Ockham, Descartes, and Hume (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 97 Julius R. Weinberg. Ockham, Descartes,and Hume. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1977. Pp. x + 179. $15.oo. This volume consists of fourteen papers by the late Julius Weinberg, most of them not previously published. Assembled and edited after his death, in 197t, by his colleagues W. J. Courtenay, W. H. Hay, and K. E. Yandell, these papers deal with Weinberg's main concerns. The first five are about medieval themes and their relation to current issues in analytic philosophy. The next group, of six papers, treats issues in the theories of Descartes and Hume. The last three papers discuss some contemporary issues. The volume closes with a complete bibliography of Weinberg's published works. Weinberg had amazingly broad interests in the history of philosophy and in intellectual history generally. The chief foci of his concerns were medieval nominalistic thought, especially that of William of Ockham and of Nicolaus of Autrecourt, the medieval Hume; the naturalistic empiricism of the eighteenth century Hume; and modern-day logical positivism and its sequels. Weinberg's doctoral dissertation, An Examination of Logical Positivism (1936), is the first detailed account of this philosophical view. His next book was Nicolaus of Autrecourt: A Study in Fourteenth-CentryThought (1948). He always saw Hume as the key figure in modern thought, and he presented much of his evaluation and admiration of Hume in his presidential address to the Western Division of the American Philosophical Association, "The Novelty of Hume's Philosophy," republished in this collection. Weinberg was concerned to relate historical materials to issues of importance in his own systematic philosophy. He saw in the views of the Christian medieval nominalists , and of some of the Islamic and Jewish philosophers who preceded them, formulations of positions that are central to twentieth-century empiricism. In Descartes he saw statements of epistemological and metaphysical positions that were overthrown by Hume's analyses. Although Weinberg often considered the fourteenth -century nominalistic position as better stated than Hume's, he saw that it is the latter view that has effected the present form of empiricism. In two of the essays Weinberg fought back against two contemporary thinkers, G. E. M. Anscombe and Anthony Kenny, who have claimed to find basic errors in Hume's often sloppy formulations and outdated psychologizing. One cannot help being impressed by the ease with which Weinberg traced issues back and forth from the ancient to the medieval to the early modern to the contemporary scene. He did this with great erudition, and with careful and precise delineation of philosophical issues. However, he structured his historical apperfus in terms of the issues in philosophy that interested him, and in terms of the periods of the history of philosophy in which he felt most at home. His presentations are always stimulating and informative. However, one does feel that other issues and other aspects of the history of thought are ignored or suppressed. In the key essay, "The Novelty of Hume's Philosophy," Weinberg mainly compared Hume's views on causality and causation with those of Al-Ghazzali and Nico- 98 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY laus of Autrecourt. He made no effort to trace how Islamic occasionalism was known and discussed in the seventeenth and eighteenth century and how it was presented in editions of Maimonides in Latin, and in discussions throughout Bayle's Dictionary. Bayle is not mentioned as a source although current scholarship indicates that he was the major source of Hume's views about previous metaphysical theories and the major inspiration of his skepticism. The critique of induction stated by Francisco Sanches and by Pierre Gassendi is ignored while various medieval ones are compared with Hume's. The development of a view like Hume's on causality worked out by the Occasionalists is alluded to, but not actually discussed. To assess Hume's novelty vis-~t-vis his immediate predecessors, one would have to go into much detail about various seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century authors. If one wished to assess his novelty compared with only the Islamic occasionalists and the medieval Christian nominalists, one could skip the developments in early modern thought. Weinberg seemed to want his most interesting comparison of Hume's analyses...