#8: David Hume
David Hume, born in Edinburgh in 1711, had a way of smiling at human certainty and asking whether we really had good grounds for it. He was one of philosophy’s great skeptics, though not in a gloomy or theatrical sense. Hume examined how people actually think and came away unconvinced that reason rules the house as much as we like to imagine. Habit, custom, feeling, and human nature all play a larger role than tidy systems often admit.
