‘Intellectual sin’ as university cancels philosopher Hume by renaming tower
A SCOTS university is to rename a building commemorating one of the world’s most famous philosophers – over his alleged links to slavery.
The University of Edinburgh said the David Hume Tower would now be called 40 George Square, after a petition by students.
Hume, a globally renowned thinker, studied at the university and was one of the key figures in the Scottish Enlightenment.
The move comes after claims about Hume’s connections to the slave trade, unearthed by an academic at Cambridge University.
Last night the decision sparked a fierce row amid concerns that the legacy of a major historical figure was being undermined by political correctness.
Earlier this week, it emerged the university was involved in a project checking public buildings for any references to the supposed ‘white superiority’ of the British Empire.
Last night, leading historian Sir Tom Devine, a Professor Emeritus at the University of Edinburgh, said Hume’s alma mater ‘has now traduced him’, adding: ‘The current Principal of Edinburgh University [Peter Mathieson] should hang his head in absolute shame.’
Sir Tom said that if he was still employed by the university, ‘I would have fought tooth and nail against this decision’.
The row came after Dr Felix Waldmann found a letter Hume wrote in 1766 urging his patron, Lord Hertford, to buy a plantation in Grenada. The lecturer in history at Christ’s College, Cambridge, said last night: ‘This is a reasonable response by the University of Edinburgh.’
Hume achieved fame for his work as a philosopher, economist, historian and essayist.
The University of Edinburgh said: ‘It is important that campuses, curricula and communities reflect both the university’s contemporary and historical diversity and engage with its institutional legacy across the world. The David Hume Tower will be known as 40 George Square.’
But Sir Tom said history students are taught ‘never to indulge in the intellectual sin of anachronistic judgment – i.e. never to impose the values of today on those of the past’.
He said Hume was the ‘greatest philosophical mind Scotland has ever produced’.
‘In the year of David Hume’s reported letter on the plantations, there is no evidence that any groups in Scotland opposed chattel slavery in the colonies. In that sense, Hume was a man of his time, no better and no worse than any other Scot at the time, Sir Tom added.
‘By the criterion of this stupid decision, the whole of Scotland in that period deserved moral condemnation.’