Who was David Hume?
Basic Information
David Hume was born on May 7, 1711 in Edinburgh (Scotland), and died August 25, 1776. He spent most of his childhood at Ninewells, where his family possessed an estate. He had a good education in Greek and Latin, and he attended the University of Edinburgh at the age of twelve. He soon threw over a career in law, and at the age of eighteen, when he made a great ”philosophical discovery”, during the next ten years of his life, he had a challenging period of of study, reading and writing. This was the period when he discovered he was passionate about philosophy, and started writing books and essays about his ideas and thoughts.
Hume was a very important philosopher whose ideas and works were considered highly influential. Other than a Scottish philosopher, David Hume was also considered a historian, economist, and most importantly an essayist, due to his studies on empiricism and skepticism. |
main ideas and contributions
Hume was mostly known as a philosophical figure in the Enlightenment. In fact, he was one of the three major figures in the British Empiricism movement, and had a huge influence on Isaac Newton’s discoveries as well as on the works of later philosophers. From 1763 to 1765, when Hume was secretary to Lord Hertford in Paris, he was admired by Voltaire, and was friends with Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
Hume’s ideas based on rationalism were completely contrasting with those of Descartes. Hume believed that human experience is the closest resource we have that leads us to the truth. As he stated, “The science of man is the only solid foundation for the other sciences”. He sustained that experience and observation are the foundations of any logical argument. Hume remained skeptical about religion, because even though he believed that humans can believe in anything throughout operations like imagination, he sustained that what humans are taught or what they believe isn’t always true. Being a philosopher, one of Hume’s major contributions to epistemology and the theory of knowledge was his support for the belief that natural instinct was the reason for our ability to make inductive inferences. |