David Hume (7 May 1711 – 25 August 1776) was a Scottish philosopher, historian, economist, and essayist who was best known for his highly influential system of philosophical empiricism, skepticism, and naturalism.
Biography[]
David Hume was born in Edinburgh, Scotland on 7 May 1711, and he attended the University of Edinburgh at the unusually young age of twelve. He considered a career in law, but he ultimately decided on pursuing a philosophical vocation. At age 25, he left Scotland for France, as he had dropped out of school due to his disdain for professors, and had not found employment in Great Britain.
Hume became a successful essayist while in France, and he later became a librarian at the University of Edinburgh. Hume's first major work, A Treatise of Human Nature, was completed in 1738, and he proceeded to publish the six-volume The History of England, his two enquiries (An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding and An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals), and Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary. Hume criticized Catholicism and organized religion in general, and he was viewed as an atheist by his contemporaries. However, he was also viewed as a conservative, with Thomas Jefferson banning his History of England from the University of Virginia due to its supposed Toryism, and Samuel Johnson seeing him as an unprincipled Tory and supporter of Thomas Hobbes. He also had controversial views such as rejecting causation altogether, proposing that concepts are the faded memories of repeated sensory experiences, denying that humans could ever perceive cause and effect (except by developing a habit or custom of mind), and that that human knowledge is obtained through sensory experience, not through a priori reasoning. He died in Edinburgh in 1776 at the age of 65.