Dr. Hynek Janoušek
Institute of Philosophy
Czech Academy of Sciences
Prague
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Husserl’s Understanding of Hume

In my presentation I will shortly present Husserl's understanding of Hume and its development from Husserl's early works till the Crisis and contrast it with Husserl's interpretation of Kant. While Husserl rejected Hume's supposed psychologism as well as his mitigated skepticism, he appreciated several important insights of Hume's psychology, especially with regard to Hume's understanding of analytic a priori judgments and Hume's theory of “constitution” and its passivity. After his transcendental turn Husserl interpreted Hume as a transcendental philosopher avant la lettre and contrasted Hume's “transcendental psychology” with Kant's deductively based approach to a priori conditions of experience. At the end of my presentation I will point out a couple of insights that Hume could still offer to phenomenology and which Husserl might have overlooked.