INTEGRATING HUMAN NATURE: TOWARD A SYNOPTIC VIEW OF DAVID HUME&rsquo\;S PHILOSOPHY AND HISTORIOGRAPHY
\nCorvinus University of Budapest
\n18-19/9/2026
\nHume scholarship has long operated with a tacit division of labour: philosophers focus on the Treatise and the Enquiries\; historians focus on the History of England. Our project proceeds from the conviction that this division is unfortunate: it prevents us from exploring productive interconnections between the philosophical and historiographic achievements in Hume&rsquo\;s oeuvre. A synoptic reading can not only help approach Hume&rsquo\;s project of understanding human nature in ways integrating his philosophical and historical insights\, but it can also yield new insights for our understanding of each strand of his scholarship. Several angles for integrative reading can be proposed\, including but not exclusively:
\nMethodology. Hume&rsquo\;s philosophical and historiographic programme can be seen as standing in a dialectic relation. Hume sees in history a chief source of experimental material for the science of man\, and philosophy as the route to explanatory principles of historically significant actions and processes. These principles provide an explanatory framework to be deployed in the History &ndash\; a framework that is itself distilled from history. Hume&rsquo\;s historiographical exercises can thus be read as integrated with experimental reasoning: they explain particular actions and processes drawing on principles analysed from the records of human action across times and circumstances.
\nCharacter. In Hume&rsquo\;s moral philosophy\, character is the locus of virtue and the basis of moral evaluation\; in the essays\, it organises Hume's portraits of political actors and national types\; in the History\, it structures both individual biography and the longer-run formation of institutions. Character\, in short\, functions across all three registers as a mediating concept between psychology and politics.
\nKnowledge. Hume&rsquo\;s accounts in the Treatise of how opinion\, belief\, and normative consensus form\, stabilise\, and transform within societies pertain to questions that are at once psychological\, epistemological\, sociological\, and deeply historical. &ldquo\;Of Refinement in the Arts&rdquo\; and the economic essays on commerce and luxury connect directly to the History&rsquo\;s narrative of how constitutional and cultural development in England tracks its commercial development. &ldquo\;Of the Standard of Taste&rdquo\; belongs in this constellation too: taste\, politeness\, and the softening of manners are both moral- philosophical and historical-sociological concepts in Hume.
\nSympathy as a historical mechanism. Sympathy in the Treatise is not merely an ethical concept but an explanatory device for the social transmission of sentiments in general &ndash\; including that of belief. In the History\, this does real work: it accounts for how religious enthusiasm spreads\, how faction generates self-reinforcing affective communities\, how a nation gradually comes to share a political culture\, and an age comes to have a spirit. The sociology of opinion rests on the psychology of sympathy.
\nThe politics of opinion. The dictum that all government rests on opinion bridges the Treatise&rsquo\;s account of belief-formation and the History&rsquo\;s narrative of how legitimacy is constructed\, contested\, and stabilised. This suggests the possibility of interpretation connecting epistemology\, political theory\, and historiography.
\nReligion as a case study. The Natural History of Religion\, the Dialogues\, and the History's treatment of Reformation and enthusiasm outline a unified sociology of religious belief &mdash\; tracing its psychological origins\, its institutional expressions\, and its political consequences.
\nCustom and habit across registers. Custom and habit are foundational to Humean psychology (as a belief-forming mechanism)\, epistemology (as surrogate for rational justification)\, to his ethics (for artificial virtues as acquired stable disposition)\, and to his political theory and constitutional history (English liberties as the sedimented product of customary practice\, not rational design). Hume&rsquo\;s account of the common law tradition in the History can be read in this sense as a political application of his epistemology.
\nThe meanings of liberty. Arguably\, Hume&rsquo\;s account of liberty in the Treatise and the first Enquiry runs in a complex relation to his account of political liberty in the History and essays. Whether these two concepts are continuous\, analogous\, or deliberately insulated from one another is an open and underexplored question. The essays on commerce\, money\, and the balance of trade are not separable from Hume&rsquo\;s account of constitutional and commercial development of England in the History. Hume&rsquo\;s stadial sensibility and his analysis of the material conditions of liberty run continuously across both.
\nHistoriography from the common point of view. Hume&rsquo\;s judicious spectator in aesthetics and moral philosophy can be seen as a model for the historian&rsquo\;s self-presentation. The historian who explains and evaluates from above faction and party might be seen as enacting &ldquo\;the common point of view&rdquo\; articulated in Hume&rsquo\;s moral philosophy.
\nProject participants include:
\nDonald Ainslie (University of Toronto)\, Pamela Ahern (University of Delaware)\, Christopher Berry (University of Glasgow)\, Donald Gibson (University of Queensland)\, Marc Hanvelt (Carleton University)\, Katharina Paxman (Bingham Young University)\, Dan O&rsquo\;Brian (Oxford Brookes University)\, Dario Perinetti (University of Qué\;bec\, Montré\;al)\, David Raynor (University of Ottawa)\, Andrew Sabl (University of Toronto)\, Margaret Schabas (University of British Columbia) Eric Schliesser (University of Amsterdam)\, Andrew Sabl (University of Toronto)\, Margaret Schabas (University of British Columbia)\, Max Skjö\;nsberg (University of Florida)\, Mark Spencer (Brock University)\, Felix Waldman (University of Cambridge)\, Aaron Zubia (University of Florida).
\nOur workshop aims to explore these and related questions of Hume&rsquo\;s philosophy an \; historiography. We invite abstracts of about 500 words to be sent \;both to Pamela Ahern (pahern@udel.edu) and Tamas Demeter (tsd2333@gmail.com) by the 1 st of June\, 2026.
ORGANIZER;CN=Tamas Demeter;CN=Pamela Ahern: METHOD:PUBLISH END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR