Hume
Matthew Noble (1817-76)
1870
Granite [?]
6 Burlington Gardens, former home of the University of London, just north of the Royal Academy, in the grounds of Burlington House.
David Hume (1711-76), the last of the great Scottish empiricist philosophers, had an enormous influence on Kant, later British philosophers, and those of the twentieth century. His Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40) and An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748) followed Locke in denying the presence of innate ideas, and like other moral philosophers of the Edinburgh school he believed emotion, particularly sympathy, provided the basis of morality instead of intellect. A famous skeptic, he attacked the argument from design in Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779).
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Other statues by Noble on this building
Photograph by Robert Freidus.
Formatting and perspective correction by George P. Landow.