An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding - Hume, David

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Résumé :
In our reasonings concerning matter of fact, there are all imaginable degrees of assurance, from the highest certainty to the lowest species of moral evidence. A wise man, therefore, proportions his belief to the evidence. The book that famously woke Kant from his dogmatic slumber, Hume's 1748 work was an early version of popscience in action. Hume believed that his anonymously published A Treatise of Human Nature had fell deadborn from the press in 17391740, so he redeveloped, reworked and republished a shorter version, which he believed to be the important bits, and called it An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. It was published in 1748, and is still a classic of modern philosophical thought.

Biographie:
David Hume (7 May 1711 - 25 August 1776) was a Scottish Enlightenment philosopher, historian, economist, and essayist, who is best known today for his highly influential system of philosophical empiricism, skepticism, and naturalism. Hume strove to create a naturalistic science of man that examined the psychological basis of human nature. Hume argued against the existence of innate ideas, positing that all human knowledge derives solely from experience. This places him with Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and George Berkeley as a British Empiricist.Hume argued that inductive reasoning and belief in causality cannot be justified rationally; instead, they result from custom and mental habit. We never actually perceive that one event causes another but only experience the constant conjunction of events. This problem of induction means that to draw any causal inferences from past experience, it is necessary to presuppose that the future will resemble the past, a presupposition which cannot itself be grounded in prior experience.An opponent of philosophical rationalists, Hume held that passions rather than reason govern human behaviour, famously proclaiming that Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions. Hume influenced utilitarianism, logical positivism, the philosophy of science, early analytic philosophy, cognitive science, theology, and many other fields and thinkers. Immanuel Kant credited Hume as the inspiration who had awakened him from his dogmatic slumbers.

Sommaire:
David Hume (7 May 1711 NS - 25 August 1776) was a Scottish Enlightenment philosopher, student of history, economist, librarian, and writer. He is most popular for his profoundly persuasive philosophical empiricism, skepticism, and naturalism. argued against the presence of intrinsic thoughts, positing that all human information derives solely from experience. He studied philosophy at the College of Edinburgh at an abnormally early age of 12 or 13. Hume never wedded and resided partly at his Berwickshire home in Chirnside, which had a place with his family beginning around 1604. Hume's doctor determined him to have the Sickness of the Learned after he created scurvy and different maladies. He was secretary to General James St Clair, who was an emissary to Turin and Vienna. Hume wrote A Treatise of Human Nature in 1738 and The History of England in 1754. In 1745, during the Jacobite risings, Hume mentored the Marquess of Annandale (1720-92), an engagement that finished in confusion. He is viewed as one of the main philosophers to write in English. The David Hume Tower, a University of Edinburgh building, was renamed in a protest over his writing on race....