David Hume

David Hume was born on 26 April 1711 (Old Style) near Edinburgh, the second son of a Scottish lawyer who died when David was two. He entered Edinburgh University at twelve, lost interest in everything but philosophy, and left in 1725 to read on his own. At twenty-three he moved to France, lived austerely near the Jesuit college of La Fleche, and wrote his enormous first book in his mid-twenties.

In 1739 he published anonymously A Treatise of Human Nature. By his own words, it fell dead-born from the press. The book reduced human knowledge to two contents — impressions and ideas — with all ideas derived from impressions. He turned that empiricism on causality: the connection between cause and effect is not given in any observation; it is a habit produced in the mind by repeated experience. Necessity lies in the observer, not the world. This upended two thousand years of metaphysics.

Humiliated, Hume rebuilt through other genres. The Essays, the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), and the Political Discourses found audiences. The decisive success was The History of England (1754-1762) — a bestseller that made him a famous historian. Recognition as a philosopher came after his death.

His ethics is summed in a provocation: reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions. Only desire moves us. Reason chooses means; ends are chosen by passion. This reverses Platonic rationalism. Hume's law — you cannot derive an ought from an is — remains a standard premise in modern moral philosophy.

He was twice rejected for university chairs because his sceptical writings made him impossible. From 1763 to 1766 he was embassy secretary in Paris, befriended d'Alembert and Diderot, and brought Rousseau to England — a friendship that ended bitterly. He died on 25 August 1776 with such equanimity that Adam Smith reported it to the world.

Kant credited him with breaking his dogmatic slumber. Russell said no philosophy after Kant has broken Hume.