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Hume engaged with contemporary intellectual luminaries such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, James Boswell, and Adam Smith (who acknowledged Hume's influence on his economics and political philosophy). In addition, according to philosopher Jerry Fodor, Hume's Treatise is "the founding document of cognitive science". Hume has proved extremely influential on subsequent western philosophy, especially on utilitarianism, logical positivism, William James, the philosophy of science, early analytic philosophy, cognitive philosophy, theology and other movements and thinkers. He was also a sentimentalist who held that ethics are based on feelings rather than abstract moral principles, and expounded the is–ought problem. Hume's compatibilist theory of free will proved extremely influential on subsequent moral philosophy. He concluded that humans have no actual conception of the self, only of a bundle of sensations associated with the self. Our assumptions in favour of these result from custom and constant conjunction rather than logic. He argued that inductive reasoning and therefore causality cannot be justified rationally.

He also argued against the existence of innate ideas, concluding that humans have knowledge only of things they directly experience. In opposition to the rationalists who preceded him, most notably René Descartes, he concluded that desire rather than reason governed human behaviour. His empirical approach places him with John Locke, George Berkeley, and a handful of others at the time as a British Empiricist.īeginning 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. He wrote The History of England which became a bestseller, and it became the standard history of England in its day. In light of Hume's central role in the Scottish Enlightenment, and in the history of Western philosophy, Bryan Magee judged him as a philosopher "widely regarded as the greatest who has ever written in the English language." While Hume failed in his attempts to start a university career, he took part in various diplomatic and military missions of the time. David Hume was a Scottish historian, philosopher, economist, diplomat and essayist known today especially for his radical philosophical empiricism and scepticism.