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Hume was born on 26 April 1711, as David Home, in a tenement on the north side of Edinburgh's Lawnmarket.He was the second of two sons born to Catherine Home (née Falconer), daughter of Sir David Falconer of Newton, Midlothian and his wife Mary Falconer (née Norvell), [14] and Joseph Home of Chirnside in the County of Berwick, an advocate of Ninewells.
Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary (1758) is a two-volume compilation of essays by David Hume. [1] Part I includes the essays from Essays, Moral and Political, [2] plus two essays from Four Dissertations. The content of this part largely covers political and aesthetic issues.
The British government, for the most part, ignored the Enlightenment's leaders in England and Scotland, although it did give Newton a knighthood and a very lucrative government office. A common theme among most countries which derived Enlightenment ideas from Europe was the intentional non-inclusion of Enlightenment philosophies pertaining to ...
The philosophic followers of Hume in Scotland were often, like Robert Adamson, of the Liberal left; and tended to see Hume as Tory-leaning. However this must be seen in the context of the self-serving whig history of Hume's time. Hume's roots were in the Revolution of the Scottish Whigs in 1688–9.
Clearly, Hume thought that there were grave misunderstandings at the time as to what counts as virtue versus vice. For example, Hume attempts to defend, contrary to many religious teachings, that a certain amount of luxury, even pride, is virtuous. Hume makes important distinctions in his classifications of virtues.
Hume's account of causality has been influential. His first question is how to categorize causal relations. On his view, they belong either to relations of ideas or matters of fact. This distinction is referred to as Hume's fork. [4] Relations of ideas involve necessary connections that are knowable a priori independently of experience.
He uses, as example, the "ridiculous" behaviour of the ancient Athenian government in banning the export of a certain kind of fig deemed too delicious for mere foreigners, but he goes on to cite similar errors in contemporary England and France, as well. In modern economic terms, that is equilibration through the price-specie flow mechanism. In ...
Hume's introduction presents the idea of placing all science and philosophy on a novel foundation: namely, an empirical investigation into human psychology.He begins by acknowledging "that common prejudice against metaphysical reasonings [i.e., any complicated and difficult argumentation]", a prejudice formed in reaction to "the present imperfect condition of the sciences" (including the ...