David Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature is one of the most important works of modern philosophy. This Guide provides students with the scholarly and interpretive tools needed to begin mining Hume’s Treatise for philosophical insight.

The Guide contains fifteen newly written chapters by leading Hume scholars. Each chapter guides the reader through a selected portion of the Treatise, explaining the central arguments, as well as key contemporary interpretations of those arguments. They cover such topics as: the formulation, reception, and scope of the Treatise; the theory of impressions and ideas; imagination and memory; space and time; causation and causal inference; the passions; Hume’s treatment of belief in the external world and the self; the moral sentiments and their relation to reason; and the role of sympathy.