Hume, David 1711-76
Scottish philosopher and historian

He was born in Edinburgh. His early years were unsettled: he studied but did not graduate at Edinburgh University. He took up law, but suffered from bouts of depression, and tried his hand instead at commerce as a counting-house clerk in Bristol. In 1734 he went to La Fl�che in Anjou where he studied for three years and worked on his first, and most important, work, A Treatise of Human Nature, which he had published anonymously in London (1739-40) when he returned to Scotland. The subtitle is 'An attempt to introduce the experimental method of reasoning into moral subjects' and the book is in many ways a consolidation and extension of the empiricist legacy of John Locke and George Berkeley, with major, and still influential, discussions of perception, causation, personal identity and what became known as 'the naturalistic fallacy' in ethics. In political theory he argued for the 'artificiality' of the principles of justice and political obligation, and challenged the rationalistic 'natural law' and 'social contract' theories of Thomas Hobbes, Richard Hooker, Locke and Jean Jacques Rousseau. Bitterly disappointed at the initial reception of the Treatise he produced the more popular Essays Moral and Political (1741, 1742), which were immediately successful, and through which his views became more widely known. These essays heralded the new school of classical economics, of which his friend Adam Smith was to be the leader, advocating free trade and clearly stating the relationship between international specie flows, domestic prices and the balance of payments. Hume's atheism thwarted his applications for the professorships of moral philosophy at Edinburgh (1744) and logic at Glasgow (1751). He became tutor for a year (1745) to an insane nobleman, the Marquis of Annandale, then became secretary to General St Clair on an expedition to France (1746) and secret missions to Vienna and Turin (1748). In 1748 he published a simplified version of the Treatise entitled Enquiry concerning Human Understanding. Its translation was said to wake Immanuel Kant from his 'dogmatic slumbers' and provoked the Idealists to counter Hume's scepticism. The brilliant Dialogues concerning Natural Religion were written in 1750 but were prudently left unpublished, and appeared posthumously in 1779. He became keeper of the Advocates' Library in Edinburgh in 1752 and achieved real fame and international recognition with his Political Discourses (1752) and his monumental History of England (5 vols, 1754-62). From 1763 to 1765 he acted as secretary to the ambassador in Paris, and was received with great enthusiasm by the French court and literary society. He returned to London in 1766 with Rousseau, whom he had befriended but who was to provoke a bitter and famous quarrel with him, and became Under-Secretary of State for the Northern Department in 1767. He returned to Scotland in 1768 to settle in Edinburgh where he died and was widely mourned, the equal in intellectual reputation to his contemporary Adam Smith. He has been a dominant influence on empiricist philosophers of the 20th century.

Bibliography: A J Ayer, Hume (1980)