Discover the Best Books Written by David Hume

David Hume was a Scottish Enlightenment philosopher, historian, economist, librarian, and essayist who is best known today for his highly influential system of philosophical empiricism, skepticism, and naturalism. Beginning with A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), Hume strove to create a naturalistic science of man that examined the psychological basis of human nature. 

Hume argued against the existence of innate ideas, positing that all human knowledge derives solely from experience. This places him with Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and George Berkeley as an empiricist. Hume argued that inductive reasoning and belief in causality could not be justified rationally; instead, they result from custom and mental habit. We never actually perceive that one event causes another but only experience the "constant conjunction" of events. 

This problem of induction means that to draw any causal inferences from past experience, it is necessary to presuppose that the future will resemble the past, a presupposition that cannot itself be grounded in prior experience. An opponent of philosophical rationalists, Hume held that passions rather than reason govern human behavior, famously proclaiming that "Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions." 

Hume was also a sentimentalist who held that ethics are based on emotion or sentiment rather than abstract moral principles. He maintained an early commitment to naturalistic explanations of moral phenomena and is usually taken to have first clearly expounded the is–ought problem or the idea that a statement of fact alone can never give rise to a normative conclusion of what ought to be done.

Hume denied that humans have an actual conception of the self, positing that we experience only a bundle of sensations and that the self is nothing more than this bundle of causally-connected perceptions. Hume's compatibilist theory of free will takes causal determinism as fully compatible with human freedom. His philosophy of religion, including his rejection of miracles and the argument from design for God's existence, was especially controversial for their time.

Hume influenced utilitarianism, logical positivism, the philosophy of science, early analytic philosophy, cognitive science, theology, and many other fields and thinkers. Immanuel Kant credited Hume as the inspiration who had awakened him from his "dogmatic slumbers."

Hume was born on 26 April 1711 (Old Style), as David Home, in a tenement on the north side of Edinburgh's Lawnmarket. He was the second of two sons born to Catherine Home (née Falconer), daughter of Sir David Falconer of Newton and his wife Mary Falconer (née Norvell), and Joseph Home of Chirnside in the County of Berwick, an advocate of Ninewells. Joseph died just after David's second birthday. Catherine, who never remarried, raised the two brothers and their sister alone.

Hume changed his family name's spelling in 1734, as the surname 'Home' (pronounced as 'Hume') was not well-known in England. Hume never married and lived partly at his Chirnside family home in Berwickshire, which had belonged to the family since the 16th century. His finances as a young man were very "slender" as his family was not rich; as a younger son, he had little patrimony to live on.

Hume attended the University of Edinburgh at an unusually early age—either 12 or possibly as young as 10—at a time when 14 was the typical age. Initially, Hume considered a career in law because of his family. However, in his words, he came to have: