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|Brief=a Scottish philosopher, historian, and essayist; he is widely considered the most important philosopher to write in the English language.
|Summary=Hume’s contributions to our understanding of the processes of scientific change and the nature of scientific knowledge come from his major philosophical works including ''A Treatise of Human Nature'' (1738) and ''Enquiries concerning Human Understanding'' (1748). He is most noted for his skeptical views on a variety of topics including the powers of human reason, metaphysics, human identity, and the existence of God.[[CiteRef::Fieser (2016)]] He is perhaps best known, first, for rejecting Aristotle’s epistemological distinction between knowledge and belief and replacing it with his own distinction between matters of fact (which depend on the way the world is) and relations of ideas (that are discoverable by thought, such as mathematical truths). This new distinction is known as Hume's Fork. Secondly, he is known for questioning whether knowledge derived from inductive reasoning can be justified. The problem he posed is known today as Hume's Problem of Induction. [[CiteRef::Morris and Brown (2016)]] Thirdly, Hume questioned whether theological knowledge is possible,and played a substantial role in its removal from the scientific mosaic of the modern world. [[CiteRef::Gavin (2007)]] The impact of these skeptical arguments is still felt to this day.
|Historical Context=David Hume was born in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1711. His family had a modest estate and was socially connected, but not wealthy.[[CiteRef::Norton (2009)]] They recognized that Hume was precocious, and sent him to Edinburgh University two years early (at the age of 10 or 11) with his older brother (who was 12). He studied Latin and Greek, read widely in history, literature, and ancient and modern philosophy, as well as some mathematics and natural philosophy. [[CiteRef:: Morris and Brown (2016)]][[CiteRef:: Harris (2015)|p. 35-65]] Both at home and at the university, Hume was raised in the stern '''Calvinist faith''', with prayers and sermons as prominent features of his home and university life. [[CiteRef:: Morris and Brown (2016)]] Following the completion of his studies, Hume rejected his family's plan that he become a lawyer, and instead determined to become a scholar and philosopher, engaging in three years of intensive personal study. Living in the aftermath of the acceptance of [[Isaac Newton]]'s(1643-1727) revolutionary theories of motion and gravitation, eighteenth century thinkers proclaimed the ''''Age of Enlightenment'''' and expected philosophy (which then included what we would call the natural and social sciences) to dramatically improve human life. [[CiteRef::Bristow (2017)]] Hume, like many of his times, revered Newton, calling him "the greatest and rarest genius that ever arose for the ornament and instruction of the species". [[CiteRef::DePierris (2006)]]
Although little is known of Hume's activities during his schooling and afterwards, he would have spent the fourth year of the curriculum at Edinburgh studying natural philosophy, and would have been exposed to experimental natural philosophy, including Newton's theories. [[CiteRef::Harris (2015)|p. 38-40]] More than thirty years earlier, in 1687, Newton had published his ''Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica'' (''Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy'') in which he put forth his '''laws of motion''', '''law of universal gravitation''', and his inductive '''experimental philosophy'''. [[CiteRef:: Westfall (1999)]][[CiteRef::Janiak (2016)]] By about 1700 these theories had become [[Theory Acceptance|accepted]] in Britain. [[CiteRef::Barseghyan (2015)|p. 210]] The works of other experimental philosophers were also available to the young Hume. The natural philosophy library at Edinburgh, to which Hume is known to have contributed, contained an extensive collection of the works of Robert Boyle(1627-1691), the works of [[Rene Descartes]] (1596-1650), and [[John Locke]]'s (1632-1704) ''Essay Concerning Human Understanding''. This work, published in 1689, more than twenty years before Hume was born, propounded Locke's '''empiricist''' view of human knowledge. [[CiteRef::Harris (2015)|p. 38-40]][[CiteRef::Uzgalis (2016)]] Boyle, Newton, and Locke were all associated with the '''Royal Society of London''', which was founded in 1663, almost 50 years before Hume's birth, and sought to promote the experimental method and the new natural philosophy. [[CiteRef::Uzgalis (2016)]][[CiteRef::Rogers (1982)]]
