An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

“In the Enquiry he puts forward his particular empirical account of the mind. There’s a whole section on morality and so on, but the key bit for me is where he’s talking about how, following on from John Locke and the tradition of seeing the mind as a blank slate, we get ideas from what he calls ‘sense impressions’. If you think of an impression as like a footprint left in the sand, the senses get impressed, somewhat passively, by information that comes in from outside. And the impression that’s left in the mind, when we think about it away from what we’re seeing, is called an idea.” Read more...

Key Philosophical Texts in the Western Canon

Nigel Warburton, Philosopher

“This is a wonderful, humane book saying that nobody has all the answers. I felt that a great weight had been lifted from my shoulders when I read it.” Read more...

Books that Inspired a Liberal Economist

Paul Krugman, Economist

“Hume thought that overconfidence and dogmatism led to intolerance, to faction, to a lot of the crimes of human history.” Read more...

The best books on David Hume

Simon Blackburn, Philosopher