Daniel de Búrca

Who was Daniel de Búrca?

Daniel de Búrca was born in Dublin, Ireland. His father was a civil servant and his mother a nurse.

From an extraordinarily young age, de Búrca exhibited a considerable and precocious mathematical ability. At the age of four he was accepted to study under the renowned mathematician, Gregor Rzadac in Prague. By the age of fourteen, his attentions turned to philosophy and in 1773 his first collection of essays entitled, "God and the Universe" was published though no copies of this remain. It is thought to have been a main influence on David Hume's later ideas on causality. This collection of essays was quite controversial as it removed the need of God from human thought and was suppressed by the Vatican. De Búrca's opus appeared in 1789 when he published his great work on the origins of human thought, "A logical reflection on thought". This was released under the nom de plume, Ezra Emsik so as to avoid the mass purging that had greeted many of his earlier works. He went into seclusion after this until an obituary notice was published in The Times in April 1852 announcing his death in the sentence, "deBúrcadies".