Hume believes that all disputes on the subject have been merely verbal arguments — that is to say, arguments which are based on a lack of prior agreement on definitions.

To show the compatibility of necessity and liberty, Hume defines liberty as the ability to act on the basis of one's will e. g. the capacity to will one's actions but not to will one's will.

Still, Hume takes care to warn that historians are generally to be trusted with confidence, so long as their reports on facts are extensive and uniform.

Hume continues his application of epistemology to theology by an extended discussion on heaven and hell.

Captain Hume of HMS Scarborough reported on 6 February that a " Pyrate Ship of 36 Guns and 250 men, and a Sloop of 10 Guns and 100 men were Said to be Cruizing amongst the Leeward Islands ".

Hume advocated a compatibilist theory of free will that proved extremely influential on subsequent moral philosophy.

Kant credited Hume with waking him up from his " dogmatic slumbers " and Hume has proved extremely influential on subsequent philosophy, especially on utilitarianism, logical positivism, William James, philosophy of science, early analytic philosophy, cognitive philosophy, and other movements and thinkers.

Also famous as a prose stylist, Hume pioneered the essay as a literary genre and engaged with contemporary intellectual luminaries such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Adam Smith ( who acknowledged Hume's influence on his economics and political philosophy ), James Boswell, Joseph Butler, and Thomas Reid.

David Hume, originally David Home, son of Joseph Home of Chirnside, advocate, and Katherine Falconer, was born on 26 April 1711 ( Old Style ) in a tenement on the north side of the Lawnmarket in Edinburgh.

Hume wrote a great deal on religion.

The perception of Hume as an atheist with an axe to grind is an oversimplification and contrasts his views on extremist positioning.

A statue of Hume by Alexander Stoddart on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh

To be sure, Hume thought that we can form beliefs about that which extends beyond any possible experience, through the operation of faculties such as custom and the imagination, but he was skeptical about claims to knowledge on this basis.

The connection is now standard, but is based on what current scholars mean by " induction ", not how Hume used the term in his writings.

According to the standard interpretation of Hume on personal identity, he was a Bundle Theorist, who held that the self is nothing but a bundle of experiences (" perceptions ") linked by the relations of causation and resemblance ; or, more accurately, that the empirically warranted idea of the self is just the idea of such a bundle.

However, some philosophers have criticised the bundle-theory interpretation of Hume on personal identity.

Earlier, the Scottish philosopher David Hume had put forward a similar view on the difference between facts and values.

( Hume 1974: 355-356 ) He also argues in brief against the idea that causes are mere occasions of the will of some god ( s ), a view associated with the philosopher Nicolas Malebranche.

Hanvelt dubs Hume as an Aristotelian in his view that rhetoric is a form of ethical studies, which ultimately make it political.

This view is rejected by sceptical realists, who argue that Hume thought that causation amounts to more than just the regular succession of events.

This view is forwarded by, for example, positivist interpreters, who saw Hume as suggesting that terms such as " self ", " person ", or " mind " referred to collections of " sense-contents ".

Since the bundle-theory interpretation portrays Hume as answering an ontological question, philosophers who see Hume as not very concerned with such questions have queried whether the view is really Hume's, or " only a decoy ".

According to this view, Hume is not arguing for a bundle theory, which is a form of reductionism, but rather for an eliminative view of the self.

Hume argued in keeping with the empiricist view that all knowledge derives from sense experience, but he accepted that this has implications not normally acceptable to philosophers.

As David Hume once wrote, " What interest can a fond mother have in view, who loses her health by assiduous attendance on her sick child, and afterwards languishes and dies of grief, when freed, by its death child's, from the slavery of that attendance ?".

Hume acknowledges that some historians have argued " that he was well qualified for government, had he legally obtained it ; and that he committed no crimes but such as were necessary to procure him possession of the crown ", but he dismisses this view on the grounds that Richard's exercise of arbitrary power encouraged instability.

The Hume and Hovell expedition disproved the widely held view that the interior of Australia was an uninhabitable wilderness.

