David Hume

If I had to pick a favorite philosopher, I would probably select the 18^th-century Scottish intellectual David Hume.  Hume is quite rightly a giant in the field, and his arguments, buttressed by cogent reasoning and a sharp wit, have maintained influence to this day.

Perhaps one of Hume’s most interesting intellectual developments was his account of how ideas are generated.  Hume held that whatever non-mathematical ideas we have are ultimately predicated upon experience—upon sense impressions—such that we cannot imagine anything whose constituents are not elements of our prior experience.

This account still allows for an explanation of how we can imagine things that we have not experienced—for example, a golden mountain.  When we have an idea of a golden mountain, we take two ideas, “golden” and “mountain,” and combine them in our mind.  By the same process, we may generate ideas of unicorns, ghosts, and most controversially, God.  Importantly, however, these constituent ideas rely on prior experience, so we could not imagine a mountain of a color of which we are unaware.  In this way and in others, Hume was arguably one of the first to engage in a sort of proto-psychology.

Hume is also famous for his profound skepticism in denying our ability to know causation as anything other than extraordinarily high correlation.  Furthermore, his demonstration that inductive reasoning is circular has been a consistent but convincing thorn in the side of the empirically-inclined ever since. 

I could go on about his support of religious toleration or his commentary on political philosophy, but I believe the ideas I have presented provide enough reason as to why Hume remains perennially fascinating and is perhaps my favorite philosopher.