Hume

Modern philosophy

David Hume is one of the towering figures of modern empiricism.
His main work, A Treatise of Human Nature, exerted a profound influence on Kant and on analytic philosophy. His critique of the notions of causality and personal identity also makes him one of the most eminent representatives of modern scepticism.
Hume's wide-ranging thought encompasses fields as diverse as epistemology, aesthetics, morality and politics.

Hume's Works Summarised on This Site

book cover

A Treatise of Human Nature

Composed of three volumes, the Treatise is an emblematic masterpiece of English empiricism. Here is a close reading of it...

Read

Bibliography

Here are the essential books if you wish to better understand this author's thought:

Bailey, Alan & O'Brien, Dan (eds.) (2012). The Continuum Companion to Hume, New York: Continuum.
Campbell Mossner, Ernest (1980). The Life of David Hume, Oxford University Press
Garrett, Don (1996). Cognition and Commitment in Hume's Philosophy. New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kemp Smith, Norman (1941). The Philosophy of David Hume. London: Macmillan.
Norton, David Fate & Taylor, Jacqueline (eds.) (2009). The Cambridge Companion to Hume, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Biography: Life of Hume

Youth: Towards the Writing of the Treatise

David Hume was born in 1711 in Edinburgh, Scotland, into a family of minor nobility. He attended the city's college to study law, following in his father's footsteps — his father, a lawyer, had died a few years after his birth.

He read the Latin poets, the Greek philosophers — particularly the Stoics and Sceptics — and modern authors such as Descartes and Locke. He also encountered Newton's thought through his teachers, who were disciples of the great British scientist.

At the age of twenty-three, he underwent a spiritual crisis: seized by a sudden and intense excitement, he resolved to abandon the career his family had mapped out for him and devote himself entirely to philosophy and, more broadly, to the pursuit of knowledge.

He left for France, where he lived for three years, first in Reims and then in the Sarthe region. During this period of intense intellectual activity, he wrote his fundamental work, A Treatise of Human Nature. This masterpiece of English empiricism, destined to exert a profound influence on Anglo-Saxon philosophy, was met with almost complete indifference.

Deeply stung by this failure, Hume resolved henceforth to express himself only in shorter essays, more accessible to readers than the vast and unwieldy Treatise, which he would later disown.

In 1739, Hume returned to Scotland, where he began to form relationships with fellow Scottish scholars such as Francis Hutcheson and Adam Smith. In the interests of clarity, he published an abridgement of A Treatise of Human Nature, together with the third part of the work and an appendix.

Maturity: Travel and Other Essays

At the age of thirty, he achieved his first success with the publication of his Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary, which ranged across subjects as diverse as freedom of the press, the political parties of Great Britain and the social contract — which he rejected as a fiction.

This budding success brought him enemies: he was attacked by certain thinkers on charges of scepticism and atheism, and his application for a professorship at Edinburgh University was rejected, despite his denials.

In 1746, he left Scotland for Austria and Italy as secretary to General Saint-Clair. He found time to write a new work, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, in which he revisited and developed certain ideas from the Treatise — though again to little immediate response. Yet a few decades later, Kant would say of this book that it had "roused him from his dogmatic slumber."

At forty, he returned to Edinburgh and published his Political Discourses, which met with some success — unlike An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, published a year later — and he began to build a reputation in British scholarly circles.

He then embarked on a new project that would occupy him for nearly ten years: a monumental History of England in four volumes, spanning from the Stuarts back to the Tudors. This colossal undertaking drew criticism from professional historians and proved another disappointment.

The Last Years: Undiminished Activity

He had considered retiring from public life, but was appointed to the French Embassy in Paris. This marked the start of an exhilarating period during which he met several leading thinkers of the French Enlightenment — among them Rousseau, with whom he eventually fell out, owing to the latter's suspicious and unstable temperament.

He returned to England, where he served as an under-secretary of state for three years.

In 1769, he settled back in Edinburgh, where he enjoyed a well-deserved retirement until his death in 1776. In his final years, he completed several works that would only appear posthumously, among them the celebrated Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion.

Main Works

A Treatise of Human Nature
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals
Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary
Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion