David Hume

David Hume (/ˈhjuːm/; 7 May 1711 NS (26 April 1711 OS) – 25 August 1776) or David Home (birth name) was a Scottish philosopher, historian, economist, and essayist, who is best known today for his highly influential system of radical philosophical empiricism, skepticism, and naturalism.

Hume's empiricist approach to philosophy places him with John Locke, George Berkeley, Francis Bacon, and Thomas Hobbes as a British Empiricist. Beginning with his A Treatise of Human Nature (1739), Hume strove to create a total naturalistic science of man that examined the psychological basis of human nature. Against rationalists, Hume held that passion rather than reason governs human behaviour. He argued against the existence of innate ideas, postulating that humans can have knowledge only of the objects of experience, and the relations of ideas, calling the rest "nothing but sophistry and illusion", a dichotomy later given the name Hume's fork. He also argued that inductive reasoning, and therefore causality, cannot, ultimately, be justified rationally: our belief in causality and induction instead results from custom, habit, and experience of "constant conjunction" rather than logic. He 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, and has proved extremely influential on subsequent moral philosophy.

David Hume (disambiguation)

David Hume (1711–1776) was a Scottish philosopher, economist, and historian.

David Hume may also refer to:

In the arts

See also

David Hume of Godscroft

David Hume (or Home; 1558–1629) was a Scottish historian and political theorist, poet and controversialist, a major intellectual figure in Jacobean Scotland. It has been said that "Hume marks the culmination of the Scottish humanist tradition."

Confusion is possible with David Hume or Home, Scottish minister at Duras in France, a contemporary: they had quite different views on the union with England.

Life

He was the second son of Sir David Hume or Home, seventh baron of Wedderburn, a Roman Catholic traditionalist of the Merse (now Berwickshire), who had married an active Calvinist wife in Mary Johnston of Elphinstone. He studied at Dunbar grammar school, under Andrew Simson. He then entered the University of St Andrews in 1578, and after a course of study there travelled on the continent. From France he went on to Geneva, intending to travel to Italy.

Hume was recalled to Scotland by the serious illness of his elder brother George, returning about 1581. Both brothers supported the Ruthven raid of 1582. In 1583 he was residing as private secretary with his relative Archibald Douglas, 8th Earl of Angus, who was ordered, after James VI withdrew his confidence from the Ruthven lords, to remain in the north of Scotland.