David Hume
Scottish philosopher, economist, and historian (1711-1776) · United Kingdom · Academics · Died at 65
David Hume is read about 2,367 times a day, in 112 languages.
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Something wrong?He dismantled causality itself - not by denying that one thing follows another, but by showing we never actually see the link, only the habit of expecting it. That sceptical move, launched in 1739, still governs how we think about induction, science, and what we can really know.
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, The admirers and followers of the Alcoran insist on the excellent moral precepts interspersed through that wild and absurd performance.
As to the Approbation or Esteem of those Blockheads who call themselves the Public, & whom a Bookseller, a Lord, a Priest, or a Party can guide, I do most heartily despise it.
Here then we may learn the fallacy of the remark... that any particular state is weak, though fertile, populous, and well cultivated, merely because it wants money.
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Born in Edinburgh in 1711, Hume set out to build a science of human nature grounded entirely in experience, publishing A Treatise of Human Nature in 1739-40. He followed Locke in rejecting innate ideas, but pushed empiricism to a radical edge: inductive reasoning can't be justified by experience because it requires assuming the future will resemble the past - a presupposition experience can't supply. He argued that passion, not reason, drives human action, that we have no coherent idea of a unified self (only a "bundle of sensations"), and that moral judgments rest on sentiment rather than abstract principle. His philosophy of religion - denying miracles, critiquing design arguments - made him deeply controversial. He died in 1776, having shaped utilitarianism, analytic philosophy, and cognitive science; Kant later said Hume woke him from "dogmatic slumbers."
Academics from the United Kingdom 6
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