David Hume

David Hume (1711–1776) was a Scottish philosopher, historian and essayist, born David Home in Edinburgh, whose empiricism and scepticism reshaped European thought. At twenty-five he went to La Flèche in Anjou and wrote A Treatise of Human Nature in the Jesuit college's library (1739–1740).

It argued that all ideas derive from impressions and causal belief rests on custom. In 1745 an atheism petition by Edinburgh ministers cost him a university chair. He recast his arguments in two Enquiries (1748, 1751), and from 1752 wrote the six-volume History of England (1754–1762), which became the standard English history for decades.

After serving as embassy secretary in Paris in 1763–1765, he brought Rousseau to England in 1766, where they quarrelled and parted. Kant said Hume had woken him from his dogmatic slumbers. Hume died of abdominal cancer in 1776.