By Hume's time, [[Aristotle]]'s (384 BC-322 BC) teleological account of causation had been rejected in favour of the '''corpuscular mechanistic''' view of causation. Derived from ancient atomism, it held that material bodies are made of invisibly small particles, called corpuscles. The only form of causation is mechanical, by direct physical contact of bodies or their constituent corpuscles. [[CiteRef::DePierris (2006)]] Natural philosophers continued to accept Aristotle's distinction between scientific knowledge and belief. Scientific knowledge was taken to be knowledge of causes and consisted of '''demonstrations'''; proving the necessary connection between cause and effect. Locke supported this view of knowledge and made the popular notion of a hypothetical hidden corpuscular microstructure and the associated notion of a metaphysically necessary connection between cause and effect central to his system. He nonetheless viewed recognized that demonstrative knowledge as was seldom attainable because of the unobservability of corpuscles. [[CiteRef::DePierris (2006)]][[CiteRef::Kochiras (2014)]]
Although many early eighteenth century thinkers regarded Newton's theories and Locke's empiricism to constitute a unified system, there was a distinct tension between them, which Hume recognized. Newton had been unable to explain his gravitational force in terms of a corpuscular mechanism. He saw his inductive method as an alternative to the demands of a corpuscularism that stood in the way of the acceptance of a mathematically lawful gravitational force on its own terms. Hume's Newton inspired skepticism of speculative metaphysical hypotheses led him to reject corpuscularism, and his enthusiastic championing of Newton's inductive method led him to challenge Locke's concept of causation, and Aristotle's taxonomy of knowledge and opinion in favour of a new epistemic taxonomy and new concept of causation. [[CiteRef::Hume (1975)]][[CiteRef::Morris and Brown (2016)]]
By the time he started work on ''A Treatise of Human Nature'' at the age of 23, Hume had become skeptical of religious belief. [[CiteRef:: Morris and Brown (2016)]] The term '''atheism''' was coined by Sir John Cheke (1514-1557) almost two hundred years earlier in 1540, to refer to a lack of belief in divine providence. The term assumed its modern meaning of disbelief in the existence of God, as divine non-existence emerged as a disquieting possibility in the seventeenth century. [[CiteRef:: Hyman (2007)]] In early modern Christian Europe, theological knowledge was deemed to derive from two sources. '''Natural religion''' attempted to demonstrate God's existence and nature through reason, logic, and observation of the natural world. '''Revealed religion''' was based on the premise that the text of the Bible was divinely inspired and thus a source of reliable theological knowledge. [[CiteRef::Fieser (2016)]]
Descartes' rationalism had a proof of God's existence at its foundation, but it was also a challenge to the theological methodology established by Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), which stressed the limitations of human reason, and the need to rely on Biblical revelation. Descartes instead claimed a human capacity to know God and nature through reason alone. However, his rationalist argument for God's existence and guarantorship of the certainty of scientific knowledge was soon rejected as circular. [[CiteRef:: Hyman (2007)]][[CiteRef::Cottingham (1992)]] It was supplanted by Newton's experimental philosophy and Locke's empiricism, both of which stressed experience and observation as sources of the limited knowledge to which humans could aspire, and eschewed metaphysics and speculative hypotheses. [[CiteRef::Rogers (1982)]] Both Newton and Locke were nevertheless devoutly religious, though they held non-standard beliefs. Newton authored an entire volume on Biblical prophesies. [[CiteRef::Mandelbrote (2004)]]Like many natural philosophers associated with the Royal Society, they supported a form of natural religion that sought to use the experimental method to demonstrate that the universe exhibited the order and purposefulness of a designed artifact crafted by an all-powerful Intelligence. Hume's empiricism led him to express skeptical doubts about both revealed religion and natural religion as sources of knowledge. In his ''Enquiries concerning Human Understanding'' (1748) In Hume's ''Dialogues on Natural Theology'' (1779) was a response to such hopes, and was to raise devastating objections to them. Unlike Locke, Hume saw that empiricism must place God's existence among those speculative questions to be eschewed. [[CiteRef::Hyman (2007)]] Doubts about God's existence also arose among French intellectuals in the mid-eighteenth century, with the first to openly proclaim himself an atheist being Denis Diderot (1713-1784). [[CiteRef:: Hyman (2007)]][[CiteRef::Bristow (2017)]]
|Major Contributions=Hume was one of a number of eighteenth century British philosophers whose work was inspired primarily by Newton's physical theories and experimental philosophy. Hume and Colin MacLaurin (1698-1746) believed that the mind's operations could be studied by broadly Newtonian observational methods, and in both cases this led them to forms of local skepticism. Joseph Priestly (1733-1804) and David Hartley (1705-1757) applied Newtonianism to both the operations of the mind and to its substance, becoming materialists. George Turnbull (1698-1748) and his pupil Thomas Reid(1710-1796) sought to ground Newtonian empiricism in a common-sense understanding of the world. [[CiteRef::Nichols and Yaffe (2016)]]
