David Hume
1711–1776 2 entries
Biography
David Hume was a Scottish philosopher, historian and essayist, one of the leading figures of the Scottish Enlightenment. Born in Edinburgh in 1711, he entered the University of Edinburgh at about twelve. Before he was thirty he wrote A Treatise of Human Nature, which, as he later said, “fell dead-born from the press”. He recast its ideas in the more readable Enquiries, arguing that all our knowledge rests on impressions of the senses and that our belief that one event causes another rests only on custom, the habit of seeing them follow each other.
Suspected of unbelief, he was twice refused a university chair, so he became the librarian of the Advocates’ Library in Edinburgh and wrote a History of England in six volumes, which made him famous and wealthy. He served at the British embassy in Paris, where the salons celebrated him, and was a close friend of Adam Smith. He died in Edinburgh in 1776. Kant later wrote that it was Hume who woke him from his dogmatic slumber.
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