David Hume

David Hume (1711–1776) was a Scottish philosopher and historian whose empiricism and skepticism challenged claims about causation, personal identity, and religious knowledge.

Empiricism: The view that knowledge derives primarily from sensory experience. Hume grounds ideas in experience rather than treating reason as an independent source of factual knowledge.
Problem of Induction: The problem of justifying predictions about unobserved cases from patterns observed in the past. Hume argues that no non-circular proof shows the future will resemble the past.
A Treatise of Human Nature: Hume’s 1739–1740 work presenting a systematic account of the mind, passions, and morality. It is the fullest early statement of his project to make human nature a subject of empirical inquiry.
Rationalism: The view that reason can provide substantive knowledge independently of sensory experience. Hume rejects rationalist claims that reason alone establishes facts about the world.
Impressions and Ideas: Hume’s distinction between vivid perceptions and their fainter copies in thought and memory. This distinction supplies the basic vocabulary for Hume’s account of how the mind forms ideas.
Causation: The relation in which one event produces or brings about another. Hume finds no observable necessary connection beyond repeated conjunction and the mind’s expectation.
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding: Hume’s 1748 revision of central arguments about knowledge, causation, miracles, and belief. This book gives his most influential presentation of skepticism about induction and testimony.
Thomas Reid: A Scottish philosopher who opposed Humean skepticism with a defense of common-sense principles. Reid argued that Hume’s analysis undermines beliefs that ordinary life and inquiry must presuppose.
Association of Ideas: Hume’s account of how resemblance, contiguity, and cause connect thoughts. These three principles explain how perceptions become linked in ordinary thinking.
Custom (philosophy): A principle of habit by which repeated experience guides expectation and belief. Custom explains why observed regularities generate causal expectations without rational proof.

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