Hume and Smith
pp. 507-519
in: Enrico Pattaro, Damiano Canale, Hasso Hofmann, Patrick Riley (eds), A treatise of legal philosophy and general jurisprudence 9-10, Berlin, Springer, 2009Abstract
David Hume's jurisprudence in the Treatise of Human Nature (1738–1740) is shaped by three converging features: anti-rationalism, anti-contractarianism, and (to use Hume's own term) "conventionalism." Hume's anti-rationalism makes him deeply suspicious of latter-day demi-Platonists such as Leibniz and Malebranche, who share Plato's belief in Phaedo and Meno that all "absolute ideas' (including moral and jurisprudential ones) are reason-given "eternal verities' which are geometrically demonstrable.
