Margarete Perriseau Introduction to Philosophy (HU) PHIL 1000-019 Spring 2015 Salt Lake Community College Final Paper Assignment: Compare and Contrast two Philosophers Ihave chosen David Hume (1711— 1776) and John Stuart Mill (1806 — 1873). They lived about a century apart. Both were of Scottish descent in Great Britain. Hume’s reputation as a philosopher is considered “the greatest who has ever written in the English language,”(Magee, p. 146) although it was as a historian that he achieved his fame, writing a six volume work, The History of England. John Stuart Mill is considered “the most influential English-speaking philosopher of the nineteenth century,"(Stanford, opening paragraph) contributing to social theory, political theory, and political economy. Hume was born outside Edinburgh and entered the University of Edinburgh at 10, 11, or 12 (depending upon the source), ahead of the normal age of 14 at the time. He left the University at about 15 and continued his education privately. Unsuccessful in his attempts to become a university professor, partly because of controversial religious views, he was eventually employed as librarian of the Advocate’s Library in Edinburgh for a decade, where he wrote most of his History of England. He introduced the term “utility,” which was developed by Bentham and Mil Mill was born in London and raised with an extraordinary private education under the direction of his father, James Mill, who was a philosopher, historian and economist. The father wanted a genius to carry on the causes of utilitarianism after himself and Jeremy Bentham. Greek at three; Latin, geometry and algebra at eight; logic at twelve; political economy at thirteen, nervous breakdown at twenty; recovery with the help of Wordsworth's poetry. Unwilling to accept the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England, he was ineligible for Oxtord or Cambridge. He joined his father at the East India Company and attended University College, London. Eventually he became an MP and among other causes, fought for women's rights. Enduring works include: On Liberty, Utilitarianism, and The Subjection of Women. For topics of comparison, | will use the syllabus questions: What is truth? What is reality? What is knowledge? How should | treat others? Do I have free will? Does God exist? What is happiness? In my summary, | will declare which philosopher has the better philosophical system and present my arguments. NOMaeNe 1. Whats truth?This topic must be considered together with the two following questions: What is reality? and What is knowledge? As a starting point, | have used various explanations in Encaria to separate the three terms. Truth infers a conclusion based on evidence or reasoning that corresponds correctly to some aspect of reality, Reality refers to the totality of things and events that ‘really’ exist, opposed to an imaginary, idealized, or false nature, and independent of people's knowledge or perception of them. Knowledge is awareness or possession in the mind of information, facts, ideas, truths or principles. The human mind would claim truth to be a declaration of what really is, or was, or will be. Degrees of certainty would vary according to whether the truth is considered simply ‘obvious, generally believed to be true, or verified and validated by repeated experience/ experiments intended to prove the truth of a theory which attempts to explain reality. The search for scientific truth led to the development of the scientific method: close, repeated observation of some thing or event in nature/reality; presentation of a hypothesis to explain the results, including what it would take to prove the hypothesis false; corroboration by others to duplicate independently the results; the test of time and additional thought to determine whether refinements or alternatives would improve the theory. Newton's laws of classical physics were proved time and again over hundreds of years and thought “true” until Einstein uncovered their limitations and “mistakes” and introduced the concepts of “relativity.” He immediately qualified his own work as “not a true theory’ and should be judged merely as better approximations, to be used until he or others developed a “unified field theory” to address all the questions still unanswered (Popper, p.45) He never got there. in the meantime, quantum mechanics emerged and challenged physics to change yet again its views on what was true. Hume's skeptical approach questioned and dismissed many of the established “truths" of his age. His criticism of human rationality and his acceptance of empiricism as the path to knowledge, if not truth, caused him to reject inductive reasoning as a method to arrive at valid statements about reality. The search for truth had to start with impressions from the external world. These could be developed into ideas, which the mind could work with to pose concepts, which in turn had to be tested in the real world. He dissected the rational proofs in religion, by showing either misuse of logic, or searching for origins in psychology, rather than revelation. Miracles and testimonies of miracies were dismissed due to the unreasonableness of believing them Even when it came to the perception of the external world through our senses, Hume considered the concept a fabrication of the mind, which in turn is programmed to form the concept. Therefore, “we have no valid conception of the existence of external things."