David Hume was born on 7 May 1711 at Edinburgh, the younger son of a minor Berwickshire laird. His father died when he was three; his mother, a formidable woman who never remarried, told friends he was 'uncommon wake-minded' — uncommonly acute — even as a child. He entered the University of Edinburgh at twelve, normal for the time, left without a degree around 1726, and spent the next several years reading obsessively at home in Ninewells while undergoing what he later described as a nervous breakdown driven by the urgency of philosophical discovery. He tried a merchant's office in Bristol in 1734, hated it, and crossed to France, spending three years at Reims and then La Flèche — the Jesuit college where Descartes had studied — writing A Treatise of Human Nature. He was twenty-six when it appeared in London in 1739–40. The book fell, as he later put it, 'dead-born from the press.' Its argument was radical: all knowledge reduces to impressions and ideas derived from them; causation is not a feature of the world but a habit of the mind; the 'self' is not a substance but a bundle of perceptions; and what we call 'reason' is in fact the slave of the passions. He had taken Locke's empiricism to a conclusion that demolished both natural theology and rationalist ethics. Despite its cold reception, Hume rewrote key arguments as the more accessible Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748) and Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751), both of which found a readership. The Enquiry on morals Hume considered his best work. In the 1750s he became famous not for philosophy but for a six-volume History of England (1754–62), which made him financially comfortable and, briefly, the most widely read historian in the English language. He served as Keeper of the Advocates Library in Edinburgh from 1752, secretary to the British embassy in Paris 1763–65, and Undersecretary of State 1767–68. In Paris he was lionised by the philosophes and invited Rousseau to England — a kindness that ended in Rousseau's paranoid accusations against him. His most explosive work, the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, he kept from publication throughout his life, convinced it would cause a scandal: it dismantles the argument from design, putting the classic theistic arguments into the mouths of characters who each demolish the others. It appeared posthumously in 1779. Hume died in Edinburgh on 25 August 1776, of a bowel complaint, serenely, playing cards with friends until the end. His friend Adam Smith wrote that he came as close as any man could to the ideal of the wise and virtuous man. Kant, roused from his 'dogmatic slumber' by reading Hume, said it was Hume who gave the critical philosophy its original spark.
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Scottish Empiricist Philosopher · Historian · Author of A Treatise of Human Nature
David Hume
1,711 CE – 1,776 CE
The Edinburgh philosopher who took Newton's experimental method and turned it on the human mind, concluding that causation, the self, and God are all products of habit and imagination rather than reason.
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