Philosophy Lost

Abstract

Abstract For Scottish Enlightenment scholars, the mid-1700s was a heady time. Europe had never seen better prospects. Scholars knew they wanted to do what Newton was doing. Exactly what that meant was unclear though, and determining how to conceive of science—then called natural philosophy—would take time. But natural science was rising, and Hume thought there ought to be a science of human nature as well. Hence Hume’s attempt to “introduce the experimental method of reasoning into moral subjects” (the subtitle of Hume’s Treatise). Instead, during the course of the 1800s, moral philosophy had to reinvent itself as what was left after testable hypotheses became the turf of newly emerging departments of social science. This was the opposite of what Hume and Smith intended, which was to apply experimental methods of reasoning to moral subjects.