(Hume, Treatise, p. 62) Mill addresses this issue in his Examination of Sir William Hamitton’s Philosophy, in which Mill professes we have no access to “things-in- themselves.” Therefore our knowledge is relative versus absolute.(Heydt, p.14) Mill’s commitment to naturalism/empiricism dominates his writings. He even treats human minds and wills as part of reality, rather than separating them from reality. He attacks and rejects “intuitionism," the “German, or a priori view of human knowledge. The notion that truths external to the mind may be known by intuition or consciousness, independently of observation and experience, is, | am persuaded, in these times, the great intellectual support of false doctrines and bad institutions. (Heydt, p. 8) Yet, at the same time, logical and mathematical truths, arrived at inductively, according to Mill, 2contain substantive information, whereas Hume claimed these truths came from “relations of ideas” and could be traced to experience. In order to defend his empirical approach, Mill develops in his A System of Logic the distinction between verbal and real propositions. Verbal propositions are empty of content, they tell us about language. Real propositions tell us about the world, based on experience. Elsewhere he compares real propositions to axioms of geometry — they are not truths a priori, but generalizations inducted from observation, a posteriori, All this, again, to undercut German intuitionism. 2. What is reality? Both Hume and Mill endorsed empiricism, which maintained that all of our ideas can be traced back to external sensations and internal feelings. But the point of origin comes from the external world and the impressions it makes on our mind. The copy thesis argued that ultimately all ideas are copied from impressions. Reality then is that external world which surrounds our mind, although in another sense the mind as a physical brain is also part of that external world. Our ideas and perceptions exist in the mind, and are our attempt to interpret the impressions that reach our mind through the senses from the external world. Therefore, we do not have the ability to have direct contact or understanding of reality. Our understanding is at best an approximation of what is “really” happening. Concepts such as space and time probably do not exist in reality, but are secondary qualities created by our mind in order to make sense of what we observe. All the formulas and theories science has produced to explain what happens and why it happens are merely constructs of the mind. We accept them and use them, because repeated experiments show them to give us the same results or the same impressions every time. That makes us comfortable and confident that we “know” what is going on. But on another level, these are merely good approximations, and may not explain what reality actually may be doing, ‘At some point, one must limit one’s skepticism in order to function in life. If one’s life is governed only by doubt, it may freeze the individual into complete inaction, because he/she is not able to convince himselfinerself to make a decision and get on with it. Extreme skepticism and rigorous empiricism lead one to even doubt one’s own existence, because we can only interpret our reality approximately from the impressions coming through our senses about the physical elements and qualities of everything but the mental processes of our mind. And to the extent that science reduces even these mental processes to some kind of physicality, what's left? Hume ruled against the existence of a “self” independent of the collection of ideas and memories that are current in the mind at a given moment. He recognized that the “self” continues to change, and adds new impressions, ideas, and memories, while losing earlier elements that are discarded Mill defended radical empiricism in logic and mathematics, and claimed that all knowledge of these disciplines involved generalizations from experience. Nothing came from a priori or inductive thinking, He attacked German “intuitionism" and considered it a danger to think one can know truths about reality from the mind alone without validating the ideas and theories through experiments in nature. Verbal propositions 3‘coming from the mind only are “empty’ in content. Real propositions require correspondence to features of the world. A quote from our textbook at the end of Chapter 10 reveals perhaps the frustration for Hume of a life of skepticism: “I am ready to throw all my books and papers into the fire, and resolve never more to renounce the pleasures of life for the sake of reasoning and philosophy.”