An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding is a book by the
Scottish empiricist and philosopher David Hume, published in 1748. It was a
simplification of an earlier effort, Hume's A Treatise of Human Nature,
published anonymously in London in 1739–1740. Hume was disappointed with the
reception of the Treatise, which "fell dead-born from the press," as he
put it, and so tried again to disseminate his ideas to the public by writing a
shorter and more polemical work.
The end product of his labours was the Enquiry. The Enquiry dispensed
with much of the material from the Treatise, in favor of clarifying and
emphasizing its most important aspects. For example, Hume's views on personal
identity, do not appear. However, more vital propositions, such as Hume's
argument for the role of habit in a theory of knowledge, are retained.
This book has proven highly influential, both in the years that would
immediately follow and today. Immanuel Kant points to it as the book which woke
him from his self-described "dogmatic slumber". The Enquiry is widely regarded
as a classic in modern philosophical literature.
— Excerpted from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
