The significance of David Hume: Scepticism, science and superstition

David Hume has long been seen as Scotland’s – and indeed the English-speaking world’s – greatest philosopher, but also as a puzzling thinker, with sceptical views that seem hard to reconcile with his enthusiastic advocacy of human science. Recent interpreters have moved towards a far more coherent and integrated view of his philosophy, revealing a strikingly modern thinker who is increasingly honoured as a rival to Aristotle and Kant as arguably the most significant philosopher of all time.

This lecture presents Hume in this light, as a scientific revolutionary and a crucial influence on Adam Smith, Darwin, Einstein, and a host of recent philosophers. It exhibits for the first time a new electronic edition of Hume’s posthumous masterpiece, the Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, whose handwritten pages cunningly encode his still-disputed attitude to religion.