(Soccio) Mill also experienced a mental crisis early in life at age 20, which in part had to do with his demanding father, but which he also attributed to an underdeveloped capacity for feeling vs. perhaps his overdeveloped analytic abilities. He claimed that Wordsworth's poetry helped him come out of his depression. The “examined life" can have its dangers. 3. What is knowledge? Hume's first major work was A Treatise of Human Nature, published before he was thirty. It was not well received at first, but has been recognized as a philosophical masterpiece. Influenced highly by “modem scientific thought” and “empiricism” - the philosophical belief that all knowledge is derived from the experience of the senses - he develops his system to explain what knowledge Is. “All the perceptions of the human mind resolve themselves into two distinct kinds, which | shall call Impressions and Ideas. . . . Those perceptions, which enter with most force and violence, we may name impressions, and under this name | comprehend all our sensations, passions and emotions, as they make their first appearance in the soul. By ideas | mean the faint images of these in thinking and reasoning; such as, for instance, are all the perceptions excited by the present discourse, excepting only, those which arise from the sight and touch, and excepting the immediate pleasure or uneasiness it may occasion.”(Monson, p. 124) Impressions may come from external sensation, or from internal reflection. Ideas ‘come from memory or imagination. Ideas may be divided into those from fancy, or from understanding. Understanding can involve relations of ideas or matters of fact. “There is another division of our perceptions, which it will become convenient to observe, and which extends itself both to our impressions and ideas. This division is into Simple and Complex. Simple perceptions or impressions and ideas are such as admit of no distinction nor separation. The complex are the contrary to these, and may be distinguished into parts. Though a particular color, taste, and smell are qualities all united together in this apple, 'tis easy to perceive they are not the same, but are at least distinguishable from each other.”(Monson, p. 124) Atfirst, he maintains that ideas and impressions appear always to correspond to each other. But then he recognizes, “that many of our complex ideas never had impressions that corresponded to them, and that many of our complex impressions never are exactly copied in ideas."(Monson, p. 125) However, his important conclusion is “that every simple idea has a simple impression, which resembles it; and every simple impression a correspondent idea.” Moreover, he finds “that all our simple ideas in their first appearance are derived from simple impressions, which are correspondent to them, and which they exactly represent.”(Monson, p. 126) Subsequently he applies this same approach to ideas of space, time and causality. 4‘Two fundamental concepts come out of this analysis: 1. All ideas begin with an impression from the real world, external to the “self” or the mind. 2. Because our impressions from nature are incomplete, yet prior to the ideas in our mind, we can neither assume nature will remain constant, nor use any inductive logic to arrive at knowledge a priori. Mills position is even more aggressively “scientific” and “empirical” than Hume's. In his System of Logic, and Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy, he attacks the German school of “intuitionism.” “The notion that truths extemal to the mind may be known by intuition or consciousness, independently of observation and experience, is, | am persuaded, in these times, the great intellectual support of false doctrines and bad institutions. By the aid of this theory, every inveterate belief and every intense feeling, of which the origin is not remembered, is enabled to dispense with the obligation of justifying itself by reason, and is erected into its own all-sufficient voucher and justification There never was such an instrument devised for consecrating all deep-seated prejudices.(Heyat, p. 8) For Miil, logic ascertains “how we come by that portion of our knowledge (much the greatest portion) which is not intuitive: and by what criterion we can, in matters not seff- evident, distinguish between things proved and things not proved, between what is worthy and what is unworthy of belief.”(Heydt, p. 9) He distinguishes between verbal and real propositions. A proposition puts two “names’ together, a subject and a predicate, and claims they are the same or different. Real propositions tell us about the world from experience. Verbal propositions are empty — they tell us what language means, not what the world means. The words in a verbal proposition may be consistent as far as language goes, but there is no correlation between the words and the real world, unless they are based on experience. A System of Logic is a thorough attempt to argue for empiricism in epistemology, logic, and mathematics, which was refined in the twentieth century. 