Abstract

With his very first work, the Treatise of Human Nature, David Hume inaugurated a new science of man. In this dissertation I offer an interpretation of this science of man as political philosophy understood as a comprehensive science of the human world. There are two basic insights which I take to be essential for understand Hume's approach to human nature, society and history: first, the subjects of a science of the human things are not objects opposed to consciousness like beings in nature. They are realities which we know about primarily because we are parts of them. Thus our understanding of these realities always involves self-knowledge. I use the term "participation" to refer to this dimension of man's existence: it is a dimension that Hume points to by, among other things, insisting on the priority of common life for our understanding of the human world. ;Secondly, Hume believes we experience ourselves as participating in a cosmos, an ordered whole. The advance of science is an advance in our awareness of order. Such order points beyond itself to a divine author or ground. I use the term "transcendence" to refer to this dimension of reality, and I try to show how Hume is committed to a belief in such a ground for human nature, political order, and even history