David Hume

David Hume
Born	7 May NS [26 April OS] 1711 Edinburgh, Scotland, Great Britain
Died	25 August 1776(1776-08-25) (aged 65) Edinburgh, Scotland, Great Britain
Nationality	British
Alma mater	University of Edinburgh (no degree)
Era	18th-century philosophy
Region	Western philosophy
School	Scottish Enlightenment Naturalism Skepticism Empiricism Sentimentalism Liberalism
Main interests	Epistemology Metaphysics Ethics Aesthetics Philosophy of mind Political philosophy Philosophy of religion Classical economics
Notable ideas	Problem of causation Induction Bundle theory Association of ideas Is–ought problem Utility Science of man
Influences George Berkeley Cicero René Descartes Thomas Hobbes Francis Hutcheson John Locke Nicolas Malebranche Isaac Newton Jean-Jacques Rousseau Adam Smith
Influenced A. J. Ayer Simon Blackburn Gilles Deleuze Jorge Luis Borges Daniel Dennett Albert Einstein Jerry Fodor Alexander Hamilton Friedrich Hayek Baron d'Holbach Edmund Husserl Thomas Jefferson James Madison William James Immanuel Kant Ernst Mach J. L. Mackie James Madison Alexius Meinong John Stuart Mill Benjamin Franklin Karl Popper Thomas Reid Bertrand Russell Arthur Schopenhauer Adam Smith Johannes Nikolaus Tetens Steven Weinberg

David Hume (/ˈhjuːm/; born David Home; 7 May 1711 NS (26 April 1711 OS) – 25 August 1776) 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, 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 philosophical rationalists, Hume held that passion rather than reason governs human behaviour and argued against the existence of innate ideas, positing that all human knowledge is ultimately founded solely in Experience; Hume thus held that genuine knowledge must either be directly traceable to objects perceived in experience, or result from abstract reasoning about relations between ideas which are derived from experience, calling the rest "nothing but sophistry and illusion", a dichotomy later given the name Hume's fork. In what is sometimes referred to as Hume's problem of induction, he argued that inductive reasoning, and belief in causality, cannot, ultimately, be justified rationally; our trust in causality and induction instead results from custom and mental habit, and are attributable to only the experience of "constant conjunction" rather than logic: for we can never, in experience, perceive that one event causes another, but only that the two are always conjoined, and to draw any inductive causal inferences from past experience first requires the presupposition that the future will be like the past, a presupposition which cannot be grounded in prior experience without already being presupposed. Hume's anti-teleological opposition to the argument for God's existence from design is generally regarded as the most intellectually significant such attempt to rebut the Teleological Argument prior to Darwin.