A treatise of human nature

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1. dugidugoutJan 2026
   I'm not sure, but it sounds like something biocentrism adjacent. My reference to Hume is the fact you are jumping from what is to what ought without justifying why. _A Treatise of Human Nature_ is a good place to start.
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2. hilbert42Nov 2023
   Philosophy is very dear to me and I loved studying it, so I cannot let this story stand without having commented. I'm not going to come to its defense other than to point to several references as the works of many philosophers over several thousands years have done so much more eloquently through their philosophical works than anything that I could even dream to equal.

   I'll just say that studying the works Plato, Aristotle, Bacon, Descartes, Locke, Hobbes, Machiavelli, Rousseau, Kant, Thoreau, Hume, Nietzsche, G.E Moore, Russell, A.J. Ayer, Popper, Schopenhauer, Sartre and many others made me a better and more rounded person. They taught me to think better, to argue logically and put things into perspective. I often don't succeed but those guys are always at the back of my head niggling about what I think and pushing me to evaluate or reevaluate what I am doing. They've altered my thinking and my perception of the world.

   My profession isn't philosophy but moving electrons around or at least trying to make them do my bidding (sometimes I reckon they're the philosophers, not me). In many ways much of what I do involves the physical world and seemingly it couldn't be further away from philosophy— metaphysics —which, by definition, is above and beyond physics. However, I'd argue that those who only perceive the world through the mathematics of say Einstein's and Schrödinger's equations and debunk philosophy as base or at best a waste of time have missed the point. Likely they haven't studied philosophy so they've not considered that the way they've learned and gained knowledge is itself a philosophical study of practical value, namely epistemology. Science was once termed natural philosophy and many of the ways of thinking and learning are common to both.

   It seems to me that conceptualizing quantum fields in QFT (or at least trying to) isn't that different a process to Berkeley conceptualizing whether the tree in the Quad exists when there's no one to look at it. No doubt the former is magnitudes more complex, and given that 250 years have passed since Berkeley's era approaches to thinking about such matters have become more nuanced and complex. In physics today causality is a central concept and David Hume refined Berkeley's propositions to incorporate inductive reasoning and causality. Philosophers fine-tuned the thinking process that eventually allowed inductive reasoning to conclude the Higgs particle actually exists despite that no one has ever seen it directly—even CERN's detectors never saw it, they've only ever detected the aftermath of its decay. Philosophy not only has practical purposes but it's a fascinating subject.

   Then there are the books, some of the most significant and influential ever written, Republic, Leviathan, A Treatise of Human Nature, Social Contract, Critique of Pure Reason, Being and Nothingness, etc., etc. These are works of brilliant minds that have endured over the centuries—and they endured for so long for the very reason that many have valued their contents greatly.

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3. pheymannNov 2023
   I am a fan of books and recently put together a digital collection of books I read and that I liked a lot[1].

   To me it seems, there are a bunch of people in this community who enjoy a good book too and I would be interested in what is in your library.

   Maybe as a start a short list of books I really enjoyed:

   * A Treatise of Human Nature; David Hume, 1739 * Meditations; Marcus Aurelius, 161-180 * The Wealth of Nations; Adam Smith, 1776 * Crime and Punishment; Fyodor Dostoyevsky, 1866 * War and Peace; Leo Tolstoy, 1865 * Debt - The first 5000 years; David Graeber, 2011 * Bible * How to read a book; Mortimer J. Adler, 1972

   [1]: https://paulheymann.de/2023/11/24/antilibrary.html

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4. satvikpendemJan 2023
   Yeah, David Hume has some good works. I recommend you read Treatise of Human Nature if you can, and follow along with commentary rather than trying to parse it all on your own, I took a class on modern philosophy where we covered it.
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5. keaneMar 2022
   A Treatise of Human Nature by David Hume (especially Book 3, Part 1)

   https://www.earlymoderntexts.com/authors/hume

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6. atypicaluserDec 2020
   To answer your second question first, The Virtue of Selfishness by Ayn Rand started me down this path. The sheer brazenness of the title made me pick it up: what I read over the next few days broke me. Or the old me.

   I've long left Rand behind, but she's a good start for a bare-knuckle punch to the teeth regarding altruism, egalitarianism and the beliefs of the political Left.

   Later I picked up the usual suspects: the Greeks, the Stoics, the modern philosophers. Read the classics of the East and of India, read more modern mystics, read the pragmatists, the existentialists and the Communists. Read the economists (Adam Smith et al.) Read Popper, Wittgenstein, Sartre, Heidegger, Rawls, Kripke, Kuhn, Habermas, etc.

   I guess if I were to recommend a starting point, I'd start with Book One of David Hume's A Treatise of Human Nature. Be sure to heed the title of the book--it's a discussion of human nature, not of the world as-is, as-was or as-will-be. And the first book explores how we understand the world (i.e. ideas) and the limits of our understanding. Note it's a little daunting due to the older language (e.g. connexion vs connection, lots of 'tis, 'tho', 'twill, lots of apostrophe-d) and some of his arguments are initially confusing (skip and come back later,) but it will give you a firm grounding on which to consider later philosophy (and much else besides.)

   After that, it won't matter too much which books you start with. If you're young, I'd recommend sticking to fiction for a while, pick up some of the old stuff (Homer, Virgil, Ovid, Dante (Inferno,) Rabelais, Cervantes, etc.) Add some new stuff, too (Camus, Tagore, Yoshikawa, Flannery O'Connor, Colson Whitehead, Colum McCann, too many to name.) Once you start hitting thirty or so is when you might pick up some philosophy. The benefit of reading the old stuff first (e.g. Aristotle's Ethics, Plato's Symposium) is that later writers reference them. Even today, were you to read about, for example, the writing craft, teachers still quote Aristotle's Poetics (e.g. all stories have a beginning, middle and end.)

   As for personal philosophy, experience will shape you more, especially if/when you have kids, pay higher taxes, buy a house, suffer a sudden medical condition. But understanding the why of it--that's where the philosophers come in handy. Putting your human self--the same human self that is shared by humans from 5,000 years ago--in the context of humanity, of the human community.

   (P.S. As a bonus, if you're really itching for philosophy, try out Machiavelli's The Prince as translated by Tim Parks, or for just a little philosophy to start, Rashomon and 17 Other Stories by Akutagawa, esp. "Rashomon" and "In a Bamboo Grove". Another little bit of philosophy can be found in The Master and Margarita by Bulgakov.)

   * edit--typos.

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