Hume was born on 26 April 1711 in Edinburgh.

At the age of 12, he entered the University of Edinburgh, where his family encouraged him to pursue legal studies. However, he was only interested in philosophy (including scientific studies).

Upon his return to Scotland in 1740 - where he met Adam Smith, to whom he remained very close throughout his life - he published his first Essays in Edinburgh in 1741, spanning a very broad field, ranging from “Of the Delicacy of Taste and Passion” to “Of Civil Liberty”. Other essays on widely diverse subjects were to be added over the years. These essays were very successful. However, accused of atheism, Hume failed to obtain a chair at the University of Edinburgh (in 1745) or Glasgow (in 1751). The position of librarian to the Edinburgh Faculty of Advocates enabled him to write The History of England, published between 1754 and 1762. After the end of the Seven Years’ War, Hume became the personal secretary to the Ambassador of Great Britain in Paris, where he spent three years, frequenting encyclopaedists and philosophers. He returned to Great Britain in 1767, as a member of the government (Under-Secretary of State for the Northern Department). In 1769 he returned to Scotland, working on new editions of his books. He died on 25 August 1776, shortly after the publication of The Wealth of Nations by his friend Smith. (On Hume’s life, see also Mossner 1954; Ross 2008).

David Hume is unanimously considered as the most important British philosopher of the eighteenth century. His precocity is surprising, since he finished his Treatise of Human Nature at the age of 26 (he published the Abstract of a Treatise of Human Nature anonymously, which was identified and republished by Keynes and Sraffa in 1938) and its depth is so great that the questions he posed at that time not only awakened Kant from his “dogmatic slumber”, but still concern us today.