David Hume (May 7, 1711 – August 25, 1776) was a Scottish intellectual who made key contributions to the disciplines of philosophy, history, and economics during his lifetime.  He is best known as a philosopher who ranks with Francis Bacon, John Locke, and Thomas Hobbes as a British Empiricist. He attempted to establish a naturalistic science of psychology, holding that all knowledge is founded on experience, either sensations or ideas derived from reasoning about experience, and that passion rather than reason governs human behavior. He was born in Edinburgh the second son of an advocate who died when David was two; his mother, daughter of Lord Falconer, never remarried. Hume entered the University of Edinburgh at age 12 to study law but instead pursued philosophy and general learning. He reported making a philosophical discovery at age 18 that opened “a new Scene of Thought” and led to years of study and A Treatise of Human Nature (1739), now considered one of the most important works in western philosophy but poorly received at the time. He was eventually made librarian at the University of Edinburgh in 1752, where he researched and wrote his massive six-volume History of England, which brought him the literary recognition he coveted. He later served the English embassy in Paris and famously quarreled with Jean-Jacques Rousseau. He is also known for “My Own Life”, a biographical essay summarizing his life in “fewer than 5 pages”.