Hume: A suspicious seeker

He recast much of Book I of the Treatise into his Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding and the material from Book III into his Inquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals.

One of Hume's major goals was to develop the empirical philosophy of Locke and Berkeley to its logical conclusion. Whereas Locke's views were tempered by commonsense notions of reality, often inconsistently, and Berkeley made an exception to his empiricist principles by relying on the concept of a transcendental other (God), Hume refused to make his philosophy bow either to common sense - for which he was criticized by Thomas Reid - or to transcendental metaphysics. He wanted to create a fully consistent but purely empirical philosophy.

In fact, not only does Hume deny the existence of a Berkeleyian or Cartesian self, he also provides devastating empirical criticisms of many metaphysical concepts, such as causation, morality, space, time, and freedom - formulating skeptical objections to all inferences that go beyond immediate experience. Even impressions of the "external" senses exist only in the sensing mind, and he rejects all attempts to argue from the senses to the existence of continuing physical substances outside the mind.

他把《政府论》第一卷的大部分内容改写成对人类理解的探究，把《政府论》第三卷的材料改写成对道德原则的探究。

休谟的主要目标之一是将洛克和伯克利的经验主义哲学发展到符合逻辑的结论。洛克的观点被现实的常识性概念所调和，而且往往是不一致的，而柏克莱则以先验的他者(上帝)的概念作为经验主义原则的例外，休谟拒绝让他的哲学向常识或先验形而上学低头——他为此受到托马斯·里德的批评。他想创造一种完全一致但纯粹经验主义的哲学。

事实上，休谟不仅否认贝克莱式或笛卡尔式自我的存在，他还对许多形而上学概念，如因果关系、道德、空间、时间和自由，提出了毁灭性的经验性批评——对所有超越直接经验的推论，都提出了怀疑论的反对。甚至“外部”感官的印象也只存在于感知的头脑中，他拒绝一切从感官到头脑之外持续存在的物质的争论。