1001Philosophers

David Hume vs Immanuel Kant

Kant famously credits Hume with awakening him from his dogmatic slumber, and Kant's critical philosophy is in significant measure a response to Hume's challenges. Their relationship is the central episode of late-eighteenth-century philosophy.

At a glance

David HumeImmanuel Kant
Dates1711 – 17761724 – 1804
NationalityScottishGerman
EraModernModern
Movements Empiricism, Scottish Enlightenment German Idealism, Enlightenment
Profile David Hume → Immanuel Kant →

Where they agree

Both held that metaphysics, as it had been practiced, was untenable, both treated the analysis of human cognitive faculties as the central philosophical task, and both held that the new natural sciences must be philosophically secured. Both rejected the Cartesian-Wolffian rationalist program.

Where they disagree

Hume argued that causation, induction, and the persistence of the self are not justifiable by reason but only by custom and habit. Kant accepted that empirical experience does not yield necessary universal connections but argued that the very possibility of such experience requires a priori categories supplied by the understanding. Where Hume left causation as a psychological habit, Kant grounded it as a transcendental condition of experience. Kant preserves what Hume seemed to dissolve, but at the cost of restricting knowledge to appearances rather than things in themselves.

Representative quotes

David Hume

  • “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions.”

    Part 3, Section 3

  • “Custom, then, is the great guide of human life.”

    Variant (perhaps a paraphrase of this passage): It is not reason which is the guide of life, but custom.

  • “A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence.”

    Section X: Of Miracles; Part I. 87

Immanuel Kant

  • “Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.”

    Two things fill the mind with ever-increasing wonder and awe, the more often and the more intensely the mind of thought is drawn to them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.

  • “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law.”

    Der kategorische Imperativ, der überhaupt nur aussagt, was Verbindlichkeit sei, ist: handle nach einer Maxime, welche zugleich als ein allgemeines Gesetz gelten kann.

  • “Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.”

    Idea for a General History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose (1784), Proposition 6. | Variant translations: Out of timber so crooked as that from which man is made nothing entirely straight can be built. | From such crooked wood as that which man is made of, nothing straight can be fashioned. | Never a straight thing was made from the crooked timber of man.

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