This is philosophy bites with me David Edmonds and me Nigel Warburton.

Philosophy bites is available at W.

Thats W. As David Hume lay dying, he infuriated a friend by refusing to seek consolation in the promise of an afterlife.

Hume, as Scott, is now generally recognized as the greatest English-speaking philosopher to date.

philosophers still grapple with his ideas on causation, on induction, on morality.

Whether he was an atheist or merely anagnostic is debatable.

Peter Milliken, a Hume specialist, believes that he occasionally toned down

his critique of religion for reasons of self-preservation and so as not to alienate

his friends.

His views on religion, Milliken argues, fit into a wider critique of human reason, and it's in what Hume says about the limits of reason

that his real significance lies.

Peace Dominican, welcome to Philosophy Bites. Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here.

The topic we're focusing on is the

significance of David Hume. For many people he is the great philosopher. I wonder

if you could say a bit about who he was and why his work is so significant.

Well David Hume was one of the great philosophers of the early modern period, the 17th and 18th

centuries. He standardly thought of as one of the big three British

empiricists along with Lock and Barclay. But I think Hume has a significance

greater than that. There's a sense in which he stands apart from all of the philosophers of the period as the first really modern thinker who developed a view of human reason which belongs far more naturally with Darwin than with Descartes or Aristotle or any of the previous thinkers.

So what did come before Hume, what was he reacting against?

Well, to understand that, I think it's useful to think of the whole period. So what you had in the early modern period was a reaction against the medieval world and that was largely building by that stage on Aristotle.

Aristotle's theory of the world was based on the idea that everything about the world

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