By James Zike
8 March 2013
![]() |
A Treatise of Human Nature or Project Gutenburg ebook |
Hume
demonstrated that certain common understandings about objects in the world are
not correct and amount to nothing more than “fictional” accounts, but with his
ontological statements, he did not intend to answer any metaphysical questions. That is to say, that Hume’s use of the term
“fiction” did not imply falsity or impossibility. A careful understanding of how he organized
his system of knowledge based on empirical means might place his fictions back
into the realm of metaphysical possibilities in a way that preserves how he
used them throughout his works.