Complete Essays

David Hume, David Womersley

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Hardback

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About the book

David Hume reshaped, redirected, and re-energised the English essay. His sceptical, rational, self-questioning persona created what amounted to a new intellectual arena, in which it was possible to think afresh about the world and the self. When he famously wrote that 'the life of man is of no greater importance to the universe than that of an oyster', something had changed.

David Womersley has spent a lifetime studying the literature of the eighteenth century. This definitive new two-volume edition of the essays follows Hume's division of his essays into two parts, and allows the modern reader to enjoy this extraordinary writer in all his moods, from benign optimism to gloomy foreboding. The editorial apparatus supplies indispensable intellectual and bibliographical context for these rewarding, humane, and yet also subtly provocative writings.

Volume 2 is published simultaneously.

About the Author

David Hume

David Hume was born in Edinburgh in 1711, and by his death in 1776 had become one of Britain’s greatest men of letters, equal in stature to Voltaire and Rousseau and described by Boswell as ‘the greatest Writer in Brittain’. As well as his Essays, which were republished and expanded throughout his life, he wrote A Treatise of Human Nature (later recast as Enquiries concerning Human Understanding and concerning the Principles of Morals) and a History of Britain.