Introduction
David Hume is a towering figure of the Scottish Enlightenment, of the history of philosophy in general, and his contributions are significant in the history of the human sciences too. There are several good general introductions available to his ideas and arguments in varying length and detail (for two very different recent ones, see Garrett 2015 and Harris 2015), and I see no obvious ways to improve on the existing literature. So in accordance with the integrative aspirations of this Encyclopedia, this entry will be focused specifically on the much less discussed significance of his philosophy for the history of science. If looked at from this angle, Hume’s contributions can be summarized in at least two possible ways: they can be read as contributions to the early history of modern human sciences from cognitive psychology to sociology and as contributions to the metaphysical and epistemological discourse on then-contemporary knowledge-making practices. Here I propose to...
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References
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Demeter, T. (2020). Hume, David (1711–1776). In: Jalobeanu, D., Wolfe, C. (eds) Encyclopedia of Early Modern Philosophy and the Sciences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-20791-9_440-1
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