Hume's Philosophy of Common Life (review)

300 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 25:2 APRIL i987 a sound, believing Christian"--leads to a surprising conclusion. It would seem that Hume does not deal the final blow to Natural Religion but simply changes it into an empty secularism--Deism. In his interpretation of Hume's skepticism Penelhum seems to confuse two kinds of skepticism: one about common sense and another about natural philosophy or science. When Hume argues within the experimental method or the doctrine of ideas, he is skeptical about common sense. But when he is playing backgammon and relying on his impressions and memory (not his ideas), then he is skeptical about Natural Philosophy. It is wrong to lump together these two skepticisms or, alternatively, their two opposite beliefs under one category: Hume's skepticism concerning commonsense beliefsand science orphilosophy. One must keep these two skepticisms quite distinct if one is to make sense of Hume's mitigated skepticism which enables him to steer his way between them by being "diffident of one's philosophical doubts" as well as of "one's philosophical conviction." To be diffident of one's philosophical doubts is to trust reason and science, and to be diffident of one's philosophical conviction is to trust common sense. It is obvious that this serious work gives us only a foretaste of the author's reflections on contemporary fideists--among them some followers of Wittgenstein. We can only hope that we will not wait too long for its sequel. EZRA TALMOR Haifa University Donald W. Livingston. Hume's Philosophy of Common Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. Pp. xiv + 371. $3o.oo. Those who have undergone the salutary influence of Pyrrhonnian doubt and who continue to "have a propensity to philosophy," will, David Hnme wrote, "still continue their researches; because they reflect, that, besides the immediate pleasure, attending such an occupation, philosophical decisions are nothing but the reflections of common life, methodized and corrected" (ECHU XII.III). It is to the explication of this position or attitude that Donald Livingston has addressed himself. His conclusion is that Hume took the reflections or judgments of common life to function transcendentally, as the form of (valid) thought. To put this in a medium I find more congenial, Livingston appears to be saying that Hume saw common life as providing us with a set of pragmatic a priori judgments--judgments about the existence of the external world, causes, the self, moral and aesthetic differences, etc. Philosophy, although confined within the limits set by the most basic of these judgments, can nonetheless criticize and refine them, and it can also criticize and expose the false philosophies of those who suppose that philosophy has the authority to command belief or judgment independently of such commonly received opinions. As an extra, then, Livingston gives us a fresh perspective on the vexed question of scepticism versus naturalism in Hume, and in doing so attributes to Hume neither the unmitigated scepticism of the Reid-Beattie interpretation, nor the anti-rational naturalism fashionable among certain followers of Kemp Smith. BOOK REVIEWS 301 Livingston's work will easily be seen as unique among studies of Hume for the way in which it deals with the complete corpus of Hume's work, the Essays and The History of England as well as the Treatise and other shorter pieces currently judged to be more philosophical. Others have, of course, discussed the relationship between the History of England and Hume's philosophical and political writings, and some recent commentators (Miller, Whelan) have with good effect approached Hume's politics through his logic and metaphysics. Livingston is the first, however, to attempt to elucidate the historical perspective that informs all of Hume's work. The more narrowly philosophical writings are viewed as the product of a mind that functioned, routinely and even unconsciously, in Livingston's term, narratively. Thus to his own central question, What, for Hume, "is the relation between philosophy and history: is philosophy independent of history, or is historical thinking somehow internal to philosophical thinking?" Livingston responds by attempting to show that for Hume philosophy and history are related at the deepest levels, internally, and how it is that Hume's...