Michael Fry: Hume can help us take a new look at humanity for the modern age

The thinking of Scotland's greatest philosopher is as relevant today as in his heyday, as a conference this week will show, writes Michael Fry

In the coming week, the University of Edinburgh will host an international conference on Scotland's greatest philosopher, David Hume, marking the 300th anniversary of his birth.

It is hoped the conference will attract not only academics, but also interested members of the general public (who can get day tickets at 25). One of the organisers, Susan Manning, says: "The anniversary year has shown that there is strong public interest in Scotland, not just in Edinburgh, in knowing more about Hume and, through him, about the Scottish Enlightenment."

The Enlightenment is often invoked as a potential inspiration to modern Scotland, it being the one era of the nation's history to have attained global significance. For example, anybody can see that Hume's great friend Adam Smith stands at the heart of economic debates still going on at this moment.

Hume's direct relevance to today's world may not be so immediately obvious. He published on a wider range of subjects than Smith and earned his living from writing history, rather than philosophy - the catalogue of the National Library of Scotland still distinguishes him from several namesakes as "David Hume, historian". Though his work as a philosopher was more important and the starting point for many problems of modern philosophy, it has got a bit lost from popular view in the technically forbidding discipline that modern philosophy has become. Hume, who prided himself on an easy style of writing and worked hard to achieve it, would not have welcomed later philosophers' descent into obscurity, however fascinated he might have been by their development of his thinking.

It is his range of activities that gives the first clue to Hume's continuing significance. While his philosophy no doubt meant most to him, it depressed him when he could not put it across to other people, polish his style as he might. So he branched out into related fields of knowledge, still bringing to them his basic cheerful scepticism. The particular arguments he advanced in any given work are best read as expressions of a general outlook on life which was already tremendously attractive in the 18th century - invitations to Hume's dinner parties, with their fine food, flowing drink and brilliant conversation, were like gold dust in enlightened Edinburgh. We exist in a different, more knowing, more disillusioned, not to say more puritanical time, but the same attitude might do us good too.

Hume's starting point was that the knowledge we can have of the world does not come handed down to us by some external authority - and in particular not from divine revelation, the point that caused most dispute in his own lifetime. All we can know is what we experience, from sensations which we turn into impressions and ideas and then, by acting on these, into conventional wisdom or social custom. Religion, or other systems of thought, might erect all this into a general theory, an all-embracing explanation of the world. That does not alter the fact that religion, or other systems of thought, are human constructs, the works of our own imagination.

It does not necessarily follow that Hume was an atheist in the full sense of denying the existence of God, as his enemies laid to his charge: surely the obvious point to take from his philosophy is that it just becomes useless to talk about a God of whom we have no direct experience. A speaker at the conference, David Fergusson of New College, Edinburgh, comments: "While he offers arguments that the new atheists can readily utilise, I'm note sure that their dogmatic certainties and shrill opposition to religion would have impressed Hume, who extolled the values of courtesy and civility amid intellectual diasgreement."

In Hume's time, it was he that had to face up to dogmatic certainties and shrill opposition. Many contemporaries found his ideas shocking or depressing. They reacted in outrage. This must have been a big reason why he turned from full frontal assault in philosophy to the feint and counterfeint of history. Hume showed in his history that different ages had different standards, conditioned by circumstances and at best distantly related to one another. Historical experience remained imprisoned within the same limitations as individual experience, and as prone to false generalisation. That is why historians needed to be impartial, or else hardly qualified as historians. Up to Hume's time, historians had often written as partisans of one side or another - typically, say, to justify the Protestants or the Catholics. Today, historians try to weigh up all the evidence without fear or favour. Hume has a good claim to be the founder of this tradition.

At the same time, it is easy to understand how Hume's destruction of all familiar and comforting certainties shocked or depressed his contemporaries. Probably, he felt that necessary if the certainties were ever to be shaken in the first place. But it left him with a reputation as a negative thinker that lasted right through his own lifetime up to the 20th century, when he began to receive his due as a philosopher (and to cease being remembered primarily as a historian).

In the 21st century, scholars are turning back from the fuller evaluation of his philosophy as such to ask how it fits in with the rest of his life and work. And perhaps from this effort - perhaps indeed from the coming week in Edinburgh - there will emerge a Hume for our own time. A commentator at the conference, David Allan of St Andrews University, says: "Hume's Scotland was working out the nature of a new constitutional relationship with England in a world marked by accelerating social change and driven forwards by increasingly global economic developments. He wanted to explain how this had happened and to lay out what people needed to know in order to make useful sense of it.

"In the early 21st century, Scots face similar challenges and could do far worse than take courage from Hume's determination to understand the origins and nature of contemporary change and try to make it work for the better."

The 18th century is often described as the Age of Reason, and for Scotland, Tom Devine has written that the basis of the Enlightenment was "faith in reason". The conference's long look at Hume this week will show, I think, how wrong that is. Hume himself said reason was "the slave of the passions" and, for example, went to great lengths to break the rusty chains of logic which in older philosophy were supposed to have proved the existence of God, among many other things.

On the vacant throne of reason, Hume installs imagination, the imagination now of clever animals rather than of fallen angels, or of flawed humans rather than of calculating automatons. For our century, ruled by statistics and computers, by manipulation and coercion, Hume may be the man to open our minds and restore an outlook that will make us ever more humane rather than ever less humane.

• Michael Fry speaks at the Hume conference on 19 July.