Hume’s Naturalism and Skepticism in the Treatise and His Appeal from Theory to Practice

Today, David Hume’s A Treatise o f Human Nature (1729–1730) is considered his greatest work. But Hume was immediately dissatisfied with it and eventually repudiated it altogether in an “Advertisement” to the 1777 edition of his works. 2 In this chapter, I argue that Hume’s theory of human nature in the Treatise is pitched at the wrong “level” of analysis because Hume (following the “modern philosophy” of Descartes, Locke, and Berkeley) bases his theory of human nature on introspection. Hume’s contemporary critic, Thomas Reid, recognized this flaw, which he attributed to the “way of ideas” common to Descartes, Locke, Berkeley and Hume. 3 Reid, however, only became aware of this flaw because Hume had drawn attention to problems in his explanations for our belief in the continued existence of objects independent of our perceptions and for our belief in personal identity. Hume only explicitly recognized a flaw in his theory of personal identity and he recanted that in the Appendix to Book 3 of the Treatise. But it is the problem of our ideas about the continued existence of objects in Treatise , Book 1, Part 4, Section 2 (“Of skepticism with regard to the senses”) that induces Hume’s famous “skeptical interlude,” which bursts forth at the conclusion of Book 1 (part 4, section 7). Hume escapes from his skeptical interlude by appealing from theory—where he encounters problems with his theory of human nature—to practice—where no one doubts the continued existence of objects, the external world or personal identity. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.