David Hume

Their life

The good-natured skeptic of the Scottish Enlightenment: he showed that custom, not reason, rules most of life, that causation is inference not observation — and remained the most cheerful dinner guest in Edinburgh while dismantling philosophy's certainties.

Known for

• A Treatise of Human Nature
• the problem of induction
• is-ought distinction
• skepticism about miracles
• empiricist theory of causation
• History of England

The road they walked

David Hume was born in Edinburgh in 1711 to a family of modest lairds from the Border country, and was expected, as second sons were, to make his way in law. He gave it up almost as soon as he'd started, consumed instead by what he later called 'a passion for literature' that overrode every other ambition. In his early twenties he suffered a breakdown from overwork — what physicians of the day diagnosed as the 'disease of the learned' — and recovered by throwing himself into commerce for a spell before retreating to La Flèche in France, the same Jesuit college town where Descartes had studied a century before, to write the book that would define him.

That book, A Treatise of Human Nature, appeared in 1739 when Hume was not yet thirty, and by his own famous account it 'fell dead-born from the press.' The failure stung him into rewriting its arguments in plainer form — the Enquiries — and into a career that, for most of his life, had little to do with philosophy at all. He tutored a marquess who turned out to be insane, served as secretary on a military expedition and later a diplomatic posting in Paris, and took a post as librarian to Edinburgh's Faculty of Advocates chiefly for the free run of its books. There he wrote his multi-volume History of England, which sold briskly and made him, to his own wry amusement, far more famous and prosperous as a historian than he had ever been as a philosopher. His reputation for irreligion cost him professorships at both Edinburgh and Glasgow, appointments he was passed over for despite, or because of, the very arguments now read as his masterworks.

In Paris in the 1760s he was lionized by the salons as 'le bon David,' the placid Scotsman whose skepticism seemed to leave his good humor untouched — a friendship there with Jean-Jacques Rousseau curdled famously into public quarrel, a rare blot on an otherwise easy sociability. He returned to Edinburgh to spend his last years among friends, chief among them Adam Smith, at the center of the intellectual circle historians would later call the Scottish Enlightenment. The dismantling of causal certainty and rational religion that unsettled Kant and generations after him was, by Hume's own account, simply the work of a man who liked good conversation, good claret, and clear thinking in roughly equal measure.

How their story ended

Hume died in Edinburgh in 1776, probably of a bowel or abdominal cancer, after a decline of several months that he faced with a composure his friends found almost unnerving — Adam Smith wrote admiringly of his cheerfulness to the end, and James Boswell sought him out on his deathbed half-hoping to catch him recant, and left disappointed. In his final weeks Hume wrote a brief, understated autobiography, 'My Own Life,' summing up his career with the same unbothered clarity he'd brought to demolishing philosophy's certainties.

In their words

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Tables where David sits

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For reason, liberty, and thinking for yourself.

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