Abbreviations for the Texts
It is standard practice to refer to Hume’s texts using abbreviations, though not everyone uses the same abbreviations. Commonly the Treatise of Human Nature, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, and Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, for example, are referred to using just the letters “T”, “E”, and “D” respectively, while other authors prefer “THN”, “EHU”, and “DNR”. But on a website such as this, long abbreviations can be cumbersome and awkward to place neatly, especially when they need to include section and paragraph details (e.g “THN 1.3.14.24”). For this reason, we have adopted the convention of using single letter abbreviations for all of Hume’s major works (including the Abstract and the Letter from a Gentleman), and longer abbreviations for his essays (including My Own Life). These are as follows: