Hume's Life and Context

Edinburgh and after

David Hume was born in 1711 near Edinburgh, Scotland, into a respectable but not wealthy family. His father died when he was two, and he was raised by his mother — who reportedly said of him that he was “uncommon wake-minded,” meaning unusually sharp. He entered the University of Edinburgh around the age of eleven (this was not unusual at the time) and left without a degree a few years later, finding the curriculum too narrow for his interests.

What followed was several years of intensive private reading — philosophy, history, literature, and classical texts in Greek and Latin. By the time he was in his mid-twenties, something had shifted. He later described the period as one in which he felt consumed by philosophical questions he couldn’t stop turning over. His family wanted him to go into law. Philosophy won.

At twenty-eight, after three years of private writing in France, Hume published his masterwork: A Treatise of Human Nature. He was confident it would make his name. Instead, as he later dryly recalled, it “fell dead-born from the press.” Nobody cared. It is now considered one of the greatest works of philosophy ever written in English.

Controversy and recognition

Hume spent the next two decades trying to reach the audience the Treatise had missed. He rewrote its core arguments in a more accessible style — the result was the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), the text you are reading. He also wrote essays on politics, economics, and history, which found a large readership and made him famous across Europe. His six-volume History of England was a bestseller.

Throughout, he was regarded by the Scottish Presbyterian establishment as a dangerous atheist and freethinker. He was twice rejected for university positions — once at Edinburgh, once at Glasgow — because of his religious views. His Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, a devastating critique of arguments for God’s existence, was so explosive that he declined to publish it during his lifetime. It appeared three years after his death.

What his enemies could never quite account for was the man himself. Hume was, by all accounts, remarkably good company — warm, witty, even-tempered, and genuinely happy. He was known in Edinburgh as “Saint David” (ironically at first, affectionately later) and was widely loved by his friends. When he died of cancer in 1776, he met his death with the composure of a man who had thought carefully about these things and was not afraid. His friend Adam Smith wrote that he had never known a man “approach so nearly to the idea of a perfectly wise and virtuous man.”

Where knowledge comes from

Hume belonged to a tradition called British Empiricism — a loose school of thought that ran from Francis Bacon through John Locke and George Berkeley to Hume himself. The central commitment of this tradition was a simple but radical claim: all human knowledge ultimately comes from experience.

This sounds obvious until you think about it. What about mathematics? You don’t need to go look at the world to know that 2 + 2 = 4 — you can work it out just by thinking. What about logical truths? “If all As are Bs and this is an A, then this is a B” is true regardless of what you observe. The empiricist has to account for these cases. Hume’s answer (which we’ll examine in the lecture pages) is that these are truths about relations among ideas, not truths about the world — and they are exactly as informative as their status suggests: formally certain, but empty of factual content.

The more important claim is what empiricism rules out. If all genuine knowledge traces back to experience, then any idea that can’t be traced to an original sensory impression is philosophically suspect — or outright meaningless. This is a scalpel Hume wields with relish. Abstract metaphysics? The concept of substance? The immortal soul? “If we take in our hand any volume,” Hume famously wrote, “let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.”

Locke and Berkeley: Hume’s predecessors

John Locke (1632–1704) established the empiricist program by arguing that the mind at birth is a tabula rasa — a blank slate. All ideas, Locke argued, are derived from experience, either through sensation (the senses delivering information about the external world) or reflection (the mind observing its own operations). There are no innate ideas, no knowledge built into us before experience begins.

George Berkeley (1685–1753) accepted Locke’s empiricism and pushed it to a startling conclusion: if all we ever directly perceive are our own ideas, then we have no good reason to believe in a material world independent of minds at all. Things exist, Berkeley argued, because they are perceived — esse est percipi, to be is to be perceived. God keeps the world in existence by perceiving it continuously. It is a bold piece of reasoning, and Hume found it instructive even if he did not follow it all the way.

Hume takes the empiricist starting point and refuses Berkeley’s theological escape hatch. What remains is a leaner, more unsettling picture: a mind equipped with impressions and ideas, a few principles for connecting them, and no guarantee whatsoever that those connections reflect how the world actually works.

The central dispute in early modern philosophy

Hume’s empiricism is best understood as a direct challenge to the tradition Descartes represents: Rationalism. The dispute between them is the dominant intellectual fault line in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European philosophy.

The core difference is a question about the source and nature of knowledge:

It is important not to caricature this as a simple “reason vs. observation” contest. Both sides used reason; neither denied the role of the senses entirely. The real disagreement is about what reason can do on its own — whether, in the absence of sensory evidence, pure rational reflection can yield genuine knowledge of the world.

Descartes thought it could: his cogito is precisely a piece of reasoning that yields a fact about reality without any sensory input. Hume thinks this is an illusion. Reason on its own only moves ideas around — it cannot tell us anything new about how the world actually is. For that, you need experience. And experience, as Hume will show, has its own serious limitations.

A pivot point

Hume sits at a hinge in this course. The first two units asked: what can we know? Socrates showed that moral knowledge is harder to pin down than we assume. Descartes tried to establish a foundation for certain knowledge, using reason to work his way from radical doubt to God and the external world.

Hume asks: did Descartes actually succeed? His answer is a thorough and uncomfortable no. Not because Descartes reasoned poorly — but because the project itself is misconceived. Reason cannot reach as far as Descartes thought. The things we are most confident about — that causes produce effects, that the future will resemble the past — are not the products of reason. They are the products of habit. And habit, however useful, is not a philosophical justification.

This matters for the rest of the course too. Hegel’s response to Hume will be one of the most ambitious in the history of philosophy: rather than accept Hume’s limits, Hegel will argue that reason and reality are not separate things that need to be bridged — they are the same thing unfolding. Marx will take Hegel’s framework and turn it toward material conditions and historical change. And Sartre will confront a world from which all guarantees — rational, divine, and historical — have been stripped away.

In this sense, Hume is the philosophical wrecking ball that makes the rest of the course necessary.