Who Was David Hume? by Anthony Gottlieb | The New York Review of Books

Who Was David Hume? by Anthony Gottlieb | The New York Review of Books

Hume treats humans as clever animals whose beliefs about most things are based on “custom,” in the form of a propensity to expect the future to resemble the past—a propensity, he argued, that is essential for the conduct of life, but cannot be provided with any sort of independent justification. This thesis has come to be known as “the problem of induction,”
Hume first advanced his new theory of rationality in A Treatise of Human Nature, most of which was written by the time he was twenty-six, and which was, he claimed, mapped out while he was still a teenager. 
Hume first advanced his new theory of rationality in A Treatise of Human Nature, most of which was written by the time he was twenty-six, and which was, he claimed, mapped out while he was still a teenager. 

 Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding) are more streamlined and carefully argued than the corresponding part of his Treatise. This new version of his philosophy omitted the Treatise’s tangled material on the ideas of space and time, and its treatment of the idea of the self, which Hume quickly came to see as “very defective.” Hume’s mature work also clarified his position on the relation between reason and passion. Reason, he wrote, is itself “nothing but a general and a calm passion, which takes a comprehensive and a distant view of its object.” Mastering one’s passions was therefore not, as he had misleadingly made it sound in the Treatise, a contest between reason on the one hand and passion on the other. It was a matter of making one’s passions milder and less agitated.

. Adam Smith wrote that Hume was, so far as he knew, the first writer to argue that manufacturing and commerce tend gradually to produce greater liberty and security for citizens. Hume’s economic essays were particularly acute on monetary theory and on trade. He was insistent about the mutual benefits of international trade, wary of national indebtedness, and dismissive of mercantilist obsessions with gold. It has been said that if only Hume had laid out his arguments more systematically, the birth of modern economics would be recorded as 1752, instead of 1776, when Smith’s Wealth of Nations was published.

The principles of Hume’s philosophy implied that the question of God’s existence cannot be settled definitively either way, so he was in one sense an agnostic. Goedeliano, desarrollar. 


t “the cause or causes of order in the universe probably bear some remote analogy to human intelligence,” which sounds respectably like an endorsement of theism. But careful readers will notice that the analogy conceded by Philo is demonstrated to be so remote that it is in fact consistent with atheism. Hume once remarked in a letter to the Comtesse de Boufflers that poor Rousseau had got into trouble because he neglected to “throw any veil over his sent