David Hume

Scottish philosopher, historian and essayist (1711–1776), born and died in Edinburgh, a central figure of the Scottish Enlightenment and, alongside Locke and Berkeley, one of the three great British empiricists, though he never obtained a university chair owing to his reputation for religious scepticism, earning his living instead as a librarian, diplomatic secretary and, above all, as a commercially highly successful historian with his History of England. His central philosophical work, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–1740), written before he was thirty and which he himself lamented 'fell dead-born from the press' for lack of initial impact, develops a radical empiricism according to which all our knowledge ultimately derives from sensory impressions, and no abstract idea, however general it may seem, is anything more than a faint copy of those impressions. From this follows his most celebrated and influential scepticism, the problem of induction: Hume argues that belief in causation — that one event necessarily produces another — can never be justified by reason, but only by custom and psychological habit arising from the repeated association of impressions, since we never observe the necessary connection between cause and effect, only their constant conjunction. This epistemological scepticism, reformulated more accessibly in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), was what, in Kant's own words, awoke him from his 'dogmatic slumber'. In ethics, Hume argued that reason is and ought only to be 'the slave of the passions', and that moral judgements derive not from reason but from moral sentiment and natural sympathy for others. His famous 'Hume's law' — the logical impossibility of deriving a normative 'ought' from a merely descriptive 'is' — remains one of the central problems of contemporary metaethics. His Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, published posthumously in 1779 to avoid controversy during his lifetime, contain one of the most devastating critiques ever written of the teleological argument for God's existence.

10 works

• A Treatise of Human Nature
• An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
• An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals
• Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion
• Essays
• Hume's Political Discourses
• Philosophical Works, v. 1 (of 4)
• Philosophical Works, v. 2 (of 4)
• The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol. I., Part D.
• The History of England, Volume I