6 ideas from David Hume, each explained in a minute and credited to the original work. Free on Savvy.
David Hume noticed that moral arguments quietly slide from describing how things are to prescribing how they should be, without ever explaining the jump. No amount of factual descr…
— David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature
David Hume pointed out we have no logical guarantee the future will resemble the past — every argument for trusting induction, because it's worked before, is itself an inductive ar…
— David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature
In 1748, David Hume argued every object of human reasoning falls into just two categories: 'relations of ideas' — like mathematics, true by logic alone — and 'matters of fact,' kno…
— David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
David Hume argued the whole free-will debate rests on a bad definition of liberty. Redefine freedom not as an escape from causation, but simply as acting according to your own desi…
— David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
When David Hume introspected to find a stable, continuous self behind his thoughts, he reported finding nothing but a bundle of fleeting perceptions, one after another, with no uni…
— David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature
Hume argued in 1752 that if one country somehow accumulated most of the world's gold, its prices would rise so much that its exports would become too expensive to sell, while impor…
— David Hume, Of the Balance of Trade