David Hume (philosopher)

David Hume
Born	David Home 7 May NS [26 April OS] 1711 Edinburgh, Scotland
Died	25 August 1776(1776-08-25) (aged 65) Edinburgh, Scotland
Nationality	Scottish
Alma mater	University of Edinburgh
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 Jeremy Bentham Jorge Luis Borges Noam Chomsky Daniel Dennett Albert Einstein Jerry Fodor Benjamin Franklin Alexander Hamilton Friedrich Hayek Baron d'Holbach Edmund Husserl Thomas Jefferson William James Immanuel Kant Ernst Mach J. L. Mackie James Madison Alexius Meinong John Stuart Mill 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 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.