David Hume
Born in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1711, David Hume was one of the great philosophers of his day, and has been highly influential on subsequent thinking about causation, philosophy of mind and epistemology. He is generally considered to be one of the leaders of the Scottish Enlightenment, as well as the last and most radical of the three leading British empiricists (together with John Locke and George Berkeley). Some have even called Hume “the most significant philosopher ever to write in English.”
A man whose intellectual pursuits ran in many directions, Hume was a philosopher, as well as a prominent historian and essayist whose works were used as textbooks in his day. His philosophical writings, however, did not gain much recognition during the course of his life. In fact, two of his most famous and influential works, A Treatise of Human Nature and An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, were not seen as the genius and seminal works that they were until after his death. It is a testament to the depth and breadth of his profundity that he is credited by other intellectual powerhouses such as Adam Smith, Immanuel Kant, Charles Darwin, Bertrand Russell and Jeremy Bentham as being a source of much illumination and inspiration.
Hume is perhaps most well known for his brand of skepticism which sought to understand the origin of various concepts such as “cause” and “the self.” Under Hume’s theory of ideas a legitimate concept needs to be grounded in some simple impression or experience. If the origin of a concept cannot be traced back to its original source impression, then Hume grants that we can be skeptical of its veridical nature. In the case of “the self” Hume indicates that no such source impression exists. Rather, when we look inside ourselves to find such an impression, all we find is a sequence of experiences, but no experience that would constitute “the self.” In the case of “cause” Hume thinks that we mistake an impression of the psychological movement of our minds between ideas for some connection between events or objects in the world. In other words, we perceive our minds moving between ideas, and project that impression onto the world. But, Hume indicates, the world gives us no such impression. This move by Hume proved to be a revolutionary form of analysis whereby thinkers began to seriously distinguish between concepts derived from the real world and concepts derived from psychological tendencies. It was also the first major step towards developing a science of the mind.
Web Resources On David Hume
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Book Resources On David HumeThe Life of David Hume by Ernest Campbell Mossner
A Treatise of Human Nature by David Hume
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