On Hume's View Of Technology

Hume was a famous British agnostic philosopher and ethicist in the 18th century, and also was well known as a historian and economist. He was one of the most important people during the Enlightenment in Scottish and in the history of Western Philosophy. Because of Hume's outstanding contribution to philosophy, the focus of many previous studies of Hume was his philosophy, especially epistemology, rather than his view of technology. In fact, Hume also had his own amazing insights on ethics, religion, philosophy of technology and other fields. In the early time of modern society, where Hume lived, which had a set of great and important changes, the understanding of technology confronted the change from tradition to modern. The contradictions, which connected with each other in Hume's ideological system, showed several social realistic conflicts. In particular, the reforms of politics, economy and culture, the optimistic utilitarianism of controlling and conquering nature through technological ways advocated during the Renaissance and, the thoughts of subject-object dichotomy based on man and nature from Bacon, Locke and Hobbes all had a significant impact on Hume's view of technology, especially the nature and role of technology.Both the understanding of technology in ancient Greece and the prototype of modern philosophy of technology can be discovered in Hume's view of technology. Therefore, the study of Hume's view of technology is an enormous task which has pretty good significance in theory and reality. This findings demonstrate that the internal reasons and contradictions of generation and evolution of Philosophy of Technology during certain historical period. And it not only enriches the research methods, but promotes the diversification of the current studies in Philosophy of Technology. In the meanwhile, it helps to form a better understanding of technology.In this paper, we present a method which combines cases study with system study to conduct a comprehensive and systematic study of Hume's view of Technology. This approach adheres to the principle of combining main points with non-main points, combining historicism with objectivist. As a typical of agnostic, Hume denied the knowability of the nature and law of objective things. And as a world-known empiricist, he stressed the importance of experience, and acknowledged that the human activities were legitimate within experience, and technology is reasonable within empiricism, and he emphasized that technology derived from experience rather than innate sense. Hume argued from the perspective of logical positivism that technology is the unity of the means and ends, also is the tool for the pursuit of human happiness. On the relationship between technology and nature, he believed that artifacts were essentially different from natural things and, artifacts could not achieve the perfection of the natural. In the standpoint of utilitarian, technology played a very important role in national economy, culture and politics. It can combine nation, commercial trade, manufacturing and humanity with each other perfectly together. Hume also had the attitude worried about technology while he praised its huge functions. So his attitude toward technology is hesitant rather than purely utilitarian. Hume's view of technology is unique and distinctive in the history of the industrial development. The purpose of this paper is to analyze Hume's view of technology, revealing its rich content and he important value of nexus role in the history of philosophy.