Learn more about the rational, ethical worldview that is humanism. Humanists find value in themselves and each other, and respect our fellow human beings
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- Hume's family thought him suited for a career in the law, but he preferred reading classical authors, especially Cicero, whose Offices became his secular substitute for The Whole Duty of Man and his family's strict Calvinism.
plato.stanford.edu/archIves/spr2010/entries/hume/index.html
Feb 26, 2001 · Why, Hume asks, haven’t philosophers been able to make the spectacular progress in understanding human nature that natural philosophers—whom we now call “scientists”—have recently achieved in the physical sciences?
Feb 26, 2001 · The most important philosopher ever to write in English, David Hume (1711-1776) — the last of the great triumvirate of “British empiricists” — was also well-known in his own time as an historian and essayist. A master stylist in any genre, Hume's major philosophical works — A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-1740), the Enquiries ...
Oct 29, 2004 · Hume’s position in ethics, which is based on his empiricist theory of the mind, is best known for asserting four theses: (1) Reason alone cannot be a motive to the will, but rather is the “slave of the passions” (see Section 3) (2) Moral distinctions are not derived from reason (see Section 4).
Challenging the common image of Hume as a thoroughly secular philosopher, I argue that Hume occasionally relied on the design argument to defend the objectivity of values. Hume acknowledged that rejecting design might open the door to aesthetic, ethical, and epistemic relativism.
Mar 18, 2021 · The Scottish eighteenth-century philosopher and historian David Hume can be considered a pioneer of the “natural history of religion” in the sense of a universal history of religion that is not based on theological presuppositions.
Instead, I sketch in very broad brushstrokes the overall structure of Hume's arguments against moral rationalism and how they fit with the parts of his philosophy that, in the next three chapters, I will examine more closely. There are three reasons I am covering this part of Hume's view so quickly.
Nov 28, 2007 · The paper argues that Hume's philosophy is best described as sceptical materialism. It is argued that the conjunction is not self-contradictory as long as ‘scepticism’ is understood in its ancient sense, as the denial of knowledge of the essences of things.
