Hume David - Routledge philosophy guidebook to Hume on knowledge

David Hume, the last of the so-called three great British empiriciststhe others being Locke (1632 1704) and Berkeley (16851753)was born on 26 April 1711, in Edinburgh, seven years after the death of Locke and when Berkeley was a young man of 26.His father was Joseph Home of Ninewells, a small landholding in Berwick-on-Tweed (David adopted the spelling Hume when he left Scotland in 1734 to avoid mispronunciation by the English). His family were quite prosperous gentry and strict Presbyterians.

Humes father died when he was only two and his mother never remarried. He was a precocious reader, described by his mother as uncommonly wake-minded, and in 1722 the family moved to Edinburgh so that he and his brother John could study at Edinburgh University. Hume matriculated at Edinburgh University in 1723 at the age of 12this was younger than was usual but not exceptionally so.There he acquired a grounding in the classical authors, logic and metaphysics, natural philosophy, ethics and mathematics.In his brief autobiography My Own Life (1993b:3516) he describes this period of his life thus:

I passed through the ordinary course of education with success, and was seized very early with a passion for literature, which has been the ruling passion of my life, and the great source of my enjoyment. My studious disposition, my sobriety, and my industry, gave my family a notion that the law was a proper profession for me, but I found an insurmountable aversion to everything but the pursuits of philosophy and general learning; and while they fancied I was poring over Voet and Vinnius, Cicero and Virgil were the authors I was secretly devouring.

(1993b:351)

Hume left Edinburgh University without taking a degree and abandoned his half-hearted study of law by 1729 when he embarked upon the philosophical study that was to lead to his writing of