书评

If we look back over the entire history of philosophy, philosophers are usually not afraid to be obscure and incomprehensible in their own style of writing, but Hume was one of the rare people who could combine profound philosophical thought with a beautiful prose style, and he became one of the rare people who made a fortune from philosophical writing. He never held a position in any university or research institution in his life, but he achieved a reputation throughout Europe for his brilliant writing. A Study of Human Understanding is a masterpiece of modern empiricist philosophy, in which Hume carried the methods of experimental philosophy and the principles of empiricism to their logical conclusion with a touch of skepticism: the knowledge of the world that humans think they possess is mostly unreliable, but that is all we can get as human beings. Because of this surprising and troubling conclusion, Hume became a landmark figure in the history of philosophy, and for centuries afterwards, philosophers could not talk about human understanding and knowledge without talking about Hume's conclusion and giving their own judgments.