Contemporary likeness
David Hume
1711 – 1776
PhilosophyHistoryEmpiricismScottish Enlightenment
The most disquieting sceptic of the age, and reportedly its most cheerful man.
Contemporary likeness. Based on the Allan Ramsay portrait, painted from life.
Why they still matter
He showed that causation is something we infer rather than see, and that reason alone cannot tell us what to want. Nobody has fully answered him.
The world they thought in
Wrote in Edinburgh, was twice refused a professorship for irreligion, and kept writing anyway.
What they wrote
The questions they worked on
Reality
What is actually there behind appearances?
Causation as inference, not observation.
Intellectual humility
How do you hold a belief while admitting it might be wrong?
Showed how little experience can actually prove.
Where the thinking travelled
Each link says what kind of link it is. A documented influence and a much later echo are not the same claim, and are never presented as one.
John LockeIntellectual lineage
Pushed empiricism to the point where it began to hurt.
A tradition carried the ideas forward over generations.
Take this further
Ponderers is the historical layer. A rabbit hole brings the same question into what people are arguing about now.