Other editions of book An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

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David Hume (7 May 1711– 25 August 1776) was a Scottish philosopher, historian, economist, and essayist, known especially for his philosophical empiricism and skepticism. He is regarded as one of the most important figures in the history of Western philosophy and the Scottish Enlightenment. Hume is often grouped with John Locke, George Berkeley, and a handful of others as a British Empiricist. Beginning with his A Treatise of Human Nature (1739), Hume strove to create a total naturalistic "science of man" that examined the psychological basis of human nature. In stark opposition to the rationalists who preceded him, most notably Descartes, he concluded that desire rather than reason governed human behaviour, saying: "Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions." A prominent figure in the skeptical philosophical tradition and a strong empiricist, he argued against the existence of innate ideas, concluding instead that humans have knowledge only of things they directly experience. Thus he divides perceptions between strong and lively "impressions" or direct sensations and fainter "ideas," which are copied from impressions. He developed the position that mental behaviour is governed by "custom"; our use of induction, for example, is justified only by our idea of the "constant conjunction" of causes and effects. Hume held notoriously ambiguous views of Christianity, but he famously challenged the argument from design in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779).

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Philosopher David Hume was considered to one of the most important figures in the age of Scottish enlightenment. In "An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding" Hume discusses the weakness that humans have in their abilities to comprehend the world around them, what is referred to in the title as human understanding. This work, now commonly required reading in philosophy classes, exposed a broad audience to philosophy when it was first published. A great introduction to the philosophy of David Hume, "An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding" and the ideas within it are as intriguing today as when they were first written.

An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding is a book by the Scottish empiricist philosopher David Hume, published in English in 1748. It was a revision of an earlier effort, Hume's A Treatise of Human Nature, published anonymously in London in 1739–40. Hume was disappointed with the reception of the Treatise, which "fell dead-born from the press, as he put it, and so tried again to disseminate his more developed ideas to the public by writing a shorter and more polemical work.

An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding is a book by the Scottish empiricist philosopher David Hume, published in 1748. This book has proven highly influential, both in the years that would immediately follow and today. Immanuel Kant points to it as the book which woke him from his self-described "dogmatic slumber" The Enquiry is widely regarded as a classic in modern philosophical literature.