An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding: A Classic Work of Empiricism, Scepticism, and Enlightenment Philosophy - Softcover

Hume, David

Softcover

ISBN 10: 160459537X ISBN 13: 9781604595376

Publisher: Wilder Publications, 2009

Synopsis

David Hume’s An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding was a simplification of an earlier effort, Hume was disappointed with the reception of the Treatise of Human Nature He felt that if “fell dead-born from the press,” as he put it, and so tried again to disseminate his ideas to the public by writing a shorter and more polemical work. The Enquiry dispensed with much of the material from the Treatise, in favor of clarifying and emphasizing its most important aspects. This book was highly influential, Immanuel Kant points to it as the book which woke him from his “dogmatic slumber.” The Enquiry is widely regarded as a classic in modern philosophical literature.

About this title

About the Author

David Hume (1711-1776) was a Scottish philosopher, historian, economist, and essayist, and one of the most important figures of the Scottish Enlightenment. Born in Edinburgh, Hume became famous for his sceptical, empiricist approach to knowledge, causation, religion, morality, and human nature. His early A Treatise of Human Nature received little attention when first published, but Hume later reworked and clarified many of its central arguments in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding and An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals. Those works helped establish him as one of the most influential philosophers to write in English.Hume's philosophy challenged claims about innate ideas, rational certainty, miracles, personal identity, and the necessary connection between cause and effect. He argued that much of what human beings take for knowledge rests on experience, custom, habit, and probability rather than on demonstrative reason. His work shaped later debates in epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, philosophy of religion, and the philosophy of science, and had a profound effect on Immanuel Kant and subsequent modern philosophy. Clear, sceptical, elegant, and unsettling, Hume remains essential reading for anyone interested in Enlightenment philosophy, British empiricism, scepticism, and the limits of human understanding.

Edition details

• Publisher: Wilder Publications
• Publication date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 160459537X
• ISBN 13: 9781604595376
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 116