David Hume (1711–1776) was a Scottish philosopher, historian, and essayist associated with the Scottish Enlightenment. A major representative of empiricism and philosophical skepticism, he investigated how experience, habit, imagination, and feeling shape human understanding and conduct. His writings range across epistemology, ethics, politics, religion, and historical explanation. (iep.utm.edu)
Life and writings
Born in Edinburgh in 1711, Hume attended the University of Edinburgh before pursuing extensive private study. Although his family envisaged a legal career, he devoted himself to philosophy. During residence in France, he composed much of A Treatise of Human Nature, published anonymously in 1739–1740. Its three books examine understanding, passions, and morals. Initially attracting little attention, it became central to his philosophical reputation. (iep.utm.edu)
His more accessible Essays, Moral and Political appeared in 1741–1742. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding followed in 1748, and An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals in 1751. These revisited earlier arguments without simply reproducing the Treatise. As librarian to Edinburgh’s Faculty of Advocates from 1752, Hume obtained resources for his six-volume History of England, published between 1754 and 1762. His Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion appeared posthumously in 1779. (iep.utm.edu)
Experience and the mind
Hume’s project was a systematic study of human nature grounded in observation rather than speculative accounts of the soul. It connected philosophy of mind with what would later become psychology. He distinguished impressions—relatively vivid sensations and feelings—from ideas, their generally less vivid counterparts in thinking and remembering. His “copy principle” holds that simple ideas derive from corresponding impressions, providing a way to examine whether philosophical terms possess intelligible content. Imagination combines and associates ideas, helping explain beliefs and social practices. (iep.utm.edu)
He also distinguished relations of ideas from matters of fact. The former, exemplified by mathematics, can be established independently of particular observations; denying them entails contradiction. Matters of fact concern existence and events, and their opposites remain conceivable. This distinction limits what reasoning alone can establish about the world. (plato.stanford.edu)
Causation and induction
Hume’s analysis of causation asks how people move from observing one event to expecting another. Experience reveals repeated conjunctions, such as flame followed by heat, but does not directly disclose a necessary connection. Repetition produces a habitual expectation: encountering the first event prompts belief in the second. His explanation therefore concerns both observed regularity and the mind’s response to it. (plato.stanford.edu)
The associated problem of induction challenges the justification of inductive reasoning. Past observations do not demonstratively establish that unobserved cases will resemble them: a change in nature involves no contradiction. Appealing to the past success of prediction already assumes the reliability of inference from past to future, making that defense circular. Hume nevertheless regarded habit-based expectation as indispensable to ordinary life, rather than something people could simply abandon. (plato.stanford.edu)
Personal identity and freedom
In discussing personal identity, Hume reported that introspection reveals particular perceptions, not a separately observable, unchanging self. The Treatise describes the mind as a succession or collection of perceptions whose relations encourage the attribution of identity. In its appendix, he acknowledged unresolved difficulties in this account. (plato.stanford.edu)
His treatment of free will reconciles freedom with regular causal explanation. Freedom means acting according to one’s will rather than under external constraint, not acting without causes. Stable connections between motives, character, and conduct make actions intelligible and support responsibility. This position is commonly classified as compatibilism. (plato.stanford.edu)
Morality and social conventions
Hume grounds moral distinctions in sentiments of approval and disapproval rather than reason alone. Reason discovers facts and means to ends, but motivation requires desires or passions. Sympathy enables concern with others’ experiences, while a more general standpoint corrects judgments distorted by personal proximity or interest. Traits receive approval because they are useful or agreeable to their possessors or to others. (plato.stanford.edu)
His discussion of the is–ought problem questions unexplained transitions from statements describing what is the case to statements prescribing what ought to be done. He also distinguishes natural virtues, such as benevolence, from artificial virtues, especially justice. “Artificial” means dependent on human conventions, not arbitrary or fraudulent: rules concerning property rights and promises address recurring problems of cooperation. (plato.stanford.edu)
Religion, taste, and commerce
In philosophy of religion, Hume examined arguments and evidence separately from the psychological origins of belief. His discussion of miracles weighs testimony against established experience. The Dialogues scrutinize analogies between natural order and human design, questioning what they could establish about a creator. The Natural History of Religion explains religious development through human hopes, fears, and uncertainty about causes. (seop.illc.uva.nl)
His aesthetics similarly centers on sentiment. “Of the Standard of Taste” (1757) nevertheless distinguishes informed criticism from unreflective preference through practice, comparison, delicacy of perception, good sense, and freedom from prejudice. Differences of temperament and cultural circumstances leave room for legitimate variation. (plato.stanford.edu)
Hume also contributed to economics. His 1752 essays analyzed money, interest, and trade. Against identifying national wealth with accumulated precious metals, he explained how monetary inflows could raise domestic prices, encourage imports, and produce an outward movement of specie—an account later known as the price–specie-flow mechanism. (iep.utm.edu)