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David Hume (1711AD – 1776AD)

David Hume

David Hume was a Scottish philosopher, economist, historian and a key figure in the history of Western philosophy and the Scottish Enlightenment. Hume is often grouped with John Locke, George Berkeley, and a handful of others as a British Empiricist. During Hume's lifetime, he was more famous as a historian; his six-volume History of England was a bestseller well into the nineteenth century and the standard work on English history for many years.

Hume was the first philosopher of the modern era to develop a systematically naturalistic philosophy. The philosophical tradition at the time held that human minds operated on principles analogous to those of God: the human mind was simply a miniature version of the divine mind. However, Hume rejected this notion, and the related view that we are imbued with a faculty of reason that guides us to the truth. Eschewing religion, he studied human nature scientifically, looking for the principles structuring the content of the human mind. Hume called his quasi-Newtonian project the "science of man." From Wikipedia

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Philosophytexts.net has the following Hume articles available:

An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

An Enquiry into the Principles of Morals