An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding - Couverture souple

Hume, David

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 1537430351 ISBN 13 : 9781537430355

Editeur : CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2016

A propos du livre

Biographie de l'auteur :

David Hume (7 May 1711 NS (26 April 1711 OS) – 25 August 1776) was a Scottish historian, philosopher, economist, diplomat and essayist known today especially for his radical philosophical empiricism and scepticism. 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. He wrote The History of England which became a best-seller, and it became the standard history of England in its day. His empirical approach places him with John Locke, George Berkeley, and a handful of others at the time 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 opposition to the rationalists who preceded him, most notably René Descartes, he concluded that desire rather than reason governed human behaviour. He also argued against the existence of innate ideas, concluding that humans have knowledge only of things they directly experience. He argued that inductive reasoning and therefore causality cannot be justified rationally. Our assumptions in favour of these result from custom and constant conjunction rather than logic. He concluded that humans have no actual conception of the self, only of a bundle of sensations associated with the self. Hume's compatibilist theory of free will proved extremely influential on subsequent moral philosophy. 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 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. In addition, according to philosopher Jerry Fodor, Hume's Treatise is "the founding document of cognitive science". Hume engaged with contemporary intellectual luminaries such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Adam Smith (who acknowledged Hume's influence on his economics and political philosophy), also with James Boswell. Immanuel Kant credited Hume with awakening him from "dogmatic slumbers".

Présentation de l'éditeur :

Hume's excellent account of human nature and mental functioning is published here complete and inclusive of original notes.

Often referred to as simply 'The Enquiry', this work is notable for setting forth a number of the concepts which would come to define David Hume's contribution to empirical philosophy. Although selling poorly at the time of first publication in 1748, this book found recognition following Hume's death as his ideas became increasingly appreciated in academic circles.

An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding has an intuitive layout - commencing with an introduction to the philosophic matters at hand, Hume delves incrementally into his beliefs on the nature of the human being. The means by which people mentally formulate ideas occupies a large tract of the work, while the process of learning, assimilating and memorising information is also discussed.

Later chapters focus on abstract topics, including the relation of probability to human activity, the inter-relatedness of individual ideas, and the merits of societal liberty in allowing man to exert his free will. Comparisons of human perception and behaviour with members of the animal kingdom, together with an examination of human testimony in the context of miraculous events, are also present.

Today, this work by Hume is considered a classic of Enlightenment era philosophy, and remains a required text in many university courses.

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
• Date d'édition: 2016
• ISBN 10: 1537430351
• ISBN 13: 9781537430355
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 128