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Thinker profile

David Hume

Critiques causality, substance, miracles, and natural theology by limiting knowledge to impressions and habits of expectation.

Dates

1711-1776

Tradition

Empiricist

Core profile

Critiques causality, substance, miracles, and natural theology by limiting knowledge to impressions and habits of expectation.

Concepts to watch

Causalityempiricismnatural theology

How to study this thinker

  1. 1Start with the basic problem this thinker is trying to solve.
  2. 2Name the concepts Aquinas receives, corrects, or resists.
  3. 3Return to Aquinas and ask how the borrowed insight is reordered.

Aquinas connection

Later challenge

Hume attacks causal necessity and weakens the path from the world to God.

Possible Thomistic defense

The Thomistic defense treats causality as a metaphysical principle of act, potency, and dependence, not merely a repeated sequence of events.

Adjacent profiles

Previous thinkerRene DescartesBegins from methodic doubt and treats mind and body through a sharply dualist framework.Next thinkerImmanuel KantLimits speculative metaphysics by arguing that the mind structures experience and cannot know things in themselves as such.