Abstract

Although Hume did not produce any major work in aesthetics, several of his essays, as well as numerous passages in A Treatise of Human Nature and in An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, do address central debates in eighteenth-century aesthetics. In this dissertation I show that Hume made some interesting contributions to these debates that in fact changed the course of aesthetic inquiry. He was the first British thinker to apply systematically an empirical method to such aesthetic concepts as the nature of beauty, the experience of the sublime, the pleasures of tragedy, and the standard of taste. His views on these concepts represent a significant departure from the classical emphasis on the formal features of aesthetic objects, and a new emphasis on the psychological processes by which the object is experienced. Hume's importance within the Anglo-aesthetic tradition is that his approach instigated a radical shift in aesthetic discourse from the study of beautiful things to the causal analysis of the emotional experiences of the percipient. Hume recognized the relativistic implications of the displacement of the aesthetic object by the experiencing subject, but he remained hopeful that a "science" of aesthetics based on principles of human nature could still be developed. This study aims to situate Hume's aesthetics within the context of his "science of man," and thereby to enhance understanding of his philosophical project as a whole