Reading Hume with Husserl

Husserl remarked that Hume\u27s Treatise played an important role in his own philosophical development. He commented at various places on the transcendental nature of Hume\u27s thought, and claimed that Hume was the first to discover the central problems of transcendental philosophy. In this dissertation, following Husserl\u27s insights, I develop a transcendental interpretation of Hume\u27s Treatise. I open the work, in the second chapter, by putting together Husserl\u27s expressed opinion about the transcendental nature of Hume\u27s philosophy. Then, using the transcendental projects of Kant and Husserl, I develop certain conditions that have to be met before a project can be considered to be transcendental. The purpose of this chapter is to understand in what sense Hume is to be considered as a precursor of transcendental philosophy. In the third chapter, I show how Hume may be interpreted as developing a transcendental problem as hinted at by Husserl. The problem of constitution presupposes a transcendental subject in the transcendental tradition. Accordingly, in the next two chapters I attempt to locate the seeds of this concept in the Humean concept of human nature. First, I use the strategy of arguing that, given Hume\u27s discussion of the problem of identity, human nature with its constitutive elements of imagination cannot be understood as an empirical ego. Secondly, I propose that, on Husserlian grounds, human nature has a transcendental function. Indeed, following Husserl, I make the case that not only did Hume discover the problems of transcendental philosophy, but attempted to account for them as well. Husserl also claimed that, although Hume was a harbinger of transcendental philosophy, in the final analysis, his skepticism undermined his genuine transcendental insights. Accordingly, I show, by a Husserlian approach, which elements of a transcendental philosophy are missing from Hume\u27s theory. The overall purpose of this dissertation is to develop in detail a transcendental interpretation of Hume that will support Husserl\u27s observations