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17 unusual facts about David Hume


1751 in literature

David Hume - An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals

Benjamin Heath

The Essay towards a Demonstrative Proof of the Divine Existence, Unity and Attributes (1740) was intended to combat the opinions of Voltaire, Rousseau and Hume.

Chirnside

David Hume, the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher, lived in Ninewells House, just south of the village (see below).

It was home to several generations of Homes (later Humes) and was the childhood home, and later the summer home, of David Hume (1711-1776) philosopher, economist and writer.

David Hume

In 1734, after a few months occupied with commerce in Bristol, he went to La Flèche in Anjou, France.

Gua-Le-Ni; or, The Horrendous Parade

By means of fantastic beasts of the same combinatorial nature as Hume’s Pegasus, Gua-Le-Ni; or, The Horrendous Parade asks the players to twist the creative capabilities described in the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding on their heads and use them as game mechanics: impossible paper beasts will parade across the screen (the page of a fantastic bestiary) only to be recognized as combinations of parts of existing animals.

In Hume’s vision, most people possess the mental concept of a Pegasus (Hume, 1748).

According to Hume, the idea of a Pegasus does not fall under the category of simple ideas, which is to say ideas that can be simply derived by having sensory ‘impressions’ of the objects the idea corresponds to.

In general, the Pegasus is presented as a divine horse that could fly using its legendary eagle wings and in David Hume’s work, it is used as a paradigm of something that cannot be encountered by humans in the world they share as biological creatures and yet is thinkable.

From a philosophical perspective, the concept of Gua-Le-Ni was inspired by David Hume’s philosophical understanding of what a ‘complex idea’ is, as well as by the very example he used to elucidate the concept in his 1748 An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding.

J. Y. T. Greig

Greig was a leading scholar on the Scottish philosopher David Hume.

James Hoge Tyler

He was related to the Humes of Nine Wells and Lord Hume of Home, Earl of Home, and was related to David Hume, the great Historian and author.

Maturidi

Both the Ash'aris and Maturidis follow occasionalism, a philosophy which refutes the basis for causality, as David Hume did in Europe many centuries later, but also proves the existence and nature of the Islamic belief of the tawhid (oneness of God) through formal logic.

Pamphilus of Caesarea

David Hume adopted the evocative pseudonym Pamphilus for his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion.

Prestonfield House

The new estate remained in the family's possession for many generations, who played host to many great thinkers of their times, including David Hume, Benjamin Franklin, Dr Samuel Johnson, and Allan Ramsay.

Salomon Maimon

By this critical scepticism Maimon takes up a position intermediate between Kant and Hume.

Whiteadder Water

It is also the site of Ninewells, the childhood home of David Hume.


1833 in South Africa

David Hume, explorer and big-game hunter, becomes the first European to enter the country of the Bamangwato (Botswana)

Aesthetic emotions

This problem was first raised by David Hume, and was revived in current discussion by Richard Moran, Kendall Walton and Tamar Gendler (who introduced the term in its current usage in a 2000 article by the same name).

Alexander Rosenberg

Rosenberg also coauthored an influential book on David Hume with Tom Beauchamp, Hume and the Problem of Causation, arguing that Hume was not a skeptic about induction but an opponent of rationalist theories of inductive inference.

Alison Gopnik

In 2009, Gopnik published a paper in Hume Studies arguing that the historical record regarding the circumstances around David Hume's authoring of A Treatise of Human Nature are wrong.

British idealism

The movement was certainly a reaction against the thinking of John Locke, David Hume, John Stuart Mill, Henry Sidgwick, and other empiricists and utilitarians.

Cosmological argument

David Hume and later Paul Edwards have invoked a similar principle in their criticisms of the cosmological argument.

David Alan Johnson

In his first book, Hume, Holism, and Miracles, Johnson purports to have refuted David Hume's popular argument for the irrationality of belief in testimony of miracles (as can be found in his essay entitled "Of Miracles") as well as several reconstructions of Hume's argument (most notably that of Bayesian philosopher Jordan Howard Sobel).

Donald Livingston

His political philosophy embodies the decentralizing themes echoed by Europeans such as Althusius, David Hume, and Lord Acton and Americans such as Thomas Jefferson, Spencer Roane, Abel Parker Upshur, Robert Hayne and John Calhoun, which holds the community and family as the elemental units of political society.

George Charles Dyhern

General Dyhern's great personality and career was also mentioned in works of John Entick (in General History of the Late War), David Hume (in The History of England) and described in other scientific literature and newspapers all over Europe and America through the 18th and 19th century.

Ideal observer theory

While Adam Smith and David Hume are recognized to have espoused early versions of the ideal observer theory, Roderick Firth is responsible for starting a more sophisticated modern version.

Idealism

Kant focused on ideas drawn from British philosophers such as Locke, Berkeley and Hume but distinguished his transcendental or critical idealism from previous varieties;

James Wilson

After graduating from the University of St. Andrews, he spent two years in Edinburgh and Glasgow studying Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, including Francis Hutcheson, David Hume and Adam Smith.

Juan Huarte de San Juan

His influence can be seen (though not always cited) in the work of Miguel de Cervantes (whose Don Quixote was inspired by him), Francis Bacon, Pierre Charron, Immanuel Kant, Noam Chomsky, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, David Hume, Montesquieu, Friedrich Nietzsche, Francisco de Quevedo, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Arthur Schopenhauer, Jakob Thomasius, and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing.

Manchester capitalism

Theoretically, Manchester Liberalism was founded on the writings of David Hume, Adam Smith and Jean-Baptiste Say.

Moral skepticism

Defenders of some form of moral skepticism include David Hume, J. L. Mackie (1977), Max Stirner, Friedrich Nietzsche, Richard Joyce (2001), Michael Ruse, Joshua Greene, Richard Garner, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong (2006b), and the psychologist James Flynn.

Sacred Hunger

The translator tells the children stories in a pidgin tongue which they all share, while Paris reads to them from Alexander Pope and David Hume.

The Problems of Philosophy

Russell guides the reader through his famous 1910 distinction between "knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description" and introduces important theories of Plato, Aristotle, René Descartes, David Hume, John Locke, Immanuel Kant, G. W. F. Hegel and others to lay the foundation for philosophical inquiry by general readers and scholars alike.

Tom Beauchamp

Beauchamp is the author or co-author of several books on ethics, and on the philosophy of David Hume, including Hume and the Problem of Causation (1981, with Alexander Rosenberg), Principles of Biomedical Ethics (1985, with James F. Childress), and The Human Use of Animals (1998, with F. Barbara Orlans et al).

Young Bengal

: free will, free ordination, fate, faith, the sacredness of truth, the high duty of cultivating virtue, and the meanness of vice, the nobility of patriotism, the attributes of God, and the arguments for and against the existence of the deity as these have been set forth in Hume on one side, and Reid, Dugald Stewart and Brosn on the other, the hollowness of idolatry and the shames of priesthood.