Hume made experience, habit, sentiment, and the limits of causal inference central to a skeptical natural science of human understanding and social life.
Hume locates necessity in observed regularities and the inferences we draw from them. Liberty is the power to act according to one’s will, contrasted with constraint. Character-based explanations can support responsibility: without a stable connection between action and disposition, the action would not reveal what sort of person performed it. The agreement depends on accepting these accounts of necessity and liberty.
Works or evidence:Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding VIII, parts I–II.
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.