David Hume attacked the foundations of human knowledge so thoroughly that Immanuel Kant said he was awakened from his "dogmatic slumber." Hume argued that causation is a habit of the mind, that reason is the slave of the passions, and that there is no rational basis for believing the sun will rise tomorrow. His cheerful demolition of certainty remains the most devastating critique of human reason ever written.

This episode traces Hume from his precocious youth in Edinburgh through the Treatise that fell "dead-born from the press," his controversial reputation as an atheist, and the philosophical arguments that forced every thinker who followed to grapple with his radical skepticism.

• Hume's youthful ambition and the Treatise of Human Nature that the world initially ignored
• The problem of induction and the argument that we  ...