biography
pronunciation:
[hyoom]
| sex:
| male
|
| lived:
| (1711–76)
|
| biography:
| Philosopher and historian, born in Edinburgh, EC Scotland, UK. A leading figure in the Scottish Enlightenment, he studied at Edinburgh, took up law, and in 1734 went to La Flèche in Anjou, where he wrote his masterpiece, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), consolidating and extending the empiricist legacy of Locke and Berkeley. His views became widely known only when he wrote two volumes of Essays Moral and Political (1741–2), and the abridgement of the Treatise entitled Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, which provoked Kant and the idealists to counter Hume's empiricism and scepticism. He wrote the posthumously published Dialogues concerning Natural Religion in the 1750s. His atheism thwarted his applications for professorships at Edinburgh and Glasgow, and he became a tutor, secretary, and keeper of the Advocates' Library in Edinburgh, where he published his popular Political Discourses (1752), and his six-volume History of England (1754–62). In 1763–5 he was secretary to the ambassador in Paris and cut a figure in French society, returning to London in 1766 and to Edinburgh in 1768. |
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