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Notes The “Advertisement” to his first publication, A Treatise of Human Nature, promises that if the
first two volumes find suitable “approbation,” the project will conclude with “the examination of
morals, politics, and criticism; which will compleat this Treatise of human nature”. Sadly, the
Treatise was not a success and Hume limited the third and final volume to the topic “Of Morals.”
He never produced his systematic treatment of politics and criticism and so never completed his
new “science” of human nature. Those topics would be handled piecemeal in several collections of
short essays, the “polite” writing that brought him the publishing success he desired.
Hume’s concept of criticism is not interchangeable with either aesthetics or philosophy of art.
These now-familiar labels were not available to Hume when he published his Treatise in 1739 and
1740. The Abbé Charles Batteux did not defend the idea of grouping the arts together in an
investigation of fine art until 1746. Hume knew and drew from the French tradition leading to and
following from Batteux’s work. Under this influence, his essays occasionally refer to the “the finer
arts” of painting, music, sculpture, and poetry. He never uses the expression “fine art” and he was
probably not aware of Alexander Baumgarten’s Reflections on Poetry of 1735, the work that
introduced the term “aesthetics.” The thesis that aesthetic judgments are completely distinct from
moral judgments would not receive its modern formulation until Immanuel Kant’s Critique of
Judgment (1790), after Hume’s death in 1776. So Hume’s aesthetics occupies a pivotal niche between
the appearance of fine art theory and Kant’s defense of an independent aesthetic judgment in the
Critique of Judgment – a defense clearly influenced by Kant’s reading of Hume’s essays and An
Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals.
Hume’s theory is most firmly rooted in the work of Joseph Addison and Francis Hutcheson. From
the older tradition, elegantly expounded by Addison in numerous essays written between 1709
and 1715, Hume retains the idea that the values within the scope of criticism are essentially
pleasures of the human imagination. Although Hume acknowledges cases where beauty seems a
merely sensory pleasure, he emphasizes beauty’s status as a cognitive pleasure. Taking beauty as
his paradigm case of such a value, Hume combines Addison’s theory of taste as an operation of
imagination with Hutcheson’s proposal that emotions are the foundation of moral judgment.
Elaborating on the “inner sense” theory, Hume endorses Hutcheson’s stance on the general question
of the nature of both moral and aesthetic value. Value judgments are expressions of taste rather
than reasoned analysis. Values cannot be addressed except in the context of a general theory about
our shared human nature. Although recognition of aesthetic and moral beauty is a manifestation
of taste (and perhaps they cannot ultimately be distinguished from one another), taste must not be
dismissed as subjective, idiosyncratic preference.
Granted, Hume has many other influences. His celebrated essay on taste, for example, draws
heavily on French thought, particularly on that of the Abbé Jean-Baptiste Dubos. Nonetheless, a
reading that emphasizes “Of the Standard of Taste” at the expense of the Treatise and Enquiries
shortchanges the theory’s complexity.
Within this framework of concerns and influences, Hume is neither interested in working out a
theory of art (in contributing to philosophy of art) nor in analyzing aesthetic properties (in doing
aesthetics). Due to the seamless connection he posits between moral and aesthetic value, much of
his technical discussion of aesthetics appears only as an illustration of his moral theory. Other
details of Hume’s aesthetics emerge in contexts where he expounds his theory of imaginative
association, elaborates on the value of delicacy of taste (DOT), and denies that his appeal to
sentiment leads to skepticism about value distinctions.
Thus, the two essays that appear to summarize Hume’s aesthetics are best understood as applications
of a larger philosophical account of human nature, including our social nature. The construction
of each essay suggests a purpose of working out details of the larger project in the face of an
obvious counterexample. Those counterexamples are the relativity of taste (SOT) and the pleasure
we take in tragic fiction (OT). Yet their limited purpose does not detract from their continuing

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