On The Transcendental Motif In Hume's Philosophy

From the perspective of Husserl's phenomenology, this paper examines the transcendental motif of "transcendence" in Hume's philosophy. It is the motif of inquiring back into the ultimate source of all knowledge. This source is " I-myself", or “ego”. Basing on this "ego", the validity of the objective world and the objective scientific, as the subjective formation, is evidently constructed. In Hume, the theory of ideas and imagination are the two parts of the "transcendental" motivation: reduction and constitution.The first part focuses on the development process of transcendental motivation from Descartes to Rock and Hume. In Descartes' philosophy, there is a beginning of transcendental motivation. Then, Rock paid much more attention to the “objectivity”. With the further research of “objectivity” and “evidence”, empiricism and subjectivism eveloped progressively, and Hume's skepticism is a continuation of this tendency.In The second part, Hume's unconditional psychology is referred. By reducing the whole world to a subjective world, Hume developed the intuitionism of empiricism to extreme, and formed a new unconditional psychology. Because of this new psychology,the transcendental motivation is revealed. This new psychology requires that the origin of all kinds of knowledge must be limited strictly in an inner field without prerequisite.Therefore, the validity of the objective world and the objective scientific needs a new subjective interpretation.The third part focuses on Hume's theory of imagination. It refers to the belief of material substance, mind substance, and causality. In addition, there is a brief description of the transcendental factors of Hume's theory on imagination.