David Hume (Detail from a painting by Allan Ramsey, 1766)

David Hume (1711 - 1776) was a Scottish philosopher, economist and historian of the Age of Enlightenment. He was an important figure in the Scottish Enlightenment and, along with John Locke and Bishop George Berkeley, one of the three main figureheads of the influential British Empiricism movement.

He was a fierce opponent of the Rationalism of Descartes, Leibniz and Spinoza.

Hume was born on 26 April 1711 in a tenement on the Lawnmarket in Edinburgh, Scotland. His father was Joseph Home (an advocate or barrister of Chirnside, Berwickshire, Scotland), and the aristocrat Katherine Lady Falconer. He changed his name to Hume in 1734 because the English had difficulty pronouncing "Home" in the Scottish manner.

He attended the University of Edinburgh at the unusually early age of twelve (possibly as young as ten), although he had little respect for the professors there and soon threw over a prospective career in law in favour of philosophy and general learning. At the tender age of eighteen, he made a "philosophical discovery" that led him to devote the next ten years of his life to a concentrated period of study, reading and writing, almost to the verge of a nervous breakdown.

In order to earn a living, he took a position in a merchant's office in Bristol before moving to Anjou, France in 1734. It was there that he used up his savings to support himself while he wrote his masterwork, "A Treatise of Human Nature", which he completed in 1737 (at only 26 years of age). Despite the disappointment of the work's poor reception in Britain (it was considered "abstract and unintelligible"), he immediately set to work to produce an anonymous "Abstract" or shortened version of it.

After the publication of his "Essays Moral and Political" in 1744, Hume was refused a post at the University of Edinburgh after local ministers petitioned the town council not to appoint Hume due to his Atheism. For about a year he tutored the unstable Marquise of Annandale and became involved with the Canongate Theatre in Edinburgh, where he associated with some of the Scottish Enlightenment luminaries of the time.

From 1746, Hume served for three years as Secretary to Lieutenant-General St. Clair, and it was during this time that he wrote his "Philosophical Essays Concerning Human Understanding", later published as "An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding", which proved little more successful than the "Treatise". He was charged with heresy (although he was defended by his young clerical friends, who argued that, as an atheist, he was outside the Church's jurisdiction), and was again deliberately overlooked for the Chair of Philosophy at the University of Glasgow.

In 1752, the Faculty of Advocates employed him as their librarian, for which he received little or no emolument, but which gave him access to a large library, and which enabled him to continue historical research for his "History of Great Britain". This enormous work, begun in 1745 and not completed until 1760, ran to over a million words and traced events from the Saxon kingdoms to the Glorious Revolution. It was a best-seller in its day and became the standard work on English history for many years. Thus, it was as a historian that Hume finally achieved literary fame.

From 1763 to 1765, Hume was Secretary to Lord Hertford in Paris, where he was admired by Voltaire and was friends (briefly) with Jean-Jacques Rousseau. For a year from 1767, he held the appointment of Under Secretary of State for the Northern Department, before retiring back to Edinburgh in 1768.

He died in Edinburgh on 25 August 1776, aged 65, and was buried, as he requested, on Calton Hill, overlooking his home in the New Town of Edinburgh.