David HumeDavid Hume was a Scottish Enlightenment philosopher, historian, economist, librarian, and essayist who lived from May 7, 1711 (26 April 1711 OS) to August 25, 1776. He is best known today for his very important system of empiricism, skepticism, and nturalism. Starting with A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), Hume tried to make a scientific study of people that looked at how their minds work. Like John Locke, Hume didn't believe in innate ideas and came to the conclusion that all information comes from experience alone. He is an empiricist, like Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and George Berkeley. Hume said that trust in causality and inductive reasoning are not logically sound; they come from mental habits and customs. We only experience the "constant conjunction" of events, which means that we never really think that one event leads to another. This induction problem means that you have to assume that the future will be like the past in order to draw any causal conclusions from the past. This is a philosophical assumption that can't be based on past experience. Read More Read Less