A Treatise of Human Nature

"I was awoken from my dogmatic slumber." -Kant, on reading Hume. In my opinion, this is probably one of the most thoroughly logical and most disturbing books ever written. Hume's use of reason completely dissects that habituation that we call "intuition", and moreover, shows how inductive reasoning i......more

It was right before David Hume's (1711-76) sixteenth birthday that he began to write his A Treaties of Human Nature. It took him 10 years to prepare a draft which he published in three volumes between 1739-1740. Hume, a Scottish philosopher and a moderate skeptic, attempts to introduce the method of......more

The real ‘scandal’ is not what Kant referred to in his 800 page rebuttal to Hume’s belief of skepticism about the real world, or the ‘scandal’ that Heidegger referred to that we were still debating the phenomenal world as such, the real scandal is that more people don’t read books like this one. Hum......more

David Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature is not a breezy book. From the first page, it plunged me into a fervid mode of double-layered analysis in which my struggle to comprehend the text was mirrored by efforts to track my personal reactions to whatever content I was able to wrest from it. Early on,......more

I just wrote a long review of this book, and Goodreads or the internet ate it. Grrrr... Here are the high points of that review. Three years to read this. Of that, almost the full time was stuck on the first two parts of the second book, which seemed both dull and pointless. It ended up that it was j......more