David Hume on Two Different Species of Philosophy: Intersecting Epistemological and Psychological Approaches
David Hume on Two Different Species of Philosophy: Intersecting Epistemological and Psychological Approaches

Summary/Abstract: The article ventures a detailed and critical exposition of the first three sections of David Hume’s Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, which represents, in a revised fashion, most of Book I of his Treatise of Human Nature. Through a careful examination of such core concepts of Hume’s epistemology as ‘perception,’ ‘impression,’ and ‘idea,’ the article arrives at the conclusion that the Humean theory of human understanding is best construed as a kind of methodological dualism: on the one hand, Hume proceeds as a philosopher making statements about the nature of human understanding with the force of a priori evidence, on the other, he acts as a natural scientist gathering empirical data, examining it, and drawing an inductive generalization therefrom. Hume is thus both a theoretical epistemologist and an empirical psychologist with a semi-disguised propensity to reduce the duties of the former to those of the latter.

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