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Empiricism & Scepticism
David Hume
1711 – 1776
“Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions.”
The Great Doubter. Hume pushed empiricism to its radical conclusion: causation, the self, and the external world are not rationally knowable — they are habits of the imagination.
Biography
David Hume (1711–1776) was a Scottish philosopher and historian who pushed the empiricism of Locke and Berkeley to its sceptical limit.
Hume's most famous argument concerns causation. We never see one billiard ball causing another to move; we only ever observe constant conjunction. The idea of necessary connection is a habit of the imagination, not a perception of objective reality.
Kant credited Hume with waking him from his "dogmatic slumber," directly inspiring the Critique of Pure Reason.
Important Works
A Treatise of Human Nature
1739The masterwork of British empiricism, arguing scepticism about causation, the self, and induction.
Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion
1779A devastating critique of the design argument for God's existence.
Key Takeaways
- Causation is habit, not rational necessity — Hume's Fork.
- The self is a bundle of perceptions, not a unified substance.
- Is-ought gap: no moral conclusion strictly follows from factual premises.
- Reason serves the passions; it cannot motivate action on its own.
- Scepticism about induction: past regularities give no logical guarantee of the future.