct: against som...
In the Enquiry, commonly referred to as David Hume’s “second treatise,” Hume seeks to identify which qualities of mind are praiseworthy and blameworthy to discern “those universal principles, from which all censure or approbation is ultimately derived” (16). His method is thereby empirical: like a kind of moral scientist, he acquires data from a set of observations on the moral life, based on which he makes inferences about the supreme principle of morality. Based on these observations, Hume con...
Good God. David Hume is amazing. I think he must be the sanest, most reasonable, engaging, penetrating writer I have ever read. Reading him is like reading to flashes of lightning. With each flash, an idea is revealed and you are left wondering why someone hadn't see it before: it is all so clear and obvious.In this book Hume lays the foundations for what Bentham would later turn into Utilitarianism, but that doesn't really capture the heart of it: Hume recognizes that the bedrock of our behavio...
Hume utilizes an empirical method to explain the basis of moral understanding, and his analysis mirrors scientific study through the observation of human traits, and the corresponding public reception of those traits. In this sense, unlike his contemporaries, Hume believes in a sort of “projectivism," in that his theory of morality does not presuppose the conditions of the world, but rather, suggests that morality exists as a product of human values, and is thus exhibited through individual pre
