Hume's Experimental Method

¹I am indebted for helpful comments and discussion to David Bloor, Márta Fehér, Giora Hon, Brad Hume, Ruth Lorand, Gábor Palló, Jeff Schwegman, Thomas Sturm, Gábor Zemplén and an anonymous referee of the Journal. My research has been supported by OTKA (79193).

²See e.g. Margaret Schabas, The Natural Origins of Economics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005) 80.

³See e.g. Gary Hatfield, ‘Remaking the Science of Mind: Psychology as Natural Science’, in Inventing Human Science, edited by Christopher Fox, Roy Porter and Robert Wokler (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995) 208.

⁴Reinhard Brandt, ‘Philosophical Methods’, in The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Philosophy, edited by Knud Haakonssen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006) 143.

⁵David Allan, Virtue, Learning and the Scottish Enlightenment (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993) 154.

⁶See Michael Barfoot, ‘Hume and the Culture of Science’, in Studies in the Philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment, edited by M. A. Stewart (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990) and Eugene Sapadin, ‘A Note on Newton, Boyle, and Hume's “Experimental Method”', Hume Studies, 23 (1997): 337–344.

⁷See Paul Wood, ‘The Natural History of Man in the Scottish Enlightenment’, History of Science, 28 (1990): 89–123.

⁸Peter Hanns Reill, Vitalizing Nature in the Enlightenment (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005) 37f.

⁹For a diagrammatic overview see Sachiko Kusukawa, ‘Bacon's Classification of Knowledge’, in The Cambridge Companion to Bacon, edited by Markku Peltonen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) 69.

¹⁰See John Gascoigne, ‘The Study of Nature’, in The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Philosophy, edited by Knud Haakonssen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006) 863f.

¹¹David Hume's works are quoted from the Clarendon Edition: Treatise of Human Nature (THN), edited by David Fate Norton and Mary J. Norton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), following the form: book.part.section.paragraph. His Enquiries concerning Human Understanding (EHU), edited by Tom Beauchamp (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000); Enquiries concerning the Principles of Morals (EPM), edited by Tom Beauchamp (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000) are quoted as: section.paragraph.

¹²Thomas Kuhn, ‘Mathematical versus Experimental Traditions in the Development of Physical Science’, in The Essential Tension (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976) 50.

¹³Whereas I do not have the space to discuss this problem here, Hume certainly does it in the EHU's chapter ‘Of Miracles’. For a recent discussion of the epistemological relevance of this section see Axel Gelfert, ‘Hume on Testimony Revisited’, Logical Analysis and the History of Philosophy, 13 (2010): 60–75.

¹⁴David Hume, ‘Of the Study of History’, in Essays, Moral, Political and Literary, vol. 2., edited by T. H. Green and T. H. Grose (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1882) 390.

¹⁵David Hume, ‘Of the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences’, in Essays, Moral, Political and Literary, vol. 1., edited by T. H. Green and T. H. Grose (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1882) 175ff.

¹⁶Kuhn, op. cit., 44.

¹⁷Hatfield, op. cit., 208.

¹⁸Wood, op. cit., 98f.

¹⁹Roger L. Emerson, ‘Hume's Intellectual Development: Part II’, in Essays on David Hume, Medical Men and the Scottish Enlightenment (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009) 103–127.

²⁰John Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, edited by Peter Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975) 1.2.9.

²¹Peter J. Marshall and Glyndwr Williams, The Great Map of Mankind: Perceptions of the New Worlds in the Age of Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982) 93.

²²David Hume, ‘Of National Characters’, in Essays, Moral, Political and Literary, vol 1., edited by T. H. Green and T. H. Grose (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1882) 246ff.

²³See Thomas Hobbes, ‘Six Lessons to the Savilian Professors of the Mathematics’, in The English Works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury, vol. 7, edited by William Molesworth. (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1845) 184.

²⁴See Daniel Garber, ‘Descartes and Method in 1637’, in Descartes Embodied (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) 37.

