Hume: An Intellectual Biography

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.

• The Infidel and the Professor: David Hume, Adam Smith, and the Friendship That Shaped Modern Thought
• Kant: A Biography
• Adam Smith: Father of Economics
• The Club: Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends Who Shaped an Age
• Empire and Revolution: The Political Life of Edmund Burke
• Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment
• The Model Thinker: What You Need to Know to Make Data Work for You
• Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely
• Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition
• Selected Essays (Oxford World's Classics)