Changes

|Major Contributions=Hume's main philosophical contributions were made via several works. The first was ''A Treatise of Human Nature'' published in three volumes in 1739 and 1740, when Hume was 29 years old. Since it sold poorly, Hume recast the material into two later publications, ''Enquiries concerning Human Understanding'', published in 1748, and ''concerning the Principles of Morals'' published in 1751. Because of its controversial nature, Hume had ''Dialogs concerning Natural Religion'' published posthumously in 1779, three years after his death. [[CiteRef::Morris and Brown (2016)]][[CiteRef:: Norton (2009)]]

The basic goal of the first three of these works is indicated by the subtitle of the ''Treatise''; "an attempt to introduce the experimental method into moral subjects". [[CiteRef::Morris and Brown (2016)|p.7]] Hume sought to extend Newton's experimental philosophy from natural philosophy into what was then called '''moral philosophy''', which he defined as the "science of human nature". [[CiteRef::Morris and Brown (2016)|p.8]] The field of moral philosophy was much broader then than today, and included topics that we might classify as psychology or cognitive science, as well as epistemology. To Hume, an understanding of the workings of the mind was the key to establishing the foundations of all other knowledge, including "Mathematics, Natural Philosophy, and Natural Religion". [[CiteRef:: Norton (2009)|p. 34]] Natural philosophers, like Newton and Boyle, he maintains, had cured themselves of their "passion for hypotheses and systems". [[CiteRef:: Morris and Brown (2016)|p. 8-9]] Hume sought to work the same cure for moral philosophy, which he saw as full of speculative metaphysical hypotheses and constant dispute. [[CiteRef::Morris and Brown (2016)]] He proposed an empiricist alternative to ''a priori'' metaphysics and its speculative belief systems. He was a naturalist who rejected any appeal to the supernatural in explanations of human nature. For such beliefs, and because he argued that we cannot justify many of our beliefs, he is noted as a skeptic. But he also observed that we have non-rational faculties which compel certain sorts of beliefs (such as the belief that there is a world external to my mind of which my senses provide knowledge), and it is these faculties of which he wishes to give a positive descriptive account. [[CiteRef::Biro (2009)]]