Nicholas of Autrecourt c. 1299 – c. 1369

Nicholas of Autrecourt was a French scholastic philosopher of the early fourteenth century, sometimes called the medieval Hume for the radical skeptical critique of Aristotelian causal reasoning he developed at the University of Paris. He argued that no inference from one existing thing to another can be evident unless it can be reduced to the principle of non-contradiction, and that, strictly speaking, we have certain knowledge only of immediate appearances. His writings were condemned at Paris in 1346 and publicly burned, and he was obliged to recant his teachings, though he later served as a respected dean of Metz cathedral.