Product Description

A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40), David Hume's comprehensive attempt to base philosophy on a new, observationally grounded study of human nature, is one of the most important texts in Western philosophy. It is also the focal point of current attempts to understand 18th-century philosophy. The Treatise first explains how we form such concepts as cause and effect, external existence, and personal identity, and to form compelling but unconfirmable beliefs in the entities represented by these concepts. It then offers a novel account of the passions, explains freedom and necessity as they apply to human choices and actions, and concludes with detailed explanations of how we distinguish between virtue and vice and of the different kinds of virtue. Hume's Abstract of the Treatise, also included in the volume, outlines his 'chief argument' regarding our conception of, and belief in, cause and effect. The texts printed in this volume are those of the critical edition of Hume's philosophical works now being published by the Clarendon Press. The volume includes a substantial introduction explaining the aims of the Treatise as a whole and of each of its ten parts, extensive annotations, a glossary of terms, a comprehensive index, and suggestions for further reading.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #67293 in Books
• Published on: 2000-01-27
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 626 pages

About the Author
David Norton FRSC is Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Mc Gill University. He is author of David Hume: Common-Sense Moralist, Sceptical Metaphysician (1982), and editor of The Cambridge Companion to Hume (1993), and, with Mary J. Norton, an independent scholar, co-author of The Hume Library (1996).

Customer Reviews

The fuse of a great revolution in Philosophy.
The german philosopher Kant used to say that was David Hume who had waked him up from the sleep of the dogmatic metaphysics. Nowhere but in this book we can feel such a force, increased by the vigour of the youth. In the peak of a english tradition in empirism, with origins in William of Ockham, Hume attacks in his Treatise each one of the fundamentals thesis of the traditional metaphysiscs: he denies the immortality of the soul, the certainty of a external world, the reality of the space, the existence of substances and (that's his most famous insight) the necessity of the law of causality. All these remarks will prepare the soil to the great revolution of Kant as well as the epistemology of Sir Karl Popper.

Being a fuss-pot
Having only ordered this work, I cannot contribute an opinion of quality or content. Sad as I am, this will comprise part of my holiday reading. My contention is that the work is described as a major contribution to the tome of English philosophy. Most will be aware of it as the major work of the nascent Scottish Enlightenment.

Sorry to be so pernickety.