Hume's General Rules - Serjeantson

Serjeantson-4
and Discours de la méthode (‘Discourse on method’, 1637); 8 Baruch de Spinoza’s
Tractatus de emendatione intellectus (‘Treatise on the emendation of the intellect’, c.
1658); Nicolas Malebranche’s Recherche de la vérité (1674-75); Ehrenfried Walter
von Tschirnhaus’s Medicina mentis (‘Medicine of the mind’, 1695); 9 John Locke’s
Essay Concerning Humane Understanding (1690) and Gottfried Wilhelm von
Leibniz’s dialogic commentary upon it, the Nouveaux essais sur l'entendement
humain (‘New essays on human understanding’; written between 1703 and 1705, but
first published only in 1765, and therefore unknown to Hume when he wrote the
Treatise); George Berkeley’s Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human
Knowledge (1710, 1734), and indeed Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature. By
definition--since they are in good part written in reaction against it--such works do not
fit neatly into the disciplinary categories that the dominant Aristotelian philosophy of
the sixteenth and earlier seventeenth centuries was so effectively structured by.
Nonetheless all of these works, as well as drawing upon natural philosophy, faculty
psychology, and even medicine, take on a great part of their significance when seen in
the context of the discipline of logic. 10
It was in discipline of logic that questions about reason and the nature of
knowledge were treated in conventional school-philosophy. It is thus the discipline of
logic that should underlie our attempts to understand the significance in the history of
philosophy of the emphasis that emerged in the later seventeenth century on ‘human
understanding’. Indeed, this emphasis developed in part from works of logic
8 On Descartes’s Regulae as a form of logic, see Eric Palmer, ‘Descartes’s Rules and the workings of
the mind’, in Logic and the Workings of the Mind, pp. 269-82.
9 Ehrenfried Walther von Tschirnhaus, Medicina mentis (Leipzig: Thomas Fritsch, 1695, 2nd ed.). On
this work, see C. A. van Peursen, ‘E. W. von Tschirnhaus and the ars inveniendi’, Journal of the
History of Ideas, 54 (1993): 395-410; Martin Schönfeld, ‘Dogmatic metaphysics and Tschirnhaus’s
methodology’, Journal of the History of Philosophy, 36 (1998): 57-76; Catherine Wilson, 'Between
medicina mentis and medical materialism', in Logic and the Workings of the Mind, pp. 251-68.
10 This point is made effectively by Lorne Falkenstein and Patricia Easton, ‘Preface’, in Logic and the
Workings of the Mind, pp. i-vii, pp. ii-iii. See also Norman Fiering, Moral Philosophy at Seventeenth-
Century Harvard: A Discipline in Transition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981), p.
240 n. 3.