Prescription, Description, and Hume's Experimental Method

British Journal for the History of Philosophy 24 (2):279-301 (2016)
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Abstract

There seems a potential tension between Hume's naturalistic project and his normative ambitions. Hume adopts what I call a methodological naturalism: that is, the methodology of providing explanations for various phenomena based on natural properties and causes. This methodology takes the form of introducing ‘the experimental method of reasoning into moral subjects’, as stated in the subtitle of the Treatise; this ‘experimental method’ seems a paradigmatically descriptive one, and it remains unclear how Hume derives genuinely normative prescriptions from this methodology. In resolving this problem, I will argue that Hume's naturalistic methodology – that is, his ‘experimental philosophy’, or what has come to be known as his experimental method – consists of the systematization of phenomena pertaining to human nature. In applying his experimental method to normative subjects, Hume systematizes our normative judgements, deriving general principles of normative justification; he then reflexivel...

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Hsueh Qu
National University of Singapore

Citations of this work

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References found in this work

A Treatise of Human Nature.David Hume & A. D. Lindsay - 1969 - Harmondsworth,: Penguin Books. Edited by Ernest Campbell Mossner.
A Treatise of Human Nature.David Hume & A. D. Lindsay - 1958 - Philosophical Quarterly 8 (33):379-380.
Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary.David Hume - 1875 - Indianapolis: Liberty Press. Edited by Eugene F. Miller.

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