David Hume: A Biography

Biography of David Tilman

D avid Tilman describes himself as both a theoretical and an experimental ecologist. Currently the McKnight Presidential Chair in Ecology and Regents Professor at the University of Minnesota (St. Paul), Tilman has spent his career developing theories of biodiversity and species composition that he has tested in carefully designed and controlled experiments. His work on resource competition in b...

David Hume and Modern Economics

Hume’s contribution to modern economics is normally thought of in terms of his early statement of the quantity theory of money, and to a lesser extent his views on trade and development. At a methodological level the influence from his empiricism is commonly traced to the development of econometrics. But if we explore his philosophy more fully, we find a much richer set of ideas which can illum...

A Credit Market à la David Hume

The answer, according to Hume, could be the borrower’s “abhorrence of villainy and knavery”, but this could only be the case in “a civiliz’d state, when [the borrower] is train’d up according to a certain discipline and education”. This cannot be the answer, however, when the interaction is looked at from the perspective of man’s basic “rude and more natural condition”. Nor can the answer be fo...

David Hume on Banking and Hoarding

David Hume and Erasmus Darwin's Zoonomia.