Annotation
David Hume's philosophy can be described as a philosophy of imagination. One of the most brilliant analyses of this fundamental faculty of the mind, which according to Hume underlies both what we commonly call the sensory perception of our mundane surroundings and what we call empirical reasoning about the world of sense-appearing objects, is given by Hume in the section entitled On Skepticism with Regard to the Senses in his Treatise of Human Nature 1.4.2.
In this text, 32 pages of which form a kind of a Treatise within the Treatise, Hume attempts to set out how, on the basis of ever-changing, immanent perceptions, our belief in the duration of identical objects in our mundane environment that are external to and independent of the mind can arise through specific operations of imagination. In this seminar, we will situate this text within Hume's broader conception of imagination, show how Hume's paradoxical skeptical yet positive treatment of the problem of the transcendence of objects with respect to the mind reveals a shattering of traditional metaphysics, and attempt to explain why some authors (notably E.
Husserl) saw in this text an important methodological corrective to Kant's transcendental philosophy.