David Hume

David Hume
Born	David Home 7 May 1711
Birthplace	Lawnmarket, Edinburgh, Scotland
Died	25 August 1776 New Town, Edinburgh, Scotland
Nationality	Scottish
Occupation	Philosopher, historian, economist, essayist
Known for	Empiricism, philosophical scepticism, naturalism, problem of induction, is–ought problem, bundle theory of the self
Education	University of Edinburgh

David Hume (born David Home; 7 May 1711 – 25 August 1776) was a Scottish philosopher, historian, economist, and essayist whose system of empiricism, philosophical scepticism, and metaphysical naturalism placed him among the most consequential thinkers of the Enlightenment era. Born into the modest gentry of Edinburgh, Hume pursued philosophical inquiry from a young age and produced his first major work, A Treatise of Human Nature, before he was thirty years old. Over the course of his career he authored works on epistemology, ethics, politics, religion, and history that challenged prevailing rationalist assumptions and reshaped the trajectory of Western philosophy. His arguments concerning induction, causality, the nature of the self, and the foundations of morality remain central to philosophical debate. Immanuel Kant credited Hume as the thinker who awakened him from his "dogmatic slumbers," and Hume's legacy extended to influence utilitarianism, logical positivism, the philosophy of science, early analytic philosophy, cognitive science, and theology. Despite his philosophical stature, Hume's views on race and certain historical claims have prompted critical reassessment in recent years, including debates at the University of Edinburgh over the naming of a building in his honour.

Early Life

David Hume was born David Home on 7 May 1711 in a tenement on the Lawnmarket in Edinburgh, Scotland. He was the second of two sons born to Joseph Home (or Hume), a minor landowner and advocate, and Katherine, Lady Falconer. The family's modest estate, Ninewells, was located near Chirnside in the Scottish Borders region of Berwickshire. Hume's father died when he was still an infant, and his mother raised both children.

From an early age, Hume displayed a pronounced intellectual curiosity and an appetite for reading. He later changed the spelling of his surname from "Home" to "Hume" so that English speakers could pronounce it correctly. The family was Presbyterian, and Hume was raised in that tradition, though he would later move decisively away from religious orthodoxy.

Hume entered the University of Edinburgh at an unusually young age — reportedly around twelve years old, which was not uncommon for Scottish universities of the period. He studied a broad curriculum that included classics, natural philosophy, and logic. Although the university did not yet award formal degrees in the modern sense, the education Hume received there was foundational to his later philosophical development. He left the university without completing a degree and, after a brief and unsatisfying attempt to study law (as his family wished), devoted himself entirely to reading and philosophical study.

In his early twenties, Hume underwent a period of intense intellectual labour that severely affected his health. He described this episode in a well-known letter, noting symptoms of what he called "the Disease of the Learned." After a period of recovery, during which he briefly attempted a career in commerce working for a sugar merchant in Bristol, Hume resolved to pursue philosophy full-time. In 1734, he moved to France, where he spent three years — mostly at La Flèche in Anjou, where René Descartes had once studied — composing his first and most ambitious philosophical work.

Education

Hume's formal education took place at the University of Edinburgh, which he entered around 1723 at approximately twelve years of age. The university's curriculum exposed him to the classics, logic, metaphysics, and natural philosophy, providing the intellectual scaffolding upon which his later philosophical projects would be built. Hume did not complete a degree, however, and was largely self-taught in the areas that would define his career. He read voraciously in classical and modern literature, including the works of John Locke, George Berkeley, Isaac Newton, and the ancient philosophers, particularly Cicero.

After leaving Edinburgh, Hume's philosophical education continued informally. His time at La Flèche in France, where he had access to the Jesuit college's substantial library, was particularly formative. It was during this period of independent study that the central ideas of his empiricist philosophy took shape.

Career

A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–1740)

Hume's philosophical career began with the publication of A Treatise of Human Nature, the first two volumes of which appeared in 1739, with a third volume following in 1740. Written during his years in France when he was still in his twenties, the Treatise represented an ambitious attempt to create what Hume described as a "science of man" — a comprehensive, naturalistic account of human cognition, emotion, and morality grounded entirely in experience rather than metaphysical speculation.

The Treatise advanced several arguments that would become central to the Western philosophical canon. In Book I, "Of the Understanding," Hume argued that all ideas are ultimately derived from sense impressions, following John Locke in rejecting the doctrine of innate ideas. He contended that human beliefs about causation are not products of rational insight but rather of custom and habitual association: people observe the "constant conjunction" of events and infer a causal connection, but they never directly perceive causation itself. This analysis gave rise to what is now known as the problem of induction — the recognition that inductive reasoning, which moves from particular observations to general conclusions, cannot be justified on purely rational or empirical grounds, because any such justification would itself rest on the assumption that the future will resemble the past.

