Abstract

Scholars have often assumed that Hume investigates human nature by stepping outside the evaluative realm and adopting a neutral stance. This dissertation argues that this is not so: that Hume tries to explain how we think, feel and behave from within the realm of value. ;Chapter One examines Hume's allegedly subjectivistic account of value, and argues that while Hume sometimes speaks of value as being subjectivistic, and so tries to make sense of it from a pre-evaluative perspective, he in fact holds that our thought and talk is evaluatively informed. In Chapter Two, it is argued that when it comes to making sense of human motivation, Hume takes our motives to be constituted by ethical considerations, and that our motives are largely intelligible only if assumed to be so constituted. In Chapter Three, the case is made that, for Hume, the freedom assumed in the free agency upon which moral responsibility is said to depend in fact rests on a prior commitment to the realm of value. ;The underlying theme of these chapters is that, for Hume, none of the phenomena discussed is intelligible unless an evaluative framework or practice is presupposed, one whose authority and legitimacy is taken to be internal to those reasonings by which we interpret our experience. Having established this, the final chapter asks: if evaluative considerations---especially moral ones---play the constitutive role they do, is the self in Hume at risk of being overmoralized? To this, a negative answer is given; and in the process the main theme of the dissertation is reaffirmed: that, for Hume, in order to give an intelligible and naturalistic account of the various phenomena examined, one must adopt an internal stance within the evaluative realm