David Hume

1711-1776 · Scottish · Epistemology, Metaphysics, Ethics, Political Economy, Philosophy of Religion

Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions.

When David Hume's Treatise of Human Nature appeared in 1739, he was twenty-seven and certain he had built a science of human nature as rigorous as Newton's physics. The book "fell dead-born from the press," he wrote. He spent the rest of his career recasting its arguments — the Enquiries, a six-volume History of England that made him famous as a historian, and the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, a demolition of the design argument he judged too explosive to publish.

Topics David Hume addresses

• impressions and ideas
• the copy principle
• relations of ideas versus matters of fact
• Hume's fork
• causation as constant conjunction
• necessary connection
• the problem of induction
• custom and habit
• the bundle theory of self
• personal identity
• the is/ought gap
• reason as the slave of the passions
• moral judgments as sentiment
• the moral sense
• sympathy
• the passions
• direct and indirect passions
• pride and humility
• the artificial virtues
• the natural virtues
• justice as artificial virtue
• mitigated skepticism
• the design argument critique
• miracles

Converse with David Hume on Symposium. Every reply is grounded in David Hume's own writing and cites the page it came from. The corpus is public-domain text.