David Hume
David Hume was a Scottish philosopher, historian and essayist whose sceptical account of causation and induction set much of the agenda for modern philosophy, and whose religious views cost him every academic post he sought. Born in Edinburgh in 1711 into minor gentry, he entered the university at about twelve, abandoned law, and had a nervous collapse in his late teens while working out his ideas. He wrote A Treatise of Human Nature in France and published it in 1739-40, aged twenty-eight. It sold almost nothing — it fell dead-born from the press, as he put it — and he later recast its arguments as the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding in 1748. His central claims are corrosive and were meant to be. We never observe causation, only the constant conjunction of events, and our confidence that the future will resemble the past cannot be justified by reason or experience without circularity — the problem of induction. The self is not a thing but a bundle of perceptions. Reason is and ought only to be the slave of the passions. No description of how things are entails a claim about how they ought to be. He was denied chairs at Edinburgh in 1745 and Glasgow in 1752 on grounds of irreligion, and made his living as a librarian, a tutor, an embassy secretary in Paris and an under-secretary of state. His six-volume History of England, published from 1754, was a bestseller and his main income for the rest of his life. He was a close friend of Adam Smith, and quarrelled publicly with Rousseau after sheltering him. His Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, attacking the argument from design, were published in 1779, three years after his death.
- Lived: 1711 CE – 1776 CE
- Nationality: British
- Roles: philosopher
