Book description
A giant of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, David Hume was one
of the most important philosophers ever to write in English. He was
also a brilliant historian. In this succinct study, Nicholas
Phillipson shows how Hume freed history from religion and politics. As
a philosopher, Hume sought a way of seeing the world and pursuing
happiness independently of a belief in God. His groundbreaking
approach applied the same outlook to Britain's history, showing how
the past was shaped solely through human choices and actions.
In this analysis of Hume's life and works, from his university days
in Edinburgh to the rapturous reception of his History of
England, Nicholas Phillipson reveals the gradual process by which
one of the greatest Western philosophers turned himself into one of
the greatest historians of Britain. In doing so, he shows us how
revolutionary Hume was, and why his ideas still matter today.
Nicholas Phillipson is Honorary Research Fellow in History at
Edinburgh, where he has taught since 1965, and author of a celebrated
biography of Hume's great friend and intellectual companion, Adam Smith
(Allen Lane 2010). He has held visiting appointments at Princeton, Yale,
Tulsa, the Folger Library, Washington DC and the Ludwigs-Maximilian
Universitat, Munich. He is co-director of a three-year Leverhulme-funded
project on the Science of Man in Scotland. He was an associate editor of
the New Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, a founder editor of the
journal
Modern Intellectual History
, published by the Cambridge University Press, and is a past president
of the Eighteenth Century Scottish Studies Society.
