The Great Infidel: A Life of David Hume [Hardcover]

Roderick Graham (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 28, 2005

This complete life story of David Hume, one of Scotland’s greatest thinkers, follows the Enlightenment from its early roots to its full blossoming in 18th-century Edinburgh. Using original sources, many for the first time, this biography details every aspect of the philosopher’s life—from the lukewarm reception of his now pivotal work, Treatise of Human Nature, to the fame and near excommunication brought about by his famous Essays and History. Also detailed are the stories behind his nickname, “The Great Infidel,” the numerous guests seeking an invitation to dine at his table, and his lengthy intellectual involvement with a married aristocrat. This work is a well-rounded picture of the man, the century in which he lived, his famous ideas, and above all, his humanity.

Editorial Reviews

Review

'a tremendous, sometimes mischievous piece of work' - The Herald 'fine and sensitive, rather than dry and academic, it is a fitting tribute to one of Scotland's greatest men' - The Daily Mail --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

About the Author

Roderick Graham has received two Emmy awards for his work in television as a writer, director, and producer. He is the author of John Knox: Democrat.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 448 pages
• Publisher: Tuckwell Press, Ltd. (September 28, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1862322287
• ISBN-13: 978-1862322288
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.1 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.9 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,251,584 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Hume deserves better, May 1, 2010

By 

M. Burke - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Great Infidel: A Life of David Hume (Paperback)

The content is so difficult to access in this ponderously written text. For a biographer and an historian (which presumably the author is) to use so many suppositions is appalling. The first three chapters abound with unsupportable statements such as 'David probably thought...', 'he must have felt...' , 'his family undoubtedly...' . It is a real battle to wade through this book and I only did so because I was desperate to know about Hume.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Story of a Diplomatic Sceptic, July 22, 2011

By 

Stephen Cowley (Edinburgh) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Great Infidel: A Life of David Hume (Paperback)

Contrary to another reviewer, I enjoyed reading this book, but then I'm from Edinburgh. The author has taken the trouble to visit the places where Hume stayed in France and tells his life story as a historian, diplomat and man of letters well. He writes well on his early life at Chirnside and his youthful reading, for example of Pierre Bayle's Historical and Critical Dictionary. He also has much to say on his loss of faith, his life in Paris as a diplomat where he was feted and his acquaintance with Alison Cockburn, which he relates to his return to Edinburgh.

He is less sure-footed when he speculates on Hume's philosophy as it becomes evident that he has not studied the subject in any great depth and his speculations on motives thus lack authority. He presents Hume as a genial man, but this leads him to like his ideas rather than to engage with them. Overall, it both shorter and more accurate than Mossner's Life of David Hume. I read Hume years ago at University and felt I had learned from this work.

3.0 out of 5 stars The biography of a genial fat man from Edinburgh, February 1, 2012

By 

S. Matthews "Sean Matthews" (Mainz, Germany) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Great Infidel: A Life of David Hume (Paperback)

David Hume, it is generally agreed, was about as attractive a man as ever lived. He had a gift for friendship, he was witty, and he was kind; he inspired almost universal affection in people he met. This is an affectionate biography of that man. However if David Hume had been only a genial buffer from Edinburgh, then 250 years after he died there would be at most local antiquarian interest in his life. But Hume was not just a genial buffer; he was terrifying; that he was a genial buffer was incidental. Peter Gay memorably wrote in his history of the enlightenment that 'when Johnson and Boswell talked about him, they talked about him with an unphilosophical aversion that smacks almost of fear'.

You get very little feeling for why Hume was so threatening from this book. You get the man, but you do not get the philosopher or the historian. You are told that he was not quite an atheist but that he was an honest man. But there is no adequate explanation of why someone supposedly shouted that out at his funeral, or why his family felt that an armed guard was necessary on his grave to prevent it being desecrated. The problem is that Graham is not really sophisticated about either philosophy or historiography. He dismisses Berkeley, for instance, as a comic footnote to philosophy apparently because he finds Berkeley's idealism ridiculous. He seems not to have realised that comic footnotes to do not get extensive discussion in randomly chosen one-volume histories of philosophy (you may not accept Berkeley's brand of full-bore subjective idealism but finding a flaw in its intellectual defenses is a serious philosophical challenge). He does not manage either to convey why Gibbon felt that a letter of praise from Hume on the first volume of the Decline and Fall more than balanced ten years labour. And finally, in spite of a final chapter dedicated to the dialogues, he does not really come to a clear position on what Hume believed (it is too easy to say that Hume not an atheist - after all by some definitions Benedict Spinoza was not an atheist either - a careful discussion in the Cambridge companion to Hume ended up labelling him an 'attenuated deist', which seems about right to me).

It is far too many years since I read Mossner's biography, so I cannot compare the two, but I think the world is still waiting for an up-to-date Hume biography.