About This Site
What this is
The Hume Bookshelf (book.themodel.be) is a book guide for people who have picked up David Hume before and been turned back — usually by the sheer length of the Treatise, or by trying to memorise "cause," "custom," and "the association of ideas" before meeting the arguments that give them meaning. This English edition selects five titles currently available on amazon.com and lays them out in a reading order that won't defeat you — from an introduction and a life, through the accessible Enquiry, to the Treatise and a philosopher's reading of it. A Japanese edition is also maintained, alongside sister shops such as The Philosophy Bookshelf.
The editorial room runs a family of philosopher bookshelves and a section-by-section reading archive of the primary texts (in Japanese). Every review and reading-order recommendation on this site rests on that first-hand reading and on explicit bibliographic checking.
The one honesty note that shapes this site
Hume said the same things twice. The youthful A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40) "fell dead-born from the press," and he later recast its core into the shorter, cleaner Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), which he asked to be read as the definitive statement of his thought. That matters for a reader choosing a first book: the Enquiry is the recommended door, the Treatise the fuller house behind it. Where a book is a modern introduction, a biography, or another philosopher's reading (Deleuze), the review says exactly which — and never dresses a study up as the original.
How books are chosen and rated
- Judgements about the works themselves rest on the editorial room's first-hand reading. Star ratings are our own; no Amazon customer reviews are reproduced.
- Where a book is an introduction, a biography, a primary text, or a scholarly study, the review says exactly what it is and what role it can honestly play. A guide is scaffolding, not the building — and we say so.
- All descriptions are written by us; no publisher copy is reproduced.
- We favour editions currently in print and available on amazon.com (Oxford, Penguin, Cambridge, Columbia University Press, and the like), and we are explicit about which edition a review is based on.
- Cover images are jacket-style images of our own design and differ from the actual covers.
- Prices and availability change, so we do not print them; always check the Amazon product page.
Amazon link disclosure
As an Amazon Associate, this site (The Hume Bookshelf) may earn from qualifying purchases.
Book links on this edition go to product pages on Amazon (amazon.com). If a purchase is made through them, this site may receive a commission at no additional cost to you. Commissions never influence the ratings — recommending books you will actually finish, rather than books that merely sell, is in the end what serves readers best.
Privacy policy
This is a static site; no personal information is collected server-side. The browser's localStorage is used solely to count link clicks (to improve the ranking's accuracy); that data stays in your browser and is never transmitted. Once you follow a link to Amazon, Amazon.com's privacy policy applies.
Contact
For corrections and inquiries, please use the contact address on our sister site soqdoq.com.