Hume was more important in the development of philosophy than Kant

A) A substantial part of Kant's overall philosophy was specifically in response to the legacy left by David Hume, establishing a causal link between Hume and a large part of Kant's work. This is corroborated not only by Kant's own account of his influences(ref.a) but by the fact that the actual content of Kant's epistemology is almost entirely an attempt to ground knowledge of the world. Kant accepted more or less Hume's observation that empirical knowledge is unreliable. Kant's concept of synthetic a priori can be seen as an attempt to answer Hume's problem of induction[1]. So Hume not only had a significant influence on the development of philosophy in general, but on Kant in particular which underscores attempt to claim Kant's influence as more significant than Hume's.B) But on to Hume's more explicit contributions to philosophy and their roles in various developments, I'd like to first focus on Hume's contribution to the development of the philosophy of science. Hume's problem of induction drew empiricist epistemology into murky waters, thus posing an important challenge not only in epistemology but also in the philosophy of science which is more or less empiricism put into practice. The problem of induction states that mere empirical observation of nature and the world around us fails to provide an adequate epistemic basis for knowledge[2]. Hume's famous example was our observation of the sun rising. We observe it rising every morning, but on the basis of these observations alone there doesn't appear to be any credible reason why we could know (i.e., have knowledge) that it would rise tomorrow. Karl Popper grounded his entire philosophy of science and demarcation as an attempt at answering the problem of induction and rightly pointed out that the problem outlines a critical problem with justificationist epistemology. Hume's contribution in this sense was to negate the classical philosophical conception of knowledge as justified true belief, thus paving the way for new methods of science such as Popper' anti-justificationist critical rationalism[3]. C) The next point I'd like to draw upon is Hume's contribution to ethics. Hume's is-ought problem showed the epistemic limitations in jumping from a given state of affairs to a prescription on what things ought to be[4]. Any philosopher attempting to ground a normative ethic is thus charged with overcoming this limitation. Whereas Kant's deontological ethics are influential as well, they pertain to a limited set of ethical issues i.e., Kant's normative theory only pertained to itself (influence notwithstanding) whereas Hume's fork applies to any attempt to ground normativity.(ref.a) "I freely admit that the remembrance of David Hume was the very thing that many years ago first interrupted my dogmatic slumber and gave a completely different direction to my researches in the field of speculative philosophy."[5] ===Sources===[1] http://www2.fiu.edu...[2] http://plato.stanford.edu...[3] http://www.criticalrationalism.net...[4] http://plato.stanford.edu... (Sec. 5)[5] Preface to Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (http://www.cambridge.org...