Who Was David Hume?

Anthony Gottlieb reviews Hume: An Intellectual Biography by James A. Harris at the New York Review of Books.

"... He omitted the Treatise [of Human Nature] from editions of his collected writings and begged the public to judge him only by his other works.

"Readers of his philosophy have, on the whole, ignored this request. That is a pity, because Hume’s distinctive doctrines about the mind and the limits of human knowledge emerge more clearly in a set of linked essays that he published in his late thirties. These essays (which are now known as his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding) are more streamlined and carefully argued than the corresponding part of his Treatise. ..."