Hume’s Nonreductionist Philosophical Anthropology

This article presents Hume’s philosophical anthropology (mainly as it can be found in the Treatise ), beginning with Hume’s discussion of human understanding, i.e. , of the special combinations of elements (ideas) resulting in knowledge and probability and forming the belief-systems of science and philosophy. The second part retraces the origins of morality and politics in human emotions and desires. The third part explains in what sense Hume can be called a non-reductionistic naturalist. Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature constitutes a philosophical anthropology quite different from a philosophy of (self-)consciousness or of the subject. According to Hume, the Self or Subject is itself a product of human nature, i.e. , of the workings of a structured set of principles which explains all ‘typically human’ phenomena. On the same basis, Hume discusses all ‘moral’ subjects, such as science, morality and politics (including economics), art and religion AND the different reflections about all these such as philosophy, criticism, political theory, history, theology, etc. The Treatise therefore is the study of the ( de facto ) possibility conditions of what is (typically) human. The principles of human nature are not primarily reason, or free will and reason, but the heart (T. 586), i.e. , a combination of principles concerning the imagination and the sensibility or the emotions, all of them irrevocably socially determined.