ABOUT THE TOMB:
"Historian and philosopher David Hume (1711–1776), author of Treatise of Human Nature, was a household name across Europe in the 18th century, and a critical figure in the Scottish Enlightenment. He was a strong influence on many other thinkers and public figures, Adam Smith among them. However, his grave had to be guarded for 8 days after burial, due to strong public hostility towards him at the time of his death, largely due to his professed atheism.
In his will Hume requested that a "Monument be built over my body ... with an Inscription containing only my Name and the Year of my Birth and Death, leaving it to Posterity to add the Rest." The tomb is a large cylindrical tower on the Edinburgh skyline. It was designed by Robert Adam in 1777. Whilst Hume was not religious, leading to be buried in this non-denominational site, other family members did not hold his views. His niece is also interred here and she added a particularly Christian sentiment to her panel, which reads "Behold, I come quickly, thanks be to God which giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ".
Hume's home, between 1771 and 1776, was relatively close by, on the corner of St David Street and St Andrew Square, but that location has never been visible from Hume's tomb (as some claim)."
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ABOUT THE MAN:
"David Hume (7 May 1711 NS (26 April 1711 OS) – 25 August 1776) was a Scottish philosopher, historian, economist, and essayist, who is best known today for his highly influential system of philosophical empiricism, skepticism, and naturalism.
Hume's empiricist approach to philosophy places him with John Locke, Francis Bacon, and Thomas Hobbes as a British Empiricist. Beginning with his A Treatise of Human Nature (1739), Hume strove to create a total naturalistic science of man that examined the psychological basis of human nature. Against philosophical rationalists, Hume held that passion rather than reason governs human behaviour and argued against the existence of innate ideas, positing that all human knowledge is ultimately founded solely in experience; Hume thus held that genuine knowledge must either be directly traceable to objects perceived in experience, or result from abstract reasoning about relations between ideas which are derived from experience, calling the rest "nothing but sophistry and illusion", a dichotomy later given the name Hume's fork.
Writings on religion
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy states that Hume "wrote forcefully and incisively on almost every central question in the philosophy of religion." His "various writings concerning problems of religion are among the most important and influential contributions on this topic." His writings in this field cover the philosophy, psychology, history, and anthropology of religious thought. All of these aspects were discussed in Hume's 1757 dissertation, The Natural History of Religion. Here he argued that the monotheistic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam all derive from earlier polytheistic religions. He also suggested that all religious belief "traces, in the end, to dread of the unknown." Hume had also written on religious subjects in the first Enquiry, as well as later in the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion."
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