David Hume 1711 – 1776

David Hume was a Scottish philosopher, historian, and economist of the Scottish Enlightenment. In A Treatise of Human Nature and the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding he advanced a thoroughgoing empiricism and skepticism about causation, induction, and the self. He argued that reason is the slave of the passions and developed a sentimentalist account of morality. His critique of the design argument and miracles shaped modern philosophy of religion. His work later prompted Kant, by his own account, to awaken from his dogmatic slumber.

David Hume was born in Edinburgh in 1711 and produced his major philosophical work, A Treatise of Human Nature, by the time he was twenty-eight. The book fell, as he later wrote, dead-born from the press; he spent the rest of his career rewriting its arguments for wider audiences in the more polished Enquiries.

Hume's empiricism pushes the principles of Locke and Berkeley to conclusions neither was willing to follow. There is no impression of a substantial self, only a bundle of perceptions; no impression of necessary connection in nature, only the customary expectation of constant conjunction; no rational ground for induction, only the habitual association of ideas. His ethics replaces rational moralism with sympathy and the moral sentiments. His Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, published posthumously in 1779, contain the canonical statement of the philosophical case against natural theology.

Hume's irreligion blocked his appointment to chairs at Edinburgh and Glasgow, and he made his living as a librarian, diplomat, and historian — his six-volume History of England was a Georgian best-seller. Kant credited Hume with awakening him from his dogmatic slumber, and the Humean program has shaped subsequent empiricism, naturalism, and moral psychology. He died in Edinburgh in 1776.