²⁶See Isaac Newton, ‘Newton to Cotes. Unsent Draft: Circa March 1713’, in Philosophical Writings, edited by Andrew Janiak (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) 120f.

²⁵Thomas Sprat, History of the Royal Society (London: J. Martyn and J. Allestry, 1667) 341.

²⁷ Letters of David Hume, vol. 1, edited by J. Y. T. Greig (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932) 16.

²⁸See Lisa Jardine, Francis Bacon and the Art of Discourse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974) 249f. On some limitations of the method Hume proposes in EHU see Thomas Sturm, ‘Freedom and the Human Sciences: Hume’s Science of Man versus Kant’s Pragmatic Anthropology’, Kant Yearbook, 3 (2011): 27–31.

²⁹See Leon Pompa, Human Nature and Historical Knowledge: Hume, Hegel and Vico (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990) 21 and 36f.

³⁰Hume in these passages seems to echo Newton's ‘Rules for the Study of Natural Philosophy’ in Newton, op. cit., 87ff.

³¹Roger Smith, ‘The Language of Human Nature’, in Inventing Human Science, edited by Christopher Fox, Roy Porter and Robert Wokler (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995) 89.

³²Thomas Dixon, From Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a Secular Psychological Category (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) 107.

³³For an overview of the problem see Eric Schliesser, ‘Hume's Newtonianism and Anti-Newtonianism’, in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2008 Edition), edited by Edward N. Zalta. http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2008/entries/hume-newton/

³⁴See Isaac Newton, ‘Rules for the Study of Natural Philosophy’, in Newton, op. cit., 87.

³⁵See George E. Smith, ‘The Methodology of the Principia’, in The Cambridge Companion to Newton, edited by I. B. Cohen and George E. Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) 143.

³⁶See Kuhn, op. cit., 41 and Peter Dear, Discipline and Experience (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995) 242.

³⁷See I. Bernard Cohen, ‘The Case of the Missing Author’, in Isaac Newton's Natural Philosophy, edited by Jed Z. Buchwald and I. Bernard Cohen (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001) 22f.

³⁸See Márta Fehér, ‘The Method of Analysis-Synthesis and the Structure of Causal Explanation in Newton’, International Studies in the Philosophy of Science, 1 (1986): 60–84.

⁴²Newton, ‘Query 31’, in Newton, op. cit., 139.

³⁹See Jardine, op. cit., 17ff.

⁴⁰See Russell McCormmach, Speculative Truth: Henry Cavendish, Natural Philosophy, and the Rise of Modern Theoretical Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) 38.

⁴¹See Robert E. Schofield, Mechanism and Materialism: British Natural Philosophy in an Age of Reason (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969) 10 and Deborah A. Redman, The Rise of Political Economy as a Science: Methodology and the Classical Economists (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 107.

⁴³Newton, op. cit., 140.

⁴⁴Newton, ‘Author’s Preface to the Reader, First Edition’, in Newton, op. cit., 41.

⁴⁵Newton, ‘Query 31’, op. cit., 139.

⁴⁶See Jaakko Hintikka and Unto Remes, The Method of Analysis (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1974) 110.

⁴⁷See Garber, op. cit., 37.

⁴⁸See Hintikka and Remes, op. cit., 106ff and Redman, op. cit., 171ff.

⁴⁹See A. L. Donovan, Philosophical Chemistry in the Scottish Enlightenment: The Doctrines and Discoveries of William Cullen and Joseph Black (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1975) 96ff.

⁵⁰See also THN 3.3.6.6 and Letters of David Hume, op. cit., 32f.

⁵¹Schofield, op. cit., 95.

⁵²See Schofield, op. cit., 10f and 91ff.

⁵³Reill, op. cit., 69; see also Wood, op. cit.

⁵⁴Andrew Cunningham, ‘Hume's Vitalism and Its Implications’, British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 15 (2007): 59–73.

⁵⁵See Schofield, op. cit., 109.

⁵⁶See Reill, op. cit., 67ff and Donovan, op. cit., 96f.