Book by
Scottish philosopher David Hume. The
Enquiry is based on the much longer
Treatise on Human Nature, which, as
Hume put it, ``
fell still-born from the press''. In the
Enquiry, Hume advances his theory of
sceptical empiricism, treating such topics as
divine reward and punishment, the
reason of
animals, and
miracles. Most importantly, though, he argues that the idea of
necessary causality is a
human invention, and that we cannot know any kind of real
necessary connection, but merely ``
constant conjunction''.
According to Immanuel Kant's Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, it was Hume that awoke him (Kant) from his ``dogmatic slumber''. The Critique of Pure Reason, and in fact Kant's entire Critical philosophy, is an attempt to answer Hume (as well as others, such as Leibniz, Wolff, and Descartes). In particular, Kant develops transcendental idealism in part in order to describe a means by which we might have apodictic knowledge of causal relations.