Primary Contributors:

Cultures of Knowledge, based on the editions of J. Y. T. Greig and of Raymond Klibansky and Ernest C. Mossner, in association with Oxford Scholarly Editions Online and English Philosophical Texts Online

---

David Hume (1711–1776)

David Hume was born on 26 April 1711 in Edinburgh, probably at his family’s house in the Lawnmarket. He was the second son but third child of Joseph Home of Ninewells (1681–1713) and Katherine Falconer (1683–1745). His father died when he was two. With ambitions from a young age to become a philosopher, accounts of his life have been coloured by his own versions set out in ‘My own life’ (written in April 1776, shortly before his death) and ‘Letter to a physician’ (1734). Hume is thought to have entered the University of Edinburgh in 1721–2, but he did not graduate. For about five years (as he described it later in the letter of 1734), ‘I cou’d think of no other way of pushing my Fortune in the World, but that of a Scholar & Philosopher. I was infinitely happy in this Course of Life for some Months; till at last, about the beginning of Septr 1729, all my Ardor seem’d in a moment to be extinguisht, & I cou’d no longer raise my Mind to that pitch, which formerly gave me such excessive Pleasure.’ This illness lasted about five years, and in an effort to shake off the malaise, Hume (who had by this time changed his name from the family ‘Home’ to Hume) seems to have moved via Bristol to settle in Anjou at La Flèche, near the Jesuit college where both Descartes and Mersenne had studied the century before. In 1734, when he was just 23, he began to write A Treatise of Human Nature; he returned to London to prepare for publication in the late summer of 1737, and the text appeared in print in January 1739.

Hume’s letters chart in detail a number of episodes central to his life, including his residence as tutor with the Marquess of Annandale in 1745–6, whom it transpired was insane. In May 1746, General James St Clair invited Hume to take up the position of his secretary and accompany him on a military expedition to Canada. This mission was aborted but, in January 1748, Hume accompanied St Clair on an embassy to both Vienna and Turin. The same year, Hume published An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding and followed this, in 1751, with An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals and Political Discourses. An offer to serve as Keeper of the Library of the Faculty of Advocates in Edinburgh provided the philosopher with the ideal opportunity to write and publish his History of England, which was brought out in six volumes between 1754 and 1762.

Hume’s works were well known and discussed widely in France. In 1761 he received an invitation to Paris from the Comtesse de Boufflers-Rouverel, an offer leading to a friendship that developed when, two years later, Hume accepted the position of private secretary to the Earl of Hertford, the British Ambassador to France. During his three-year stay in Paris, where he was welcomed into salons and at court, he was promoted to become Secretary to the Embassy, and later chargé d’affaires. On the encouragement of his now intimate friend the Comtesse de Boufflers, Hume offered to assist the troubled Rousseau and find him refuge in England. Duly, the pair left Paris together on 4 January 1766 and arrived in London on 13 January. Once in England, Rousseau was treated as a celebrity, and the trials and tribulations of ‘managing’ the reluctant Frenchman are described in detail in Hume’s letters. Hume secured lodgings for Rousseau when the latter wished to move from the capital, first in Chiswick and subsequently in Staffordshire. However, the two men argued, with Rousseau suspicious of some form of conspiracy to dishonour him by means of the offers of help he had received. By autumn of 1766, Hume had returned to Edinburgh, hurt by publication of the letters exchanged between himself and the Frenchman, a deeply unfortunate episode that Hume regretted for the rest of his life.

Hume spent his final years surrounded by friends and revising his works for new editions. He died on 25 August 1776 at his house in St David’s Street.

 

Partners and Additional Contributors

In the winter of 2021–2, thanks to a grant awarded to the Cultures of Knowledge research project from the University of Oxford’s John Fell Fund, EMLO collated a listing of the metadata for the correspondence of David Hume from the editions published by Oxford University Press. The texts for these letters are available (within a subscribing institution) on two separate Oxford platforms—Electronic Enlightenment and Oxford Scholarly Editions Online; while the metadata are based on the publications in Oxford Scholarly Editions Online, the letter records in EMLO link to the texts in both resources. In collaboration with English Philosophical Texts Online [EPTO], edited by Amyas Merivale and Peter Millican, the correspondence inventory for Hume’s correspondence was completed with the addition of metadata itemizing the letters published in recent years by Felix Waldmann.

Key Bibliographic Source(s)

The Letters of David Hume, ed. J. Y. T. Greig, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1932).

New Letters of David Hume, ed. Raymond Klibansky and Ernest C. Mossner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954).

Further Letters of David Hume, ed. Felix Waldmann(Edinburgh Bibliographical Society, 2014).

Adam Budd, ‘Men of consequence: Whimsical David Hume, politician and man of business: an unpublished letter’, Times Literary Supplement, 24 January 2015, pp. 14–15.

Contents

The inventory of Hume’s letters has been drawn primarily from J. Y. T. Greig’s edition, published in 1932 by Oxford University Press. This two-volume edition was supplemented twenty-two years later by an additional volume, edited by Raymond Klibansky and Ernest C. Mossner (the author of the standard biography of Hume, for details of which please see the bibliography below), which included a further 127 letters that had been located over the intervening years in, for example, Edinburgh, London, Los Angeles, Oxford, and a number of letters in private collections. It is likely that a number of Hume’s letters may yet be identified both in archives and in private collections. The letter published by Adam Budd in 2015 has been described in this catalogue, and metadata for an additional sixty letters published by Felix Waldmann (2014) have been included. Users keen to be kept up-to-date with additional letters are advised to consult the listing maintained on an ongoing basis by Felix Waldmann and hosted on the Cambridge University Institutional Repository.

Further resources

Bibliography

Adam Budd, The Career and Correspondence of Andrew Millar, 1725–68 (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2020), available via subscribing institution or library on Oxford Scholarly Editions Online.

Adam Budd, ‘Men of consequence: Whimsical David Hume, politician and man of business: an unpublished letter‘, Times Literary Supplement, 24 January 2015, pp. 14–15.

J. Y. T. Greig, ed. The Letters of David Hume, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1932), available via subscribing institution or library on Oxford Scholarly Editions Online and on Electronic Enlightenment.

David Hume, My Own Life (1777); the manuscript is in the care of the National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh (Hume MSS, MS 23159), and the text is available on Hume Texts Online.

Raymond Klibansky and Ernest C. Mossner, eds, New Letters of David Hume, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954), available via subscribing institution or library on Oxford Scholarly Editions Online and on Electronic Enlightenment.

E. C. Mossner, The Life of David Hume (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954, updated second edn, 1980), available via subscribing institution or library on Oxford Scholarship Online.

Donald Siebert, The Moral Animus of David Hume (Associated University Presses, 1990).

Felix Waldmann, ed, Further Letters of David Hume, (Edinburgh Bibliographical Society, 2014); additions and emendations to this edition are available as a .pdf document hosted by Cambridge University Institutional Repository and this document will be updated by Felix Waldmann as and when the need arises.

Additional Resources

English Philosophical Texts Online [EPTO]. An open-access library of early modern English-language philosophical texts.

Hume Texts Online, ed. Amyas Merivale and Peter Millican.

Oxford Philosophical Texts, teaching editions of canonical texts in the history of philosophy listed on Oxford University Press.

philosophy bites: podcasts of top philosophers interviewed on bite-sized topics (including the podcast by Peter Millican on Hume’s Significance).

Launch curated catalogue