In this episode, we journey from the heights of rational certainty to the depths of skeptical doubt. We explore how David Hume—Scottish philosopher, historian, and the great destroyer of philosophical systems—created an empiricism that would challenge the very foundations of knowledge, morality, and politics for centuries to come.

We begin with eighteenth-century Edinburgh: a world of Enlightenment optimism, scientific discovery, and burgeoning commercial society. We trace Hume's influences—from John Locke's tabula rasa to Isaac Newton's mechanical universe—and we ask: Was Hume the great liberator of philosophy from religious dogma, or did he reduce human thought to mere habit and sentiment?

From the copy principle to the problem of induction, from the slave of the passions to the critique of  ...