Husserl’s Transcendental Interpretation of Hume’s Philosophy

Considering the works of Hume and Husserl, this paper argues that Husserl’s interpretation of Hume’s philosophy as a transcendental philosophy is rooted in his distinctive approach to searching the transcendental in modern philosophy, which is not necessarily in conformity with the facts in the history of philosophy or at least with what is generally argues by the historians of philosophy. Indeed, according to a hermeneutical tradition which belongs to the great philosophers, not the commentators and the historians of philosophy, Husserl has paid particular attention to Hume’s views in order to find the origin of some basic concepts of his phenomenology in Hume’s philosophy. After considering the relation between Husserl's phenomenology and empiricism and the status of the transcendental in Hume's empiricism, such elements of phenomenology as reduction, constitution and life-world have been examined as counterparts of skepticism, imagination and external world in Hume's philosophy respectively. Finally, it has been argued that Husserl thus says the unsaid and thinks the unthought of Hume’s philosophy within his own transcendental phenomenology. Husserl’s approach is the same as the one we can see in the later Heidegger’s hermeneutics and his own approach to great philosophers.