Early modern · 1711–1776
Who influenced David Hume?
Influences and legacy
Reduced causation to habit and woke Kant from his dogmatic slumber.
David Hume was influenced by Michel de Montaigne, John Locke, Nicolas Malebranche, Pierre Bayle and George Berkeley, and went on to influence Thomas Reid, Adam Smith, Immanuel Kant and Jeremy Bentham. That is 9 lines of the 448 documented lines of influence between the 279 thinkers on this map.
Read on Wikipedia Portrait: Allan Ramsay, Public domain See the whole map
Who was David Hume?
Beginning with A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), the Scottish philosopher David Hume set out to build a naturalistic science of man. Following Locke, he denied innate ideas and traced all ideas back to impressions. He argued that induction and belief in causation cannot be justified by reason: we never perceive one event causing another, only their constant conjunction, and expect the future to resemble the past out of habit.
He held that the passions, not reason, govern conduct, that ethics rests on sentiment, and that no "ought" follows from an "is". The self, for him, is only a bundle of perceptions. In his lifetime he was famous mainly for his History of England; later he shaped utilitarianism, logical positivism and analytic philosophy, and Kant said Hume woke him from his "dogmatic slumber".
Summarized from the lead of the Wikipedia article.
Who influenced David Hume?
5 direct influences on this map, earliest first.
- Michel de Montaigne 1533–1592
- John Locke 1632–1704
- Nicolas Malebranche 1638–1715
- Pierre Bayle 1647–1706
- George Berkeley 1685–1753
Who did David Hume influence?
4 thinkers on this map draw directly on David Hume.
- Thomas Reid 1710–1796
- Adam Smith 1723–1790
- Immanuel Kant 1724–1804
- Jeremy Bentham 1748–1832
The line of teachers behind David Hume
The longest documented line of influence ending at David Hume runs 17 generations back, to Thales of Miletus.
Two steps away from David Hume
Indirect influences
- Through Michel de Montaigne: Cicero, Lucretius, Seneca, Plutarch, Sextus Empiricus, Erasmus
- Through John Locke: René Descartes
The second generation
- Through Immanuel Kant: Johann Gottfried Herder, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Georg W. F. Hegel, Johann Friedrich Herbart, Bernard Bolzano, Arthur Schopenhauer, Charles Sanders Peirce, Gottlob Frege, Georg Simmel, Max Weber, Ernst Cassirer, Karl Popper, Hannah Arendt, John Rawls
- Through Adam Smith: Karl Marx
- Through Jeremy Bentham: John Stuart Mill
Contemporaries of David Hume
Thinkers on this map born within 25 years of David Hume, with no direct line between them.
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau 1712–1778
- Denis Diderot 1713–1784
- Étienne Bonnot de Condillac 1714–1780
- Émilie du Châtelet 1706–1749
- Hryhorii Skovoroda 1722–1794
- Voltaire 1694–1778
- Gotthold Ephraim Lessing 1729–1781
- Moses Mendelssohn 1729–1786
David Hume by the numbers
- Direct influences
- 5
- Direct followers
- 4 — #24 of 279 on this map
- Thinkers upstream
- 60
- Thinkers downstream
- 108
- Wikipedia languages
- 111 — #14 of 36 among early modern philosophers
- Card rarity
- Legendary
Schools and lineages
- Empiricists: John Locke, George Berkeley, David Hume
Questions about David Hume
- Who influenced David Hume?
- Michel de Montaigne, John Locke, Nicolas Malebranche, Pierre Bayle and George Berkeley.
- Who did David Hume influence?
- Thomas Reid, Adam Smith, Immanuel Kant and Jeremy Bentham.
- When did David Hume live?
- 1711–1776. The map files David Hume under the early modern period.
- How rare is the David Hume card?
- Wikipedia carries an article on David Hume in 111 languages, which makes it a Legendary card. Legendary starts at 100 languages, Epic at 50 and Rare at 25.
More early modern philosophers
- René Descartes 1596–1650
- Immanuel Kant 1724–1804
- Voltaire 1694–1778
- Adam Smith 1723–1790
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau 1712–1778
- Niccolò Machiavelli 1469–1527
- Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz 1646–1716
- John Locke 1632–1704