Baxter, Donald L. M.: Hume’s Empiricist Metaphysics

_Quaestio: Yearbook of the History of Metaphysics_ 22:261-279. 2022Hume’s empiricist reason for rejecting “school metaphysics” makes it natural to assume that Hume rejects all metaphysics. A.J. Ayer certainly reads Hume this way. The natural assumption is wrong, however. Hume only rejects the aprioricity of metaphysics, and not the science itself. I will argue that his empirical science of human nature supports three basic metaphysical principles. (1) The Contradiction Principle: The clearly con