Hume and Necessary Truth

Abstract

There is a widespread belief, more often implied than explicitly asserted, that Hume considered all necessary propositions to be analytic. Of course Hume did not use the analytic-synthetic distinction explicitly. This only come to the forefront with Kant; and it is Kant who is probably the main source of the above-mentioned belief. Kant ascribed to Hume the view that mathematical propositions are, in his (Kant's) terminology, analytic. If this is correct, then since mathematics was for Hume the paradigm of a body of necessary truths, it is plausible to infer that he considered necessary propositions to be one and all analytic. The absence in Hume's writings of the analytic-synthetic terminology is by no means decisive: though he did not have the terms he may well have possessed the concepts, as evidenced by his use of them.

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