Hume as phenomenologist

摘要

Hume is best known for his skeptical wit and for his naturalistic stance. This thesis develops a less popular line of interpretation, starting with Husserl's suggestion that the first book of Hume's Treatise of Human Nature anticipates some features and concerns of the phenomenological movement. Besides doing justice to the complexity and the historical fecundity of Hume's thought, a phenomenological reading of Hume sheds a new light upon the self-legitimating capacity of the "true philosophy" he claims to hold. On this point I part company with Husserl. In fact, Husserl regards Hume as still entangled in the opaque naturalistic presuppositions of British empiricism, and therefore as failing in point of philosophical coherence. Instead, I claim that Hume's reflection on the possibility of a true philosophy drives him to a fully mature and rigorous phenomenological position, which can be compared to Hegel's and Husserl's later phenomenologies.