So Hume lived and worked in Edinburgh, Scotland most of his life.
He's most famous for
developing a completely naturalistic philosophical system.
So by naturalistic, people mean a system that nowhere does it appeal to God in
giving explanations of things.
He's one of the first philosophers to ever have lots
of things to say about almost all the different areas of philosophy, but
he doesn't appeal to anything supernatural in any of it.
He's also really well known for his spirited critiques of religion,
had to keep these under wraps though in 18th century Scotland,
you couldn't really be all that bold in your critiques of religion.
So what I want to talk about is Hume's essay on miracles.
It's a chapter in his book called an Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding,
that first came out in 1748.
So Hume's conclusion in the section on miracles is that you should never believe
that a miracle's occurred on the basis of testimony.
So to figure out why he drew that conclusion,
we need to figure out two things.
What does he mean by testimony?
What does he mean by a miracle?
So let's take that first part first.
What is testimony?
So philosophers use the word testimony to refer to any situation in which
you believe something on the basis on what someone else asserts,
either verbally or in writing.
So someone else tells you something and you believe it.
Or you read something that someone else wrote down and you believe what they say.
Those are all instances of testimony.
So Hume and other philosophers who write about testimony are really keen to point
out that a ton of what we believe is based on the testimony of other people.
So in the essay on miracles, Hume had this to say.
He said, there is no species of reasoning more common, more useful, and even
necessary to human life, than that which is derived from the testimony of men.
Just to get a feel for what Hume's talking about,
think of some city you've never visited before.
Some city you've never actually been to.
You've got a lot of beliefs about that city, beliefs about who lives there,
population size, what it's like.
All those beliefs are based on testimony,
they're based on believing what people tell you who've been there.
They're based on believing what you read in the newspaper about what's
going on in that city.
Based on reading the Wikipedia article about that city, stuff like that.
So all those beliefs are based on testimonies.
So Hume and other philosopher's writing about testimony are going to point out
first thing, testimony's a really important source of beliefs for
creatures like us.