Hume, Hermeneutics, and History: A ‘Sympathetic’ Account
It has been observed that Hume is the hero of analytic philosophy in its positivist phase, Kant the hero of analytic philosophy in its "ordinarylanguage" and hermeneutic phase. I The soundness of this observation rests upon the standard "positivist" interpretation of Hume's philosophy. But Hume's philosophy harbors a systematic ambivalence which emerges most clearly in his account of the methodology of history and the "moral sciences." Indeed it can be argued that Hume anticipated a hermeneutic or interpretative philosophy based upon a methodological appropriation of his principle of sympathy Hume's eighteenth-century prototype of lverstehen. I am not suggesting that Kant is any less the hero of analytic philosophy in its later interpretative phase, but that Hume is rather more heroic than the standard interpretation allows.