Portal:Atheism/Selected biography/51
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David Hume (April 26, 1711 – August 25, 1776)[1] was a Scottish philosopher, economist, and historian. He is considered one of the most important figures in the history of Western philosophy and the Scottish Enlightenment. Although in recent years interest in Hume's work has centred on his philosophical writing, it was as an historian that he first gained recognition and respect. His The History of England[2] was the standard work on English history for sixty or seventy years until Macaulay's.[3]
Hume was the first great philosopher of the modern era to carve out a thoroughly naturalistic philosophy. This philosophy partly consisted in the rejection of the historically prevalent conception of human minds as being miniature versions of the Divine mind; a notion Edward Craig has entitled the ‘Image of God’ doctrine.[4] This doctrine was associated with a trust in the powers of human reason and insight into reality, which powers possessed God’s certification. Hume’s scepticism came in his rejection of this ‘insight ideal’,[5] and the (usually rationalistic) confidence derived from it that the world is as we represent it. Instead, the best we can do is to apply the best explanatory and empirical principles available to the investigation of human mental phenomena, issuing in a quasi-Newtonian project, Hume's ‘Science of Man’.
Hume was heavily influenced by empiricists John Locke and George Berkeley, along with various Francophone writers such as Pierre Bayle, and various figures on the Anglophone intellectual landscape such as Isaac Newton, Samuel Clarke, Francis Hutcheson, Adam Smith, and Joseph Butler.
