 | Hume’s Science of Human Nature: Scientific Realism, Reason, and Substantial Explanation Subjects: Humanities; History; Philosophy; History of Science & Technology; History of Philosophy; Modern Philosophy (16th Century-18th Century); Hume's Science of Human Nature is an investigation of the philosophical commitments underlying Hume's methodology in pursuing what he calls 'the science of human nature'. It argues that Hume understands scientific explanation as aiming at explaining the inductively-established universal regularities discovered in experience via an appeal to the nature of the substance underlying manifest phenomena. For years, scholars have taken Hume to employ a deliberately shallow and demonstrably untenable notion of scientific explanation. By contrast, Hume's Science of Human Nature sets out to update our understanding of Hume's methodology by using a more sophisticated picture of science as a model. David Landy is Associate Professor of Philosophy at San Francisco State University. He is the author of Kant's Inferentialism: The Case Against Hume (Routledge, 2015). |
