«David Hume» – Common-Sense Moralist, Sceptical Metaphysician

Sinopse

Taking issue with the two leading interpretations of David Hume’s philosophy, David Fate Norton shows that Hume was neither a purely negative sceptic nor a purely positive naturalist. Instead, Hume responded to two quite different philosophical crises, a crise spéculative and a crise morale, and his responses to each of these two crises were not only methodologically different, but known by him to be so. Demonstrating that Hume did not dogmatically deny the existence of substances, causes, and values, this work also argues that recent studies stressing Hume’s naturalism err by minimizing his fundamental questions about the nature of reality. Hume was, in his own terms, a “speculative sceptic,” in the pre-Cartesian sense of the word scepticism, in which doubting and denying may be antithetical. Concerned about the corrosive influence of moral scepticism, Hume assigned sentiment and natural belief a role in morals but not in speculative philosophy.
Professor Norton provides detailed textual and philosophical analysis of Hume and several of his contemporaries, including a chapter on Frances Hutcheson, a well-known influence on Hume, and another on George Turnbull and Henry Home, Lord Kames, two of Hume’s philosophical foils. He also discusses Hume’s views on the roles of reason and sentiment in morals and metaphysics and offers an exposition of the traditional varieties of scepticism.