Biography: David Hume

David Hume was born in Edinburgh in 1711and later died at the age of 65 in 1776. What summarizes his sixty five years is a life packed with great significance to both people of his time and the current generation. He was ideally a renowned Scottish Historian and Philosopher. He was brought up by his widowed Calvinist mother from an early age. Later on, he attended the Edinburgh University. He described himself in his personal autobiography laying out his honest attributes as a man of mild dispositions, of an open and socially acceptable humor and cheerfulness, with a command on temper and less vulnerable to enmity and of high moderation in all his passions. One of his friends Adam Smith endorses Hume’s portrait of himself in an obituary that was written in honor of this great person as a friend. Adam smith considered Hume as an almost perfect virtuous and wise man in a manner where may be the human frailty nature would agree.

This great philosopher of his time maintained the work of those who came before him like John Locke and George Berkeley. He went past the basic understanding about knowledge as one that derives from encounters in opposition to the logical believe, founded in the 17th century where ideas were believed to have an innate value. Hume embraced a very radical skepticism making a suggestion that experience had the ultimate significance stating that no philosopher is able to get people behind the day-to-day experiences or present us with rules of engagement that are dissimilar to those we have through reflections on a daily basis.

He worked very hard on the postulations those ideas that abound stem up from sensations from our daily lives rather than complicated facts. In his life, he differentiated between ideas and impressions where he stated that impressions were the immediate sensations on real matters that surround us and the ideas being the remembrance of the said impressions. His writings were very important to the expansion of Kant’s final work intertwining empiricism and rationalism into a coherent and uniform bond. Later on in his life, Hume spent his life in Edinburgh where he continued to rework and again work on his philosophical creativities. He continually became skeptical all through his works till the last one published in 1779 on “The Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion”. This last work dispute any claims for natural or logical theology and it is maybe because of the tremendously contentious nature of the work that Hume withheld the work.