In Book II, "Of the Passions," Hume developed his influential theory of the relationship between reason and the emotions. He declared that "Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions," arguing that reason alone cannot motivate action and that human behaviour is governed fundamentally by sentiment and desire.

Book III, "Of Morals," extended these themes into ethics. Hume argued that moral judgments are grounded in feeling or sentiment rather than in abstract rational principles. He is generally credited with first clearly articulating the is–ought problem — the observation that statements about what is the case cannot, by themselves, logically entail conclusions about what ought to be the case.

Despite the originality and depth of its arguments, the Treatise was not a commercial or critical success upon publication. Hume himself later described it as having "fallen dead-born from the press, without reaching such distinction, as even to excite a murmur among the zealots."

Essays, Moral and Political and the Enquiries

Undeterred by the Treatise's poor initial reception, Hume turned to shorter, more accessible forms of writing. His Essays, Moral and Political, published in two volumes in 1741 and 1742, achieved considerably greater public success than the Treatise had. The essays covered a wide range of topics, including politics, aesthetics, commerce, and social customs, and established Hume's reputation as a sophisticated essayist and man of letters.

Hume subsequently undertook to recast the central arguments of the Treatise in a more polished and approachable form. The result was two works that remain among the most widely read texts in the history of philosophy: An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748) and An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751). The first of these revisited and sharpened the epistemological arguments of Book I of the Treatise, including the analysis of causation and induction, and added the celebrated chapter "Of Miracles," in which Hume argued that testimony is never sufficient to establish the occurrence of a miracle because the improbability of the miraculous event will always outweigh the reliability of any testimony in its favour. The second Enquiry refined Hume's moral philosophy, emphasizing the role of sentiment — and particularly the sentiment of "humanity" or benevolence — in grounding moral judgment. Hume himself regarded the second Enquiry as the best of all his philosophical writings.

Academic Appointments and Public Life

Hume's philosophical views, and especially his perceived religious heterodoxy, created obstacles to academic employment. He was twice denied a professorship — first at the University of Edinburgh in 1744–45 and again at the University of Glasgow in 1752 — with clerical opposition playing a significant role in both rejections.

Hume held a number of other positions throughout his career. He served briefly as tutor to the Marquess of Annandale (a position that ended unhappily) and later as secretary to General James St Clair on military expeditions, including a diplomatic mission to the courts of Vienna and Turin. From 1752 to 1757, Hume served as Keeper of the Advocates' Library in Edinburgh, a position that gave him access to a large collection of books and facilitated his work as a historian.

Later in life, Hume held diplomatic posts. From 1763 to 1765, he served as secretary to the British embassy in Paris, where he was received with enthusiasm by French intellectual society and became friends with leading figures of the French Enlightenment, including Jean-Jacques Rousseau (with whom he later had a dramatic and widely publicized falling-out) and Denis Diderot. Upon his return to Britain, Hume briefly served as Under-Secretary of State for the Northern Department in 1767–68.

The History of England

One of Hume's most commercially successful and influential achievements was his multivolume History of England, published between 1754 and 1762. The work covered English history from the Saxon period through the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and was written in reverse chronological order, beginning with the Stuart monarchs. Hume's History was notable for its literary quality, its attempt at impartiality (though critics accused it of Tory sympathies), and its sceptical treatment of received historical narratives. It became the standard history of England for many decades and went through numerous editions, securing Hume's fame and financial independence more than any of his philosophical writings had done.

Political Economy

Hume also made notable contributions to economic thought. His Political Discourses (1752) contained essays on money, trade, taxes, and the balance of payments that were influential in the development of modern economics. In these essays, Hume articulated an early version of the price-specie flow mechanism, arguing that trade imbalances between nations tend to be self-correcting. His economic writings influenced his close friend Adam Smith, whose The Wealth of Nations (1776) would become the foundational text of modern economics. Recent scholarship has examined Hume's 1752 observation that wealth was becoming "untethered from land," a development that some commentators have connected to the emergence of distinctly modern forms of capitalism.

Philosophy of Religion

Hume's writings on religion were among his most controversial. Beyond the chapter "Of Miracles" in the first Enquiry, Hume composed The Natural History of Religion (1757), which offered a naturalistic account of the origins of religious belief, tracing it to human fears and hopes rather than to rational demonstration of divine existence. His most sustained critique of religious philosophy, the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, was withheld from publication during his lifetime at the urging of friends who feared its consequences. It appeared posthumously in 1779. In the Dialogues, Hume subjected the argument from design — the claim that the order observed in nature proves the existence of an intelligent Creator — to searching criticism, raising objections that remain central to the philosophy of religion.

