Hume: An Intellectual Biography
Cambridge University Press
Edition: Reprint, 12/6/2018
EAN 9781108733687, ISBN10: 1108733689
Paperback, 634 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 x 3.6 cm
Language: English
This is the first book to provide a comprehensive overview of the entire career of one of Britain's greatest men of letters. It sets in biographical and historical context all of Hume's works, from A Treatise of Human Nature to The History of England, bringing to light the major influences on the course of Hume's intellectual development, and paying careful attention to the differences between the wide variety of literary genres with which Hume experimented. The major events in Hume's life are fully described, but the main focus is on Hume's intentions as a philosophical analyst of human nature, politics, commerce, English history, and religion. Careful attention is paid to Hume's intellectual relations with his contemporaries. The goal is to reveal Hume as a man intensely concerned with the realization of an ideal of open-minded, objective, rigorous, dispassionate dialogue about all the principal questions faced by his age.
Introduction
1. Pursuits of philosophy and general learning
2. Anatomist of human nature
3. Essayist
4. Achievement of independence
5. Two years at Ninewells
6. The start of a history of Great Britain
7. The completion of a history of Great Britain
8. Paris, London, Edinburgh
Afterword
death and character.