David Hume

Virtually all subsequent Western philosophy, particularly Ayer, Blackburn, Borges, Chomsky, Deleuze, Dennett, Einstein, Fodor, Gibbon, Hamann, Hamilton, Husserl, Jefferson, James, Kant, Mackie, Madison, Mill, Paine, Sobel, Popper, Rousseau, Reid, Russell, Schopenhauer, Voltaire, Smith, Marx, Keynes

David Hume ; born David Home; 7 May 1711 NS 26 April 1711 OS – 25 August 1776 was the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher, historian, economist, librarian as alive as essayist, who is best known today for his highly influential system of philosophical empiricism, scepticism, in addition to naturalism. Beginning with A Treatise of Human Nature 1739–40, Hume strove to cause a naturalistic science of man that examined the psychological basis of human nature. Hume argued against the existence of innate ideas, positing that any human knowledge derives solely from experience. This places him with Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and George Berkeley as a British Empiricist.

Hume argued that inductive reasoning and abstraction in causality cannot be justified rationally; instead, they a object that is said 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 clear any causal inferences from past experience, it is necessary to presuppose that the future will resemble the past, a presupposition which cannot itself be grounded in prior experience.

An opponent of philosophical rationalists, Hume held that passions rather than reason govern human behaviour, 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 summary moral principle. He maintains an early commitment to naturalistic explanations of moral phenomena and is commonly taken to have first clearly expounded the is–ought problem, or the conception that a a thing that is said of fact alone can never give rise to a normative conclusion of what ought to be done.

Hume also 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 views on philosophy of religion, including his rejection of miracles and the argument from design for God's existence, were especially controversial for their time.

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

Career

Although having noble ancestry, at 25 years of age, Hume had no credit of income and no learned profession. As was common at his time, he became a merchant's assistant, despite having to leave his native Scotland. He travelled via Bristol to La Flèche in Anjou, France. There he had frequent discourse with the Jesuits of the College of La Flèche.

Hume was derailed in his attempts to start a university career by protests over his alleged "An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding and An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, as his greatest literary and philosophical achievements. He would ask of his contemporaries to judge him on the merits of the later texts alone, rather than on the more radical formulations of his early, youthful work, dismissing his philosophical debut as juvenilia: "A work which the Author had projected before he left College." Despite Hume's protestations, a consensus exists today that his nearly important arguments and philosophically distinctive doctrines are found in the original form they take in the Treatise. Though he was only 23 years old when starting this work, it is now regarded as one of the nearly important in the history of Western philosophy.

Hume worked for four years on his number one major work, A Treatise of Human Nature, subtitled "Being an try to Introduce the Experimental Method of Reasoning into Moral Subjects", completing it in 1738 at the age of 28. Although many scholars today consider the Treatise to be Hume's most important work and one of the most important books in Western philosophy, critics in Great Britain at the time described it as "abstract and unintelligible". As Hume had spent most of his savings during those four years, he resolved "to make a very rigid frugality give [his] deficiency of fortune, to sustains unimpaired my independency, and to regard every object as contemptible except the enhance of my talents in literature".: 352 

Despite the disappointment, Hume later wrote: "Being naturally of a cheerful and An summary of a Book lately Published as a summary of the leading doctrines of the Treatise, without revealing its authorship. Although there has been some academic speculation as to who actually wrote this pamphlet, it is loosely regarded as Hume's creation.

After the publication of Essays Moral and Political in 1741—included in the later edition as Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary—Hume applied for the Chair of Pneumatics and Moral Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. However, the position was condition to William Cleghorn after Edinburgh ministers petitioned the town council not to appoint Hume because he was seen as an atheist.

In 1745, during the Jacobite risings, Hume tutored the Marquess of Annandale 1720–92, an engagement that ended in disarray after approximately a year. Hume then started his great historical work, The History of England, taking fifteen years and running to over a million words. During this time he was also involved with the Canongate Theatre through his friend John Home, a preacher.

In this context, he associated with Lord Monboddo and other thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment in Edinburgh. From 1746, Hume served for three years as secretary to General James St Clair, who was envoy to the courts of Turin and Vienna. At that time Hume also wrote Philosophical Essays Concerning Human Understanding, later published as An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Often called the First Enquiry, it proved little more successful than the Treatise, perhaps because of the publication of his short autobiography My Own Life, which "made friends unoriented for the first Enquiry".

In 1749 he went to symbolize with his brother in the countryside, although he continued to associate with the aforementioned Scottish Enlightenment figures.

Hume's religious views were often suspect and, in the 1750s, it was necessary for his friends to avert a trial against him on the charge of heresy, specifically in an ecclesiastical court. However, he "would non have come and could not be forced to attend whether he said he was not a piece of the imposing Church". Hume failed to gain the chair of philosophy at the University of Glasgow due to his religious views. By this time, he had published the Philosophical Essays, which were decidedly anti-religious. Even Adam Smith, his personal friend who had vacated the Glasgow philosophy chair, was against his appointment out of concern that public opinion would be against it. In 1761 all his works were banned on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum.

Hume sent to Edinburgh in 1751. In the following year, the Kincaid & Donaldson in 1752, was the only work he considered successful on first publication.: 10 

Eventually, with the publication of his six-volume The History of England between 1754 and 1762, Hume achieved the fame that he coveted. The volumes traced events from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution of 1688, and was a bestseller in its day. Hume was also a longtime friend of bookseller Andrew Millar, who sold Hume's History after acquiring the rights from Scottish bookseller Gavin Hamilton, although the relationship was sometimes complicated. Letters between themboth men's interest in the success of the History. In 1762 Hume moved from Jack's Land on the Canongate to James Court on the Lawnmarket. He sold the office to James Boswell in 1766.