Hume's Treatise was published before he was thirty (after its publication in 1739-40 he wrote that it 'fell dead-born from the press'). It is nothing less than an attempt to extend the Copernican Revolution to philosophy - to put to the test of experience a complete system of the moral sciences which had hitherto gone unquestioned. But Hume was no rationalist: from his viewpoint of informed scepticism he could see man not as a religious creation,...

"All men by nature are actuated with the desire of knowledge," declared Aristotle. The philosopher's works are foundational to the history of science, and his treatise on metaphysics, or "first philosophy," is divided into sections on previous philosophical thought and theories; a refutation of skepticism; a demonstration of God's existence; an examination of the relation of metaphysics to the other sciences; an elucidation of the nature of the infinite;...