David Hume, Scottish enlightenment philosopher (7th May 1711 - 25th August 1776). Steel engraving by W. Holl in \Gallery of Portraits\" 1837, with later colouring, from the 1766 painting by Alan Ramsay. Hume opposed the rationalists such as Descartes in believing that human passions ruled reason. In his \"A Treatise of Human Nature\" he tried to create a naturalistic 'science of man' examining the psychological basis of human nature. He challenged the natural theological argument from design in his \"Dialogues concerning Natural Religion\" 1779. He has been seen as a founding father of cognitive science and very influential in the philosophy of science. Albert Einstein (1915) wrote that he was inspired by Hume's positivism when he wrote the Special Theory of Relativity, and he also influenced (amongst others) Karl Popper, Charles Darwin, Immanuel Kant, Shopenhauer and Wittgenstein."