Video and Podcast Resources on David Hume's Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
28 videos and 28 podcast episodes designed to help learners get the most out of this great early modern philosophical work
One text of early modern philosophy I teach quite frequently in my Introduction to Philosophy classes is David Hume’s Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. It is fairly short and quite well-written (though in 18th century prose, which students sometimes have difficulties with), and provides a number of useful analyses, arguments, and discussions bearing on a number of different matters in philosophy. It also represents a fairly systematic approach by a great thinker that later philosophers will respond to, criticize, or incorporate in their own works (most famously Immanuel Kant, who credits Hume with wakening him from his “dogmatic slumbers”).
Most often people associate this book with Hume’s skeptic and empiricist approach to the issue of causality, or the relation between cause and effect, but there are a lot of other philosophical issues that he examines and stakes out positions on in the work, including how our ideas are connected with each other, whether we can extrapolate from people’s motivations in one culture to another, whether animals have minds or not, and whether or not we ought to believe testimony from other people.
So the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding is definitely a work that I think any decent philosophical education ought to include. I started producing core concept videos on it as a resource for my own academic students some years back, adding a few to the stock each new time that I taught the class. And as I do with most of my core concept videos, I then started taking the sound files, editing and improving them, and turning them into podcast episodes. I finished that editing earlier this week.
If you are going to study this work, perhaps these video and podcast lectures might prove helpful to you. Here are the links to all of them.
Section 1
Easy Vs Abstruse Philosophy - video format | podcast format
Pleading Metaphysics Case - video format | podcast format
Human Nature And Moral Philosophy - video format | podcast format
Section 2
Impressions And Ideas Of The Mind - video format | podcast format
Empiricism, Ideas, And Impressions - video format | podcast format
The Shade Of Blue Example - video format | podcast format
Section 3
Association Of Ideas - video format | podcast format
Section 4
Relations Of Ideas And Matters Of Fact - video format | podcast format
Experience And Cause And Effect - video format | podcast format
Section 5
The Principle Of Custom Or Habit - video format | podcast format
The Feeling Of Belief - video format | podcast format
Belief And The Association Of Ideas - video format | podcast format
Section 6
Probability Of Chance And Causes - video format | podcast format
Section 7
Possible Source Of Idea Of Power - video format | podcast format
Rejection Of Divine Occasionalism - video format | podcast format
The Doctrine Of Necessity - video format | podcast format
Section 8
Uniformity Of Human Nature - video format | podcast format
Necessity, Motive, And Volition - video format | podcast format
Laws, Actions, And Punishments - video format | podcast format
God, Evil, And Necessity - video format | podcast format
Section 9
Animals, Instinct, And Experience - video format | podcast format
Section 10
Miracles, Testimony, And Nature - video format | podcast format
Reasons Against Testimonies Of Miracles - video format | podcast format
Section 11
Causes, Effects, And Divine Providence - video format | podcast format
God, Providence, And Justice - video format | podcast format
Section 12
Skepticism And The Senses - video format | podcast format
Pyrrhonian And Mitigated Skepticism - video format | podcast format
Hume's Fork - video format | podcast format
So there you go: a set of 28 videos and corresponding podcast episodes covering all of the main ideas of David Hume’s Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. I hope you find them useful resources for fostering your study.