Phenomenalism is a radical form of empiricism and, hence, its roots as an ontological view of the nature of existence can be traced back to George Berkeley and his subjective idealism, which David Hume further elaborated.

Before Kant ( 1724 – 1804 ), David Hume ( 1711 – 1776 ) accepted the general view of rationalism about a priori knowledge.

The introduction to David Hume's Treatise of Human Nature is a locus classicus of this view ; Hume subtitled his book " Being An Attempt To Introduce the Experimental Method of Reasoning Into Moral Subjects.

The common modern view of the Restoration stage as the epitome of Shakespeare abuse and bad taste has been shown by Hume to be exaggerated, and both scenery and adaptation became more reckless in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Partly it would be by way of natural development and progress ( the view espoused by David Hume ) but more so by way of education ( precursors of this view included John Locke, David Hartley, and the leaders of the Polish Enlightenment ) and by way of overt state action ( Claude Adrien Helvétius, later Jeremy Bentham ); reliance was placed in cooperation among people ( Charles Fourier, 1808 ), later in eugenics ( Francis Galton, 1869 ).

* Philo, according to the predominant view among scholars, is the character who presents views most similar to those of Hume.

Hume defends this view by 3 arguments-one of them is that the mind cannot think of a certain quality without the degree of that quality, such as a line without a length attached to it.

The justification for attributing life to objects was stated by David Hume in his Natural History of Religion ( Section III ): " There is a universal tendency among mankind to conceive all beings like themselves, and to transfer to every object those qualities with which they are familiarly acquainted, and of which they are intimately conscious.

Hume was disappointed with the reception of the Treatise, which " fell stillborn 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.

This was not an idle concern for Hume.

Anderson and his associate Brit Hume confirmed that Capp was shown out of town by university police, but that the incident had been hushed up by the university to avoid negative publicity.

One of the earliest accounts relating to a large unknown freshwater animal was in 1818, when Hamilton Hume and James Meehan found some large bones at Lake Bathurst in New South Wales.

Soldiers claimed the pair were armed, which was denied by local people, and moderate nationalists including John Hume and Gerry Fitt walked out of the Parliament of Northern Ireland in protest.

Conservatives typically see Richard Hooker as the founding father of conservatism, the Marquess of Halifax as important for his pragmatism, David Hume articulated conservative mistrust of rationalism in politics, and Edmund Burke was the leading early theorist.

There is a debate in the historiography, because Hooker lived too early, Halifax did not belong to any party, Hume was not involved in politics, and Burke was a Whig.

However there was no consistency in Whig ideology, and diverse writers including John Locke, David Hume, Adam Smith and Edmund Burke were all influential among Whigs, although none of them was universally accepted.

Bruce Kent was warned by Cardinal Basil Hume not to become too involved in politics.

The central argument in Principles was that the present is the key to the past – a concept of the Scottish Enlightenment which David Hume had stated as " all inferences from experience suppose ... that the future will resemble the past ", and James Hutton had described when he wrote in 1788 that " from what has actually been, we have data for concluding with regard to that which is to happen thereafter.

David Hume ( 25 August 1776 ) was a Scottish philosopher, historian, economist, and essayist, known especially for his philosophical empiricism and skepticism.

He changed the spelling of his name in 1734, because the fact that his surname ' Home ' was pronounced ' Hume ' in Scotland was not known in England.

Hume attended the University of Edinburgh at the unusually early age of twelve ( possibly as young as ten ) at a time when fourteen was normal.

However, the position was given to William Cleghorn, after Edinburgh ministers petitioned the town council not to appoint Hume because he was seen as an atheist.

During the 1745 Jacobite Rebellion, Hume tutored the Marquis of Annandale ( 1720 – 92 ), who was officially described as a " lunatic ".

But it was then that Hume started his great historical work The History of England, which took fifteen years and ran over a million words, to be published in six volumes in the period between 1754 and 1762, while also involved with the Canongate Theatre.

Hume was charged with heresy, but he was defended by his young clerical friends, who argued that — as an atheist — he was outside the Church's jurisdiction.