Hume made experience, habit, sentiment, and the limits of causal inference central to a skeptical natural science of human understanding and social life.
Intellectual setting
Hume wrote in the Scottish Enlightenment amid commercial change, religious controversy, historical writing, and debates over Newtonian method.
Key ideas
Habit and causation
Experience forms expectations of causal regularity, but reason does not demonstratively justify the inference from observed cases to unobserved ones.
Moral sentiment
Moral approval arises from human sentiments and social perspective-taking rather than reason's discovery of independent moral facts alone.
Legacy
His challenges to causation, induction, selfhood, religion, and moral rationalism helped set terms for Kant, pragmatism, analytic philosophy, and cognitive science.