Thinker Without Credentials

David Hume (1711 - 76), the Scottish thinker now recognized as one of the founders of empiricism - the doctrine that experience, and not reason or God, is the supreme touchstone of truth - was never able to teach philosophy because he lacked the proper academic credentials. Unable to secure the chair of philosophy at either Edinburgh or Glasgow universities, Hume worked as a general’s secretary on a military expedition to Brittany and on a diplomatic mission to Turin, and as a keeper of the Advocates Library in Edinburgh. His major works, such as “The Treatise of Human Nature” and “An Enquiry Concerning the Human Understanding”, were largely ignored during his lifetime, but later had an important influence on thinkers such as the Englishman Jeremy Bentham and the German Immanuel Kant.