4. How should I treat others? In moral theory, Hume divorced morality from religion. His was a purely secular theory, which judged the morality of actions on pleasing and useful consequences. He introduced “utility” into our moral vocabulary, and his theory became the foundation for Bentham’s and Mil’s utiitarianism.(Fieser, p. 2) In both the Treatise and An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, he states that moral assessments are not judgments about empirical facts, but arise from the passions. He contends that one cannot move from is to ought to. “All actions of a moral agent are motivated by character traits, specifically either virtuous or vicious character traits. .. . some virtuous traits are instinctive or natural, such as benevolence, and others are acquired or artificial, such as justice."(Fieser, p. 23) The agent, receiver, and spectator may all experience pleasure from the action and therefore judge the character trait a virtue. If, by contrast, the spectator observes pain in the receiver, he will sympathetically also experience pain, and judge the character trait a vice. Hume identified four categories of useful qualities that make up moral virtue—those that are useful to others, useful to oneself, immediately agreeable to others, and immediately agreeable to oneself. Hume often used “utility” as a synonym for “useful” consequences.(Fieser, p. 25) 5Over the next hundred years, “utility” became “utilitarianism"—the greatest happiness for the greatest number.(Soukhanoy, p. 1957) Mill's Utilitarianism was Published from 1861 to 1863. His criterion for distinguishing right and wrong is the principle of utility: “actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness; wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. By happiness is intended pleasure and the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain and the privation of pleasure."(Heydt, p. 17) By using an external standard of pain and pleasure, Mill considered this approach superior to intuitionism, which could allow people to take their own prejudices as moral principles. In addition, the judgment of right vs. wrong applied to the external actions alone, not the internal motivations. 5. Do | have free will? Simplistically, for Hume — No! For Mill — Yes! But let's consider some of the complexity for each of them. To understand Hume's point of view, a review of cause and effect may be a good starting point. Cause and effect include priority in time, proximity in space and a necessary connection to link Cause A to Effect B. Cause A must take place before Effect B happens. Cause A and Effect B must be close enough together to perceive a likely interaction. But in addition, there must be some power or force that connects the cause with the effect. Time and Space have already been mentioned as “secondary qualities,” formed in the mind rather than being “primary qualities’ in reality. Consistent with those, the idea of ‘necessary connection” is also generated in the mind, rather than coming from an external impression. However, there is a link to experience, in that the repeated impressions of the cause and effect raise the expectation in the mind that the same thing will happen again and again. Thus the idea of necessary connection is copied from the recurring events. Perhaps influenced by his explanation of causality, Hume states that ‘all actions of the will have particular causes’ (Fieser, p. 13) so there is no such thing as an uncaused willful action. “Then, “our actions have a constant union with our motives, tempers, and circumstances."(Fieser, p. 13) These motives correspond to the causes in the cause- effect discussion above. There appears to Hume a “necessary connection” between those motives and the actions, just as there is between other causes and effects. That people believe they are exercising their will comes from a feeling of liberty, but this is an illusion Mill addressed free will in A System of Logic, which should be studied by science. “Our will causes our bodily actions in the same sense, and in no other, in which cold causes ice, or a spark causes and explosion of gunpowder. The volition, a state of our mind, is the antecedent; the motion of our limbs in conformity to the volition, is the consequent."(Heydt, p. 12) This appears to be in the same cause-effect framework as above, but Mill differs on what drives the will. Raised under the prevailing system of “Philosophical Necessity,” he perceived a “grand error’ in the idea that our character is formed for us, not by us.(Heydt, p. 13) Among the circumstances that form our character are our own desires. With those we have the power to alter our own character.To the objection: our desires are determined, so where is the free will? Mill acknowledges that our desires are driven by painful and pleasant consequences from our experience, and are therefore largely determined, but “we are stil left with the feeling of moral freedom, which is the feeling of being able to modify our own character “if we wish."