Clayton State University
John Locke and David Hume
Tiffany Anderson
PILO 2010
James Grindeland
9th February 2016
Anderson 1
John Locke and David Hume
Philosophers tend to be a rare breed of individuals who have a unique outlook on life and
on the world in general. When looking at philosophers who lived around the end of the
Renaissance period, common themes of mortality, human nature, and the divine all tend to get
blurred into key ideas about the world and the nature of humanity in general. Not all
philosophers focus on the same idea of humanity and the human condition, John Locke and
David Hume both took particular interest in the ways that humans view themselves, the world
around them, and the subject of identity of self in contrast to the universe. Through analysis of
John Locke’s perspectives as shown in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding and that of
David Hume in his Treatise of Human Nature, it is possible to see how both of these
