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Marking the tercentenary of David Hume's birth, Annette Baier has created an engaging guide to the philosophy of one of the greatest thinkers of Enlightenment Britain. Drawing deeply on a lifetime of scholarship and incisive commentary, she deftly weaves Hume's autobiography together with his writings and correspondence, finding in these personal experiences new ways to illuminate his ideas about religion, human nature, and the social order.Excerpts from Hume's autobiography at the beginning of each chapter open a window onto the eighteenth-century context in which Hume's philosophy developed. Famous in Christian Britain as a polymath and a nonbeliever, Hume recounts how his early encounters with clerical authority laid the foundation for his lifelong skepticism toward religion. In Scotland, where he grew up, he had been forced to study lists of sins in order to spot his own childish flaws, he reports. Later, as a young man, he witnessed the clergy's punishment of a pregnant unmarried servant, and this led him to question the violent consequences of the Church's emphasis on the doctrine of original sin. Baier's clear interpretation of Hume's Treatise of Human Nature explains the link between Hume's growing disillusionment and his belief that ethics should be based on investigations of human nature, not on religious dogma.Four months before he died, Hume concluded his autobiography with a eulogy he wrote for his own funeral. It makes no mention of his flaws, critics, or disappointments. Baier's more realistic account rivets our attention on connections between the way Hume lived and the way he thought-insights unavailable to Hume himself, perhaps, despite his lifelong introspection.

Electronic books. --- BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Philosophers. --- Books in machine-readable form --- Digital books --- E-books --- Ebooks --- Online books --- Books --- Electronic publications --- Hume, David, --- Hume, David

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Hume, David,

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Annette Baier delivers an appeal for our fundamental moral notions to be governed not by rules and codes but by trust: a moral prejudice. Along the way, she gives us the best feminist philosophy there is. Baier’s topics range from violence to love, from cruelty to justice, and are linked by a preoccupation with vulnerability and inequality of vulnerability, with trust and distrust of equals, with cooperation and isolation. Throughout, she is concerned with the theme of women’s roles. In this provocative exploration of the implications of trusting to trust rather than proscription, Baier interweaves anecdote and autobiography with readings of Hume and Kant to produce an entertaining, challenging, and highly readable book.

Ethics --- Ethiek --- Ethiek [Feministische ] --- Ethique --- Ethique féministe --- Feminist ethics --- Feministische ethiek --- Feminism --- Deontology --- Ethics, Primitive --- Ethology --- Moral philosophy --- Morality --- Morals --- Philosophy, Moral --- Science, Moral --- Philosophy --- Values --- Moral and ethical aspects --- Ethics. --- Feminist ethics.

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Character --- Knowledge, Theory of --- Philosophical anthropology --- Reason --- Skepticism --- Scepticism --- Unbelief --- Agnosticism --- Belief and doubt --- Free thought --- Mind --- Intellect --- Rationalism --- Anthropology, Philosophical --- Man (Philosophy) --- Civilization --- Life --- Ontology --- Humanism --- Persons --- Philosophy of mind --- Epistemology --- Theory of knowledge --- Philosophy --- Psychology --- Ethology --- Ethics --- Personality --- Hume, David --- Hume, David,

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Annette Baier’s aim is to make sense of David Hume’s Treatise as a whole. Hume’s family motto, which appears on his bookplate, was “True to the End.” Baier argues that it is not until the end of the Treatise that we get his full story about “truth and falsehood, reason and folly.” By the end, we can see the cause to which Hume has been true throughout the work. Baier finds Hume’s Treatise on Human Nature to be a carefully crafted literary and philosophical work which itself displays a philosophical progress of sentiments. His starting place is an overly abstract intellectualism that deliberately thrusts passions and social concerns into the background. In the three interrelated books of the Treatise, his “self-understander” proceeds through partial successes and dramatic failures to emerge with new-found optimism, expecting that the “exact knowledge” the morally self-conscious anatomist of human nature can acquire will itself improve and correct our vision of morality. Baier describes how, by turning philosophy toward human nature instead of toward God and the universe, Hume initiated a new philosophy, a broader discipline of reflection that can embrace Charles Darwin and Michel Foucault as well as William James and Sigmund Freud. Hume belongs both to our present and to our past.

Knowledge, Theory of. --- Reason. --- Skepticism. --- Scepticism --- Unbelief --- Agnosticism --- Belief and doubt --- Free thought --- Mind --- Intellect --- Rationalism --- Epistemology --- Theory of knowledge --- Philosophy --- Psychology --- Hume, David --- Hume, David,