David Hume - Part 1: A World on the Edge of Certainty

Imagine walking into a library where every book is a debate, every shelf a battlefield between old certainties and new doubts. This was the world David Hume inherited—a Scotland newly joined to England, minds electrified by science yet haunted by the ghosts of metaphysical authority.In this world, answers were provisional and certainty was a luxury. The question was no longer just what we can know, but whether knowledge itself could survive the loss of its ancient guarantees. Hume was born in seventeen eleven, just a few years after the Union of Scotland and England. But the more radical union was intellectual. The old scholastic language still lingered in universities, yet Isaac Newton’s physics and John Locke’s psychology promised a new way to study reality. Could the world be explained by laws, observation, and experiment rather than by inherited tradition? In Hume’s time, that was not a settled matter. Every merchant, physician, and minister depended on the confidence that bread would nourish, fire would burn, and tomorrow would resemble today. But what, if anything, justified that confidence?Learn more at: https://thephilosophyarchive.com/philosophy/david-humeThe Philosophy Archive is part of The Archive Network by Jonkai Ventures, a collection of podcasts dedicated to exploring the great ideas and thinkers that shaped how we think.Support the podcast and access exclusive content on Patreon:https://thearchivenetwork.com/supportDiscover more archives and stories:https://thearchivenetwork.comExplore this archive:https://thephilosophyarchive.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.