Author Description

An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding is a book by the Scottish empiricist and philosopher David Hume, published in 1748. It was a simplification of an earlier effort, Hume's A Treatise of Human Nature, published anonymously in London in 1739-1740. Hume was disappointed with the reception of the Treatise (it "fell dead-born from the press", as he put it) and so tried again to disseminate his ideas to the public by writing a shorter and more polemical work. The end product of his labors was the Enquiry. The Enquiry dispensed with much of the material from the Treatise, in favor of clarifying and emphasizing its most important aspects. For example, Hume's views on personal identity, do not appear. However, more vital propositions -- such as Hume's argument for the role of habit in a theory of knowledge -- are retained. This book was highly influential, both in the years that would immediately follow and today. Immanuel Kant points to it as the book which woke him from his self-described "dogmatic slumber". The Enquiry is widely regarded as a classic in modern philosophical literature. (Quote from wikipedia.org) About the Author David Hume (1711 - 1776) David Hume (April 26, 1711 - August 25, 1776) was an 18th-century Scottish philosopher, economist, and historian, considered among the most important figures in the history of Western philosophy and the Scottish Enlightenment. He first gained recognition and respect as a historian, but interest in Hume's work in academia has in recent years centred on his philosophical writing. His History of England was the standard work on English history for sixty or seventy years until Macaulay's. Hume was the first great philosopher of the modern era to carve out a thorou