When did Edinburgh University become a centre of barbarism? – AM Celâl Şengör

Edinburgh University’s decision to remove Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume’s name from its tower block in the city’s George Square overlooks how he saved humanity from dogmatic thinking, writes Professor AM Celâl Şengör

If we think David Hume was wrong about racism, it is because we have learned from him not to take any claim to be beyond criticism, writes Professor AM Celâl Şengör

The University of Edinburgh’s decision to rename the Hume Tower because of what philosopher David Hume said of the character of non-white races in a footnote of his essay On National Characters is an affront to history.

What Hume wrote was the accepted scientific judgement of his day, which, for example, we see also in Buffon’s theory of “degeneration” or Cuvier’s classification of the animal world. We were able to overcome those theories, because Hume’s Law in philosophy – which states that “there can be no demonstrative arguments to prove, that those instances, of which we have had no experience resemble those of which we have had experience” – saved us from our justificationist hang-up in sciences, a remnant of medieval religious teaching.

It showed us that the best we can do to increase our understanding of nature is to advance hypotheses. That led to Kant’s famous treatise on The Critique of Pure Reason – yet Kant, for all his ingenuity, failed to avoid the implications of Hume’s Law.

Only in the 20th century did Sir Karl Popper show in his Logic of Scientific Discovery that Hume’s Law is unviolable – ie, justificationism in science is an impossible dream, much to the chagrin of Lord Bertrand Russell.

Instead, what scientists actually do is to invent bold conjectures and then try to refute them as best they can with a view to finding better conjectures. Thus knowledge and understanding can grow, but never attain certainty.

This has saved humanity (at least, those members of it who think in a scientific manner) from dogmatism.

Those who find Hume’s name on a building objectionable are most likely unaware that they are able to study in Edinburgh because humanity has learned to overcome the idea of “certainly correct assertions” and, instead, to test them to achieve better understanding.

If we think Hume’s opinions about different humans are incorrect, it is because we have learned from him not to take any claim to be beyond criticism, but to examine every assertion with more and better observations.

If we forget Hume’s lesson, humanity will sink back into dogmatism and we know what that means, not the least because of the awful experience of the 20th century, when “indubitable truths” dragged humanity into appalling armed conflicts.

The bloodbath of the Middle East or the continuing tragedy of the Rohingyas in Myanmar, or the denial of climate change because of human activity in our own days are promulgated by people who have never heard of Hume.

If we take the ridiculous attitude of the University of Edinburgh’s administrators to its logical extreme, we might start burning Aristotle’s books, who approved slavery for all “barbarians” (which, for him, would include most of us), or perhaps destroy the Cuvier fountain at the corner of Rue Linné and Rue Cuvier in Paris right next to the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle – or, indeed, take away Darwin’s statue in the Natural History Museum in London.

But why stop there? Let us erase the names of those two great scientists from the streets too (a suggestion to rename the Linnaeus building, the Linnaeusgebouw, of the Radboud University in the Netherlands has indeed been made recently).

Let’s shut down the Linnean societies the world over, take down Buffon’s statue facing the Grand Gallerie d’Évolution, get rid of the name of Pic d’Aggasiz in the Alps and close down the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard which Agassiz created.

Where will this madness stop? Voltaire once wrote that “we look to Scotland for all our ideas of civilisation”. Since when has the venerable University of Edinburgh, whose professors of Hume’s times (many of whom were his friends) add lustre to the annals of science and which was the fountainhead of the Scottish Enlightenment spearheaded by Hume (and which was far superior to its continental version), become a centre of barbarism, a corner of darkness?

AM Celâl Şengör is professor of geology at Istanbul Technical University

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