The Life of David Hume

"This is the standard life of Hume. There are others, but Mossner seems to hold the field. It was the book that introduced me to Hume’s life and biography, so it was formative in that respect. It bears out what I just said, that Hume was a very loveable, admirable, man. He had this great generosity and benevolence and was very much adored by everyone who knew him. He was born in the Lowlands of Scotland in 1711. His family were small-scale farmers but well enough off for him to get a good education. He went to Edinburgh University at a young age, and then with various interruptions — not many — he lived the life of a scholar. He devoted a great deal of time to learning, to reading and, of course, eventually to writing. He started writing very young: the Treatise , which many people think is his masterpiece, and is certainly a very important book in the history of philosophy, was written by 1739, when he was still only 28. He got off the blocks pretty quickly, and he never stopped writing after that. Yes, notoriously he didn’t get the chair at Edinburgh, largely because of hostility from entrenched religious interests and the Church of Scotland, the Presbyterian church here. Yes, although it was not a term he liked to apply to himself. He was known as the “Great Infidel,” and he certainly had no religious convictions at all. Yes, he had a very wide circle of correspondents and acquaintances — and of course they wrote letters to each other in those days and not emails — so we do have a very splendid archive of his correspondence."