Hume's Arguments about Reason Writing Assignment

Hume’s Arguments about Reason
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Hume’s Arguments about Reason
Reasoning is deductive or inductive logical process that is utilized in drawing conclusions from premises or facts. It is a logical process in the sense that people often use logic, consciously or unconsciously, while providing reasons regarding what they believe or when trying to convince others towards believing their conclusions. Reasoning is among the critical tenets in the philosophers’ logical toolkit. With the use of logic, one is able to articulate his or her reasons more clearly. Different philosophers have come up with different arguments in support of and against reason. For instance, Hume, in his book, A Treatise of Human Nature (Book 3), acknowledges the heated debate between reason and passion. In light of this, people contend that the virtuousness of men is measured based on the extent to which they conform to the dictates of reason. It is also argued that a rational creature is the one who regulates his or her actions by reason. While most modern and ancient moral philosophy is based on the school of thought that the reason is the superior drive of action, Hume is largely against it. This essay examines Hume’s view regarding the contribution of reason for action, and compares and contrasts this view with Plato’s.
As Hume puts it, people admire reason’s divine origin, the never changing and eternity while emphasizing passion’s deceitfulness, inconsistency, and blindness. This statement implies that reason supersedes passion. Dismissing this argument as utterly fallacious, Hume endeavors to illustrate that reason in its entirety cannot motivate any of the will’s actions and it can never antagonize passion in guiding the will. While providing arguments in support of his line of thought, Hume provides two different working mechanisms of reason. One of the mechanisms is that reason facilitates people to reach judgments through the process of demonstration. This mechanism is focused on the abstract correlations of people’s ideas. The other working mechanism is that reason facilitates people to reach conclusions based on probability. This mechanism is focused on the meaning people attach to objects based on their experience.
Hume goes on to discredit the line of thought that an action can result from reasoning’s demonstrative aspect. In other words, the demonstrative aspect of reasoning alone is insufficient to motivate the will towards performing an action. In this regard, the demonstrative reasoning is separated from the will in the sense that the latter focus on realities while volition focus on ideas. Hume compares the relationship between demonstrative reasoning and the will with the relationship between geometry and arithmetic. Arithmetic is critical in virtually all professions and arts while geometry is critical in all mechanical operations. However, the two fields of mathematics are not influential by themselves. Mechanics regulates the motion of objects and arithmetic facilitates people to uncover the proportions of the operations and the effect of the objects. Just like mechanics and arithmetic, the sole aim of demonstrati...