(Heydt, p. 13) If we have the desire to change our character, we find that we can. For Mil, this constitutes free will. 6. Does God Exist? Hume's approach to this question is determined by his rigorous skepticism and his views on knowledge discussed in question 3. All knowledge has to be traced back to empirical data — experiences observed by the senses — which then give rise to ideas in the mind. In his quest for data to support the theological concept of God as an all- good, all-knowing, all-powerful being, he comes up empty. The world he observes is filled with misery and pain for all animals, not just humans. Predators and prey are the order of nature and nothing escapes the relentless, grinding reality of the march toward death. It is impossible for Hume to fathom the state of life on earth and make its existence consistent with the professed Judeo-Christian concept of God. The evil or misery on earth has to come from somewhere. If it comes from God, then he is not all- good. If it comes from somewhere else, then he is not all-powerful He attacked the various “proofs” for God with his powerful skill in reason and logic. One by one, he showed the fallacies of reason, or dismissed the arguments as “empty” because they were merely constructed fantasies of the mind, rather than solid developments from rigorously observed experience. His demand for empirical data, that others could replicate and that must be undoubtable, created an impossible barrier to any claims for the “proof” of God. His forthright honesty on this issue blocked various attempts to secure valued Positions and employment, and caused his friends and associates deep concern as his death approached, for fear of divine retribution and punishment. The society could not distinguish between his skepticism/agnosticism and their label of atheism, which to them was a damning judgment, not only in a hereafter, but also on earth during his life. His ultimate position was that we cannot know if there is a God. No empirical data exists to make that conclusion. Mill's views have perhaps different shadings to those of Hume, but in essence he arrives at the same point. With Hume's logic and his father's precedent, he felt “that the world as we find it could not possibly have come from an omnipotent and benevolent God given the evils rampant in it; either his power is limited or he is not wholly benevolent."(Heyat, p. 27) Like Hume, Mill disposes of all a priori arguments for his existence. He considers Possible an a posteriori and probabilistic argument based on the argument of “design.” But at the same time, he speculates that Darwin may have arrived at a naturalistic explanation for the origin of complex features of life in The Origin of Species, thereby eliminating the need for the Designer. 7. What is happiness?It seems appropriate to answer this question in connection with number 4: How should | treat others? For Hume, the morality of actions depended upon “pleasing and useful consequences."(Fieser, p. 1) For Mill, “actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness; wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. By happiness is intended pleasure and the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain and the privation of pleasure."(Heyat, p. 17) To combine the two: happiness consists of a pleasing and useful life, experienced in the absence of pain. Summary Obviously both Hume and Mill were giants among their peers. As a total beginner in philosophy, | am naturally uncomfortable declaring a preference, but as required, | choose Hume over Mill 1 Hume's achievements were impressive in that he came first. Both shared similar commitments to empiricism, a distrust of inductive truth, a doubt or even denial of revealed religion and its all-powertul, all-knowing, all-benevolent God, and an advocacy of “utiity/utiitarianism.” But Mill clearly had an advantage coming a hundred years later to build on Hume's foundation and the intermittent developments by others. Hume's system appears to me to address concerns that | consider classically philosophical and to present arguments with more of a calm, dispassionate objectivity. Mill clearly has agendas, and uses philosophy to further them, whether in politics, economics, human rights, or attacks on other individual philosophers or schools of philosophers. Although it is difficult for me to judge “tone” in English, | find Hume's tone carries me with him, whereas Mill's sometimes excites resistance. While it may be ridiculous to label Hume as the underdog in their competition, | respect his achievements in the face of much adversity, while | also admire and even envy Mill's upbringing and outstanding accomplishment. It is easier for me to identity with HumeSoukhanoy, Anne H., gen. ed., Encarta World English Di (1999) fionary, St. Martin's Press Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “John Stuart Mill’, (hitp:/plato. stanford,edu/ entries/mill) (2007) 10