David Hume

David Hume was born in Edinburgh in 1711 into a modestly prosperous Scottish family. He was a precocious student at Edinburgh University but left without a degree at fifteen — not unusual at the time. He spent several years in a state of intense philosophical study that produced, by his mid-twenties, his masterwork: A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–1740). The Treatise, Hume later wrote, ‘fell dead-born from the press.’ Nobody read it. It was not properly appreciated for another century.

Undeterred, Hume reworked its arguments into more accessible forms. The first Enquiry (An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, 1748) condensed and clarified the epistemological arguments of the Treatise. The second Enquiry (An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, 1751) did the same for his moral philosophy. His Essays and Political Discourses were widely read and made him famous. His History of England (1754–1761) made him wealthy.

Hume twice failed to obtain academic positions — at Edinburgh and Glasgow — because his religious scepticism made him too controversial. He worked as a librarian for the Advocates’ Library in Edinburgh and served as a secretary to the British ambassador in Paris, where he was lionised by the French philosophes. His friendship with Jean-Jacques Rousseau ended in mutual accusations of betrayal.

He died in Edinburgh in August 1776, cheerful and composed in the face of death — to the visible discomfort of the many Christians who came to witness his deathbed conversion and went away disappointed. His posthumously published Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779) is the most rigorous philosophical examination of the design argument for God’s existence ever written.

Adam Smith, his closest friend, said of him that he approached ‘as nearly to the idea of a perfectly wise and virtuous man, as perhaps the nature of human frailty will admit.’