This work is the third in the 10-volume series "Early Responses to Hume", which is an edited and annotated collection of eighteenth-and nineteenth-century critical reactions to Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711-1776) . Both a philosopher and historian, he was infamous in his day for his skeptical views on human nature, knowledge, metaphysics, and religion.

Some of the most important early critical discussions of the Treatise of Human Nature, the metaphysical and epistemological portions of An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, and A Dissertation on the Passions are reproduced in this set, including responses from Immanuel Kant, Thomas Reid, and James Beattie.

The intellectual scope and cultural impact of British writers cannot be assessed without reference to their European 'fortunes'. These essays, prepared by an international team of scholars, critics and translators, record the ways in which David Hume has been translated, evaluated and emulated in different national and linguistic areas of Europe. This is the first collection of essays to consider how and where Hume's works were initially understood throughout Europe. They reflect on how early European responses to Hume relied on available French translations, and concentrated on his Political Discourses and his History, and how later German translations enabled professional philosophers to discuss his more abstract ideas. Also explored is the idea that continental readers were not able to judge the accuracy of the translations they read, nor did many consider the contexts in which Hume was writing: rather, they were intent on using what they read for their own purposes.

Holden presents a study of theories of the internal architecture of matter in the 17th & 18th centuries. He offers a synthesis of discussions by Galileo, Descartes, Newton and Kant, amongst others, and gives his own interpretation of the debate.

David Hume (1711-1776), philosopher, historian, and essayist, is widely considered to be Britain's greatest philosopher. One of the leading intellectual figures of the Scottish Enlightenment, his major works and central ideas, especially his radical empiricism and his critique of the pretensions of philosophical rationalism, remain hugely influential on contemporary philosophers. This comprehensive and accessible guide to Hume's life and work includes 21 specially commissioned essays, written by a team of leading experts, covering every aspect of Hume's thought. The Companion presents details of Hume's life, historical and philosophical context, providing students with a comprehensive overview of all the key themes and topics apparent in his work, including his accounts of causal reasoning, scepticism, the soul and the self, action, reason, free will, miracles, natural religion, politics, human nature, women, economics and history, and an account of his reception and enduring influence. This textbook is indispensable to anyone studying in the areas of Hume Studies, British, and eighteenth-century philosophy.

The divide between the sciences and the humanities, which often seem to speak entirely different languages, has its roots in the way intellectual disciplines developed in the long eighteenth century. As various fields of study became defined and to some degree professionalized, their ways of communicating evolved into an increasingly specialist vocabulary. Chemists, physicists, philosophers, and poets argued about whether their discourses should become more and more specialised, or whether they should aim to remain intelligible to the layperson. In this interdisciplinary study, Robin Valenza shows how Isaac Newton, Samuel Johnson, David Hume, Adam Smith, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth invented new intellectual languages. By offering a much-needed account of the rise of the modern disciplines, Robin Valenza shows why the sciences and humanities diverged so strongly, and argues that literature has a special role in navigating between the languages of different areas of thought.

Tom Beauchamp presents the definitive scholarly edition of two famous works by David Hume, both originally published in 1757. In A Dissertation on the Passions Hume sets out his original view of the nature and central role of passion and emotion. The Natural History of Religion is a landmark work in the study of religion as a natural phenomenon.

Demonstrates the uniqueness of Hume as an Enlightenment thinker, illustrating how his 'spirit of scepticism' often leads him into seemingly paradoxical positions. This book will be of interest to Hume scholars, intellectual historians of 17th- to 19th-century Europe and those interested in the Enlightenment more widely.

Jay L. Garfield defends two exegetical theses regarding Hume's Treatise on Human Nature. The first is that Book II is the theoretical foundation of the Treatise. Second, Garfield argues that we cannot understand Hume's project without an appreciation of his own understanding of custom, and in particular, without an appreciation of the grounding of his thought about custom in the legal theory and debates of his time. Custom is the source of Hume's thoughts about normativity, not only in ethics and in political theory, but also in epistemological, linguistics, and scientific practice- and is the source of his insight that our psychological and social natures are so inextricably linked. The centrality of custom and the link between the psychological and the social are closely connected, which is why Garfield begins with Book II. There are four interpretative perspectives at work in this volume: one is a naturalistic skeptical interpretation of Hume's Treatise; a second is the foregrounding of Book II of the Treatise as foundational for Books I and III. A third is the consideration of the Treatise in relation to Hume's philosophical antecedents (particularly Sextus, Bayle, Hutcheson, Shaftesbury, and Mandeville), as well as eighteenth century debates about the status of customary law, with one eye on its sequellae in the work of Kant, the later Wittgenstein, and in contemporary cognitive science. The fourth is the Buddhist tradition in which many of the ideas Hume develops are anticipated and articulated in somewhat different ways. Garfield presents Hume as a naturalist, a skeptic and as, above all, a communitarian. In offering this interpretation, he provides an understanding of the text as a whole in the context of the literature to which it responded, and in the context of the literature it inspired.