Three Videos on David Hume's Treatise of Human Nature

I teach David Hume's works from time to time.  In fact, he made his way into my classes quite early on in my career.  My very first Ethics classes included some portions of his Treatise of Human Nature, and the first time I taught Intro to Philosophy his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding was a required text. 

I incorporated that Enquiry into my Foundations of Philosophy sections (at Marquette University) and my Intro to Philosophy class (at Milwaukee Area Technical College) this last semester, but - alas! - couldn't carve out the time to shoot footage for the core concept videos I'd wanted to produce on that text.  I did, however, manage to shoot a bit of material on the Treatise for my online Ethics class at MATC this summer.

One of Hume's most famous passages is where he claims:

We speak not strictly and philosophically when we talk of the combat of passion and of reason. Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them. 

That is from book 2 of the Treatise, part 3, section 3, and it fit in quite well to the section on non-cognitivism and emotivism in my class.  So I decided it was about time I created some Hume content for my students. Later this summer, I'm planning on shooting some additional videos on the Enquiry as well.

In any case, here are those three videos:

• Reason, Will, and Action
• Conflict Between Reason and Passion
• Calm Passions

I hope you find them interesting and useful!