Penultimate draft. Forthcoming in The Routledge Handbook to Liberal Naturalism (Mario De Caro & David Macarthur eds.) 1 Hume and Liberal Naturalism Benedict Smith The work of David Hume (1711-1776) is regarded as one of the most influential articulations of a naturalistic approach in philosophy, interpreted by many as a key inspiration for naturalist projects in a range of areas. His Treatise of Human Nature (1739/40), An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748) and An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751), 1 amongst other works, have been interpreted as resolute expressions of a philosophical attitude guided by the methods, metaphysics and epistemology of natural science. As is often noted Hume’s naturalistic method seems evident from the subtitle of the Treatise: ‘Being an Attempt to Introduce the Experimental Method of Reasoning into Moral Subjects’. Hume’s ambition was to investigate the foundations of our thought and practice with the aim of explaining our beliefs, ideas, emotions and behaviour in ways that rendered them intelligible by science. But characterizing the role of science and naturalism in Hume’s philosophy is not straightforward. According to some readings Hume’s stated task of understanding ourselves and our ideas involved placing relevant phenomena into the explanatory frameworks of the natural sciences, an expression of orthodox philosophical naturalism. But other readings emphasize quite different aspects to Hume’s naturalism and clarifying these shows the close connections Hume’s approach has with more ‘liberal’ forms of naturalism. One of the many things that makes Hume’s views distinctive is how he attempted to incorporate our rational capacities into a relevant naturalistic account. Our capacity for judgement as well as our emotional and biological drives are by “an absolute and uncontroulable necessity” determined by nature (T SBN 183). Thus rationality is not conceived as a faculty radically distinct from our more animal characteristics as it would be by, say, a Cartesian perspective. Hume’s naturalism, understood one way, insists that every aspect of our bodily and cognitive lives, as well our everyday interpersonal interaction including moral thought and agency, is explicable as phenomena within the scientifically described world. Under a particularly austere version of this interpretation Hume’s naturalism is a form of scientism: roughly, the dogmatic assertion that the natural sciences have complete and exclusive authority over what can be said to exist and the methods by which we can achieve genuine knowledge. However, there are elements at the core of Hume’s naturalism that 1 In referring to these works below I will use ‘T’ to refer to the Treatise followed by the page number contained in the edition prepared by L.A. Selby-Bigge and P.H. Nidditch abbreviated to ‘SBN’. And similarly with the Enquiry referred to as ‘E’.