Moral Philosophy and the Scottish Enlightenment: The Study of Human Nature

From the 1730s, and especially from 1739, the date at which David Hume (see Biographical Notes) published the Treatise of Human Nature , the problems of moral philosophy were actively explored and debated in Scotland; the study of human nature was seen as an essential pre-requisite to the wider study of man in society. This work Francis Hutcheson had already begun, and, as we shall see, his successors found much of value in his writings. But primarily the issues in the debate were those put forward by David Hume. Hume’s position within the Scottish Enlightenment is not an easy one to gauge. His views were met with direct hostility and academic rejection, in spite of his personal friendship with many of the leading ‘literati’. The study of Hume’s philosophy is clearly a matter for the technically equipped philosopher; here it is possible only to indicate one or two of the major areas of debate, and the part that Hume played in provoking his contemporaries. In this chapter, the documents chosen deal with the fundamental question of epistemology: man’s knowledge of the external world, and with the attempts made to develop a psychology of human nature. 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.