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📖 A Treatise of Human Nature

Meet Hume's challenge to certainty through experience, habit, passion, sympathy, and the human conventions that make justice possible.

lessons

~15 min

to learn

🏺 Philosophy

subject

Adults

level

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What you’ll learn

Experience before theoryUse Hume's copy principle and account of causation to distinguish experience from inference.Hume tests ideas against impressions, then explains causal expectation as a habit formed by repeated conjunctions.
Self, passion, and actionExplain Hume's account of personal identity and motivation without turning it into a rejection of reason.The self is a connected stream of perceptions, while desire supplies ends and reason helps find means.
Morality as a human practiceDescribe how sentiment and useful conventions shape Hume's moral theory.Moral judgment involves feeling informed by facts, and justice becomes valuable through shared social rules.

Questions this course answers

What is Hume's copy principle?

Hume argues that simple ideas are fainter copies of simple impressions, while complex ideas can combine simpler materials.

Why do we form causal expectations?

Repeated experience produces a felt transition of thought, not a deductive guarantee.

What supplies motivation according to Hume?

Reason can guide action, but an end must matter through passion or sentiment.

Why is justice called artificial?

Justice depends on useful conventions, even though the resulting virtue is genuine.

Based on a real book

This course is built from A Treatise of Human Nature by David Hume — the complete public-domain text, free to read and listen to on Wunder. The book itself is never rewritten or AI-edited; this course teaches its ideas.

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📖Hume’s Enquiry: Experience, Causation, and Belief 📖An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding 📚Common Sense: How to Exercise It 🧭Discourse on Method 🎭Faust, Part One 📜Nicomachean Ethics 🏛️Meditations — Marcus Aurelius (Quick Summary)👑The Prince — Machiavelli (Quick Summary)

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