Skeptical Arguments in Hume and Wittgenstein

Abstract

It’s hard to think of two philosophers more distant than David Hume and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein himself is supposed to have said that he ‘couldn’t bear’ to read Hume. It’s easy to see why: in Philosophical Investigations (PI) (Wittgenstein 1968) Wittgenstein ‘trashes’ Hume’s basic tenets.¹ Hume’s thesis that every word expresses an ‘idea’ derived from an ‘impression’ is more noxious to Wittgenstein than Augustine’s idea (quoted at the beginning of PI) that every word is a name. For Hume’s doctrine makes every word a name of a private object, and every language a private language. Also, Wittgenstein has no truck with any absolute notion of a simple idea (a mistaken notion which he traces to Plato’s Theaetetus), yet Hume made ‘simple ideas’ the basis of all knowledge.