Hume's Place in Moral Philosophy (review)

682 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPI4Y 29:4 OCTOBER 1991 The Con~olatio~L~of Phdosophy, pturalized in the borrowed title, receive no explicit mention. But of course they are the vectors making up any profound discussion of anxieties and accommodations in human agency. Rosenthal never evades attention to that center at which they converge; but neither does he ever tell us directly where we may locate it or how we are able to bespeak it. Philosophy's essays toward ultimate reflections, however enlightening and wise, must always remain incomplete and incompletable. In this latter sense, it is no more than a summary image that the author, deceased m 1977, left unfinished manuscripts and memorable conversations, no doubt both messy and deeply important. By reworking them for public consideration (as much a labor of love as one of filial devotion) his daughter, Abigail I_ Rosenthal, has provided us with skilled editing, rearrangement, iutroduction and annotations. These adaenOa are invariably discrete and helpful--prolegomena or explications making Rosenthal's heady exposition the more accessible. The literary manner of these es~ay~ is doubtless in "the meditative tradition," as she says. But we are indebted to he1 own formidable philosophic talents for transforming what might otherwise have been private meditations into public reflections. Th~s we may participate in them, and thus we might convert them further into continuing dialogue with noble thoughts--those from our own recent past, and those from a more remote past made vivid and profound. WILLIAM SACKSTEDER University of Colorado at Boulder Nicholas Capaldi. Hume's Place in Moral Philosophy. New York: Peter Lang, t989. Pp. 380. NP. Kant and Mill are like the two pillars of the colossus of Rhodes through which the many variants of moral philosophy in contemporary liberal culture must pass. Yet many have come to think that liberal moral theory is antinomic. In After Virtue, Maclntyre held out only two paradigmatic possibilities fbr reviving contemporary moral theory: Aristotle and Nietzsche. Many have followed him in seeking inspiration from Aristotle. But much of this retreat to Aristotle is highly contrived and even sentimental . Whatever "truth" we find in Aristotle must be considerably qualitied by its being embedded in a metaphysical biology, an ontology of substance, and the constricted moral universe of the poli~. But modern science has achieved its own autonomy, and we have learned too much about the virtues of commercial republics to return to the pulis, even if a return were possible. Where, then, are we to look for inspiration in moral philosophy? There is no need to go to Nietzsche, for there is an untapped source in modernity itself which takes full account of modern science and the virtues and vices of commercial republics, namely, the moral sentiment theory of Francis Hutcheson, and its development in David Hume, and Adam Smith. For some reason this powerful theory, which contains much that Aristotelian humanists long for (but without the distorting metaphysical baggage), has never been exploited. There is no systematic work on the moral philosophy of Hutcheson or Smith. There are a few books on BOOK REVIEWS 683 Hume's moral theory, but except for Norton's David Hume: Common-Sense Moralist, Sceptical Metaphysician (1982), none exhibits Hume's theory as a standard around which thought can rally. There is no Humean tradition of moral philosophy in the way there are Kantian or utilitarian traditions. Nicholas Capaldi's Hume's Place in Moral Philosophy is a spirited explication and defense of Hume's version of the Scottish moral sentiment theory. Although Capaidi is very much concerned to bring Hume into the contemporary debate, the discussion is kept close to the text and to Hume's historical context. Five of eight chapters are devoted to explicating the moral theory of the Treatise. A chapter is given to each of the following topics: moral insight, moral judgment, moral obligation, the nature of passion and sympathy, and the crucial role that sympathy plays in the moral philosophy of the Treatise. But the book is more than a commentary on Hume's moral philosophy. It is also, and equally, a commentary on the deeper question of what Hume considers true philosophical criticism to be...