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”.