A number of different lecturers provide lectures in
Odyssey of the West V.
These lectures oscillate between coverage of key people and discussions of events and movements. We get conversations on Hume and Adam Smith. And then we get the French revolution and the terror.
There are a few different lecturers participating, some better than others. My favorite is Timothy Shutt. He is always careful to discuss the "consensus" scholarly opinion, while also providing his particular view. This is especially useful when he discusses "best" novel of a certain era or genre. He almost gets me to want to read Jane Austen.
Hume is dense and influential. I felt like a lot of his work is spent framing his ideas in the context of what other people thought in his day. Alas, I am not really up to speed with the current debates of his days. It makes it hard to really grok what his arguments are. He does come across very full of himself in the appendix. He seemed to not have any faults other than not communicating his ideas well. He does feel people are more likely to be content with their stations in comparison to others that are extremely different positions than to those that are close.
Hume has been a very influential philosopher. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding was an attempt to distil his thoughts in a more accessible format. There is a great deal of exploration of the difference between reason and experience. I found the small points to be easily understandable, but had trouble grabbing the big picture of the argument. In general it was an exploration of a bunch of ideas about how people think.
Hume lived back in the 1700s. He was from Scotland and spent time on the continent. As a youth he tried to perform sacrifices that were in vogue with the intelligencia. However, he found himself unhealthy in the process. He became somewhat of a skeptic. Yet, he also believed that his time was better than past times. (The common perception of the day was that other times in the past were better.) One interesting observation was with the group that we compare ourselves to. We respect the elite and look up to them. We don't feel bad when they have a great many more privileges and material benefits than us. We are more concerned with the small relative advantages of people of our own level. This could explain why inequality is a greater concern today. The media takes us into the intimate details of everyone's life. We now see everyone as somewhat of an equal, and thus feel bad at even the smallest differences.