Relationship Between Literature and Philosophy

Hume's intellectual programme also shaped the boundary between literary and philosophical writing. Scholars have noted that Hume worked actively to distinguish philosophy from literary modes of inquiry, distrusting character sketches and other literary forms as vehicles for philosophical argument. This effort contributed to the institutional separation of the two disciplines that became more pronounced in subsequent centuries.

Personal Life

Hume never married and had no children. He was known in his personal life for his sociability, good humour, and generosity, traits that earned him the nickname "le bon David" during his years in Paris. His closest friendships included a long and affectionate relationship with Adam Smith, who served as his literary executor and wrote a moving tribute to Hume after his death.

Hume's relationship with Jean-Jacques Rousseau was less happy. Having helped Rousseau secure refuge in England in 1766, Hume became the target of Rousseau's paranoid suspicions, leading to a public quarrel that attracted considerable attention across Europe.

Hume was openly sceptical of religious claims throughout his life, and his composure in the face of death became a subject of public interest and commentary. He died on 25 August 1776 in the New Town of Edinburgh. Adam Smith later wrote that Hume had approached his death with "the utmost cheerfulness" and philosophical calm, a report that both impressed and scandalized contemporaries who expected a non-believer to exhibit deathbed terror.

In recent years, Hume's legacy has been complicated by attention to a footnote in his essay "Of National Characters" (first added in 1753), in which he expressed views on racial hierarchy that scholars have characterised as racist. In 2020, the University of Edinburgh renamed its David Hume Tower, citing these views. A 2025 investigation in The Times reported that Hume may have disregarded evidence that contradicted his racial claims, an omission at odds with his own stated commitment to proportioning belief to evidence.

Recognition

During his lifetime, Hume achieved fame principally through his History of England and his essays rather than through his philosophical works, which gained wider recognition only after his death. In France, he was celebrated as one of the foremost British thinkers, and his salon appearances during his time as embassy secretary were well attended by the intellectual elite of Paris.

In the centuries since his death, Hume's philosophical reputation has grown enormously. Immanuel Kant credited Hume with awakening him from his "dogmatic slumbers," a statement that underscores Hume's pivotal role in the development of Kant's critical philosophy. The logical positivists of the early twentieth century, including A. J. Ayer, regarded Hume as a forerunner of their movement. His analysis of causation and induction remains a standard topic in epistemology and the philosophy of science, and his ethical sentimentalism has experienced renewed attention in contemporary moral philosophy.

The relationship between Hume's economic and moral thought and that of Adam Smith has remained a subject of scholarly inquiry. A 2025 study published in Social Philosophy and Policy examined the problem of moral relativism as it arises in the writings of both Hume and Smith.

Hume has been memorialised in Edinburgh with a prominent statue on the Royal Mile, near his birthplace. The Hume Society, an international organisation of scholars, publishes the journal Hume Studies and holds regular conferences devoted to his work.

Legacy

Hume's influence on the development of Western philosophy is difficult to overstate. His empiricist epistemology, which held that all knowledge derives from experience and that the mind contains no innate ideas, helped define the trajectory of British empiricism alongside the earlier work of Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and George Berkeley. His analysis of causation as a product of mental habit rather than rational insight raised problems that remain unresolved in epistemology and the philosophy of science to this day.

Hume's compatibilist account of free will — his argument that causal determinism is fully compatible with human freedom, properly understood — has been one of the most enduring positions in the free will debate. His bundle theory of the self, which denied the existence of a unitary, persisting self and proposed instead that personal identity consists of nothing more than a succession of perceptions linked by habits of association, anticipated developments in cognitive science and the philosophy of mind.

In ethics, Hume's sentimentalism — his insistence that moral judgments arise from emotion rather than from reason — influenced the development of utilitarianism through thinkers such as Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, as well as the emotivist theories of the twentieth century. The is–ought problem, first articulated clearly in the Treatise, remains a foundational issue in metaethics.

Hume's sceptical arguments concerning religion — particularly his critique of miracles and the argument from design — influenced subsequent philosophical theology and the development of secular thought. The posthumous publication of the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion ensured that Hume's challenge to natural theology would continue to provoke responses long after his death.

In the broader culture, Hume is recognised as a central figure of the Scottish Enlightenment, a period of extraordinary intellectual achievement that also included Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, and Thomas Reid. His literary skill as an essayist and historian, combined with the depth and originality of his philosophical arguments, established a model of philosophical writing that balanced rigorous argument with elegant prose. His works continue to be widely taught and debated in universities throughout the world, and his central questions — about the limits of human knowledge, the foundations of morality, and the nature of the self — remain among the most vital in philosophy.