Hume's Foundational Project in the Treatise

Abstract

In the Introduction to the Treatise Hume very enthusiastically announces his project to provide a secure and solid foundation for the sciences by grounding them on his science of man. And Hume indicates in the Abstract that he carries out this project in the Treatise. But most interpreters do not believe that Hume's project comes to fruition. In this paper, I offer a general reading of what I call Hume's ‘foundational project’ in the Treatise, but I focus especially on Book 1. I argue that in Book 1 much of Hume's logic is put in the service of the other sciences, in particular, mathematics and natural philosophy. I concentrate on Hume's negative thesis that many of the ideas central to the sciences are ideas that we cannot form. For Hume, this negative thesis has implications for the sciences, as many of the texts I discuss make evident. I consider and criticize different proposals for understanding these implications: the Criterion of Meaning and the ‘Inconceivability Principle’. I introduce what I call Hume's ‘No Reason to Believe’ Principle, which I argue captures more adequately the link Hume envisions between his logic, in particular his examination of ideas, and the other sciences.

Universal Gravitation and the (Un)Intelligibility of Natural Philosophy

“…30 But Newton deliberately denies having any knowledge of this fluid: 'for I do not know what this AEther is' (Opticks, Query 21). 31 For this point, see Boehm's (2016) foundational project reading. 32 Berkeley (1948) anticipates this in his New Theory of Vision (85):…”

“…The Hume–Newton relationship has by now been thoroughly examined (e.g., by Capaldi, ; Laudan, ; Jones, ; Force, ; Barfoot, ; Stanistreet, ; Buckle, ; Millican, ; De Pierris, ; Ducheyne, ; Brown & Morris, ; Slavov, ; Demeter, , ; Boehm, ; Hazony & Schliesser, ). Despite the immense amount of scholarship, Hume's Newtonian‐inspired criticism of Leibniz on reason and intelligibility has not been given the attention it deserves.…”

Before the Two Cultures: Merging the Canons of the History of Science and Philosophy

“…Yet, Hume's vision of progress for moral philosophy, unlike Turnbull's, does not proceed through the perfection of natural philosophy and through our knowledge of final causes. The science of man is the foundational science, as he proclaims it in the Treatise 's introduction, as it will delineate possible claims of knowledge in other disciplines—including natural philosophy and religion too (see Boehm ; Hazony ). As a consequence Hume's project eliminates claims aspiring to knowledge of transcendence, or more precisely, Hume takes pains to argue that our conclusions in moral and natural philosophy cannot be stretched to the intentions of the Deity: “We can never be allowed to mount up from the universe, the effect, to Jupiter, the cause; and then descend downwards, to infer any new effect from that cause.…”

“…Descartes's original vision of method that underpinned this unity prescribed analysis into intuitively clear and infallibly known metaphysical principles, the world's basic constituents, “simple natures,” from which deductive knowledge in physics and other fields of knowledge was attainable (see Garber ). At the other end of the spectrum, David Hume's foundational project in Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40) aspired to empirical knowledge about the limits and prospects of human cognition, a basis upon which a “compleat system of the sciences” could be erected (see Boehm ; Hazony ; Demeter ).…”

Newton and Hume

“…The critical interpretation (Laudan 1981;Jones 1984;Barfoot 1990;Schliesser 2009;Ducheyne 2009;Boehm 2013Boehm , 2016Hazony 2014) challenges this. According to Miren Boehm (2016, 1-2), interpreters have actually underestimated how misleading the traditional picture actually is.…”