Hume (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 477 deal of historical and explanatory material. In addition, the Mungello volume has a glossary of Chinese terms, the other a list of variant readings. One could hardly ask for more adequate apparatus. It would be wrong to saddle these volumes with Leibniz's failures as an interpreter of neoConfucianism . Real faults in the two books are few. Neither adequately suggests the complexity of background of the Chinese concept li ("rational principle") or the variety of its interpretation in the seventeenth century. It is not quite c/ear whether Mungello's heart is focussed on Leibniz or on the general problem of East-West understanding. And there are few, very few, errors: on page 64 of the Discourse a translation from Latin closes unsatisfactorily--perhaps a textual error. The Mungello volume has two slips in transliterating Chinese: "'shan'"for "shen" (p. 114) and "je'" for "che" (p. 164): a few stylistic infelicities: "complimentary" (p. 21), "this phenomena" (p. 63); a jarring use of "literati" as an adjective, and a couple of misprlntlngs (pp. 61, 161). The very paucity of these shows the carefulness of the authors and of the University Press of Hawaii. I have already fruitfully used the Dtscour~e in a graduate seminar; I recommend both to students in any relevant field. EDWARDJ. MACHLE Universit3' of Colorado, