Led by David Hume
About this course
The sixth module of the Metaphysics paper takes up causation — the relation by which we suppose one thing makes another happen — with David Hume, who looked for the necessity we attribute to it and could not find it anywhere in the world.
After five modules spent among necessities and substances and sufficient reasons, Hume makes a single civil demand: show me the impression. Trace every idea to the experience it copies, he argues, and the supposed necessary connection between cause and effect simply is not there — we observe one event, then another, and the two constantly conjoined, but never the tie that would make the second have to follow. Necessity, he concludes, lives not in things but in us, a habit of expectation we project onto the world. Beneath this lies the deeper wound — the problem of induction, which leaves all of science resting on custom rather than reason — and the same method, turned inward, dissolves even the self into a bundle of fleeting perceptions. Yet Hume is no nihilist: he is the genial naturalist who holds that nature overrules our scepticism the moment we rise from the desk, and that a wise person simply proportions belief to the evidence.
The student leaves able to reconstruct Hume's analysis of causation, state the problem of induction and the bundle theory, and understand the sceptical naturalism that answers them — carrying Hume's demand that even substance and God answer to experience into the final two modules. They read Hume's Enquiry and the relevant parts of the Treatise directly.
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Led by David Hume
The question
When one thing causes another, we think the cause *makes* the effect happen — that given the cause, the effect *must* follow. But where is that necessity? Hume looks at the closest causal sequence he can find and observes one event, then another, and the two joined together time after time — and never the connection itself. The module follows his case that causation, stripped to what we can actually observe, is just constant conjunction, that the necessity we feel is a habit of mind projected onto the world, and that the inductive leap from past to future — on which every science depends — has no foundation in reason at all. The same scrutiny, turned on the self, finds only a bundle of passing perceptions; and Hume closes by asking how, knowing all this, we are to live.