ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the way in which taste is a capacity of the mind for Hume, and argues that the analogy with the palate (“the great resemblance between mental and bodily taste”) on which he relies in “Of the Standard of Taste” is not the problem that post-Romantic skeptics about taste have taken it to be. Although there is indeed a problem with the investigative procedure in Hume’s essay, it lies in a misunderstanding of bodily taste, not in the bodily analogy as such, for the two tastes involve the same mental action.
