Works by David Hume

Works by David Hume David Hume's corpus spans metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, historiography, and criticism, influencing figures across the Enlightenment, Romanticism, and analytic philosophy. His writings intersect with thinkers and institutions such as John Locke, George Berkeley, Immanuel Kant, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, Royal Society, University of Edinburgh, and British Museum, and extend to debates involving the Glorious Revolution, the Act of Union 1707, the Jacobite rising of 1745, and the intellectual milieus of Paris, Edinburgh, London, and Geneva.

Major philosophical works

Hume's principal philosophical treatises include the multi-part A Treatise of Human Nature, the influential An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, and the related An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, each responding to and shaping conversations with René Descartes, Thomas Hobbes, David Hartley, Francis Hutcheson, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury, and Bishop Berkeley. The A Treatise of Human Nature synthesizes arguments about perception and the self, addressing positions taken by Aristotle, Galen, and critics in the Scottish Enlightenment; it contains sustained discussion of causation that later provoked responses from Immanuel Kant and Edmund Burke. The Enquiry on understanding popularized empiricist skepticism, examining miracles and induction in dialogue with accounts by Pierre-Simon Laplace and rebuttals from Thomas Reid and proponents at the University of Glasgow. The moral enquiry refines Hume's moral sentimentalism, engaging with Adam Smith's moral philosophy, Jean-Jacques Rousseau's critique, and debates in the Royal Society of Edinburgh about virtue and custom.

Essays and shorter writings

Hume's essays and polemical pieces—collected in editions like the Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary—address subjects ranging from aesthetics to political theory, connecting to figures such as William Robertson, Lord Kames, Henry Home, Lord Kames, James Boswell, Samuel Johnson, and institutions like the East India Company and Bank of England. Essays on tragedy and the sublime converse with traditions traced to Longinus, Horace, and Alexander Pope; political essays reflect on the Glorious Revolution and critique contemporary statesmen including Robert Walpole. His writings on economics and commerce interact with John Law, Mercantilism, and contemporaries like Richard Cantillon and William Pitt the Elder. Shorter works—on taste, poetry, and liberty—were influential among readers in Parisian salons, the Royal Society, and the literary networks around Lord Byron, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and William Wordsworth.

Historical and literary works

Hume's multi-volume The History of England charts developments from the Roman conquest of Britain through the reign of William III, engaging with narratives by Raphael Holinshed, Francis Bacon, and Edward Gibbon. Commissioned and read across Europe, the history engaged monarchs and ministers such as George II, George III, William Pitt the Younger, Horace Walpole, and intellectuals like Montesquieu and Voltaire. Hume's historical method provoked responses from historians at the University of Oxford, antiquarians like John Aubrey, and critics including Thomas Babington Macaulay. His essays on literature and criticism address Shakespearean and classical drama, dialoguing with the legacies of William Shakespeare, John Milton, Sophocles, Euripides, and contemporary critics such as Samuel Johnson and Edmund Burke.

Posthumous and unfinished writings

Posthumous publications and unfinished manuscripts, edited after Hume's death by figures like Lord Brougham and preserved in collections at the Bodleian Library and British Museum, include drafts on metaphysics, religion, and political economy that illuminate connections with Joseph Butler, Bishop Berkeley, William Paley, and reformers such as John Wilkes. These papers reveal exploratory treatments of miracles, natural theology, and the problem of induction that bear on later debates by Pierre Bayle, John Stuart Mill, and Charles Sanders Peirce. Posthumous dialogues and notebooks trace Hume's engagement with diplomatic correspondents in Paris and Rome, and with legal thinkers like Blackstone; they also influenced editors and translators including Thomas Reid's contemporaries and later compilers at the University of Glasgow.

Editions, translations, and compilations

Hume's works have appeared in numerous editions, influenced editorial projects by Adam Smith, William Guthrie, Ludwig Feuerbach, and modern scholarly editions produced by institutions such as the Clarendon Press, the University of Oxford, and the Edinburgh University Press. Major collected editions—like the Works and Correspondence of David Hume—provide critical apparatus that situates Hume among correspondents including Benjamin Franklin, Voltaire, D'Alembert, Cesare Beccaria, Joseph Priestley, and Thomas Jefferson. Translations into French, German, Italian, and Spanish spread Hume's influence to audiences in Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Rome, and Madrid, shaping receptions by thinkers such as Kant, Herder, Hegel, Marx, and Mill. Modern anthologies and scholarly commentaries produced by centers like the Hume Society, the Institute of Historical Research, and university presses continue to edit, translate, and compile Hume's manuscripts, correspondence, and marginalia for global scholarly use.

Category:David Hume