O CONHECIMENTO SEM A BONDADE DE DEUS: HUME SOBRE A RAZÃO HUMANA

Abstract

Hume’s project of naturalization of reason is commonly understood by its submission to instinct, that is, he would have defended that there are some principles that reason should not question and should follow, even if their truth is suspicious. This reading distinguishes him clearly from the Cartesians, which claim the self-sufficiency of reason. However, it fails to distinguish him from the fideists, which defend the necessity of faith in virtue of reason’s insufficiency to deal with human matters. The relation between instinct and reason in Hume seems analogous to the relation between faith and reason to the fideists: reason is subdued by a faculty that prescinds fundamentation. That sounds contrary to the spirit of the Enlightenment that his philosophy owns. My aim is to argue that, although Hume agrees with the fideists that reason is unable to justify itself, that does not mean it needs an additional assistance. The natural principles are themselves principles of reason, they constitute it, so they are not an external restriction, but its very healthy mode of functioning. It is its integration, not its submission, to nature that typifies the Humean naturalism.