David Hume (1711-1776) was a Scottish philosopher, economist, historian and a key figure in the history of Western philosophy and the Scottish Enlightenment. He is often grouped with John Locke, George Berkeley, and a handful of others as a British Empiricist. During Hume"s lifetime, he was more famous as a historian; his six-volume History of England was a bestseller well into the nineteenth century and the standard work on English history for many years. Hume was the first philosopher of the modern era to develop a systematically naturalistic philosophy. In the twentieth century, he has increasingly become a source of inspiration for those in political philosophy and economics as an early and subtle thinker in the liberal tradition, as well as an early innovator in the genre of the essay in his Essays Moral, Political, and Literary. After the publication of Essays Moral and Political in 1744, he applied for the Chair of Pneumatics and Moral Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. From 1763 to 1765, Hume was Secretary to Lord Hertford in Paris, where he was admired by Voltaire and lionised by the ladies in society.