title: The Cambridge Companion to Hume (Cambridge Companions to Philosophy)
author: David Fate Norton
description: David Hume's mother reportedly lamented, "Our Davie is a fine good-natured critter, but uncommon weak-minded." Perhaps she would have been comforted to know that today her son is widely considered to be the most important philosopher ever to have written in the English language. The <i>Companion</i>'s 11 essays take the reader from Hume's precocious <i>Treatise of Human Nature</i>--published in 1739, when he was only 28--to the posthumously published <i>Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion</i>, and cover not only the subjects central to Hume's philosophy but also his views on politics, economics, literary and aesthetic theory, and even history. As David Wootton's essay observes, the British Library catalog identifies Hume as "the historian"--"to the puzzlement," Wootton quips, "of generations of philosophers." Also included are Hume's two short autobiographies, written in his own inimitable style: he describes the unexcited reaction to his <i>Treatise</i> by saying that "it fell dead-born from the press, without reaching such distinction as even to excite a murmur among the zealots."
zlib_text: Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006
  DAVID FATE NORTON
  1 
  An introduction to
  Hume's thought
  David Hume (1711-76) may be best understood as the first post-
  sceptical philosopher of the early modern period. Many of Hume's
  immediate predecessors, particularly the Cartesians, had attempted
  to refute philosophical scepticism. In contrast to these predecessors,
  Hume was a self-proclaimed sceptic who consciously developed a
  philosophical position that is at one and the same time fundamen-
  tally sceptical and fundamentally constructive. His position is
  sceptical in so far as he shows that knowledge has nothing like the
  firm, reliable foundation the Cartesians or other rationalists had
  claimed to give it; his position is constructive in so far as he under-
  took to articulate a new science of human nature that would provide
  for all the sciences, including morals and politics, a unique and
  defensible foundation. For nearly two centuries the positive side of
  Hume's though