Born in Edinburgh in 1711, David Hume's father died when he was two. His mother, who came from a family of lawyers, dedicated herself to her children's education. He was steered toward the law and admitted to Edinburgh University at the age of twelve. There he discovered he had “an insurmountable aversion to everything but the pursuits of philosophy and general learning.”

Hume left the university without taking a degree but carried on a life of study at home. When he was just twenty-eight, he published his first — and as it turned out his greatest — philosophical work, the Treatise of Human Nature (1739). His reputation as a philosopher was for attacking orthodoxies. As a result, he failed to land an academic position at the University of Glasgow in 1752. His iconoclastic reputation grew with the publication of his Natural History of Religion in 1757. The volume took an unkind look at the origin of our religious impulses. He then claimed to “live quietly and keep remote from all clamor,” and so he withheld publication of Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion until after his death. It would become a classic in the philosophy of religion. He also wrote a six-volume History of England.

He lived the last years of his life in his hometown of Edinburgh, where he was quite prominent in intellectual and literary circles. Two years of constant illness preceded his death in 1776. It is nearly impossible to capture the importance of Hume's contribution to philosophy and the extent of his influence over the two centuries since his death.