David Hume (1711-1776) was born in Edinburgh, Scotland. His family pushed him to study law but he preferred to read and write philosophy. He worked for a while in a merchant's office in Bristol and then moved to France. He spent most of his time at La Flèche, the same place where Descartes had gone to school, writing his Treatise of Human Nature. When he published it in England three years later the work was almost completely ignored - in his words, "It fell dead-born from the press." When he tried to get a teaching position in philosophy nobody would take him and those who had read the Treatise accused him of heresy and atheism. Hume thus had to support himself by tutoring a marquess and then as a secretary, first to a General and then to an ambassador. After failing yet again in 1752 to get hired as a philosopher in Glasgow, he got a job as head librarian at the Advocates' library at Edinburgh.

bio by Daniel Kolak in Lovers of Wisdom
(Wadsworth, 1997)