ABSTRACT
The feminist work in epistemology has emphasized some themes in Hume's writings on epistemology. The whole of Hume's epistemology, in Book One of the Treatise, is in the service of his philosophy of passion and action in Books Two and Three. The celebrated laments in the conclusion of Book One of the Treatise might be read as the expression of a member of a subject race, the Scots, who had just lost their independence. Epistemology in the usual narrow sense becomes subject to the test of moral and cultural reflection. Hume takes passions to be intrinsically reflective, cases of a "return upon the soul" of remembered experience of good and of evil, so that the fuller reflexivity of the moral sentiment is a development of a "return upon the soul" that every ordinary passion involves. Humean reflection is by the whole membership of: the "party of humankind" listening to and influenced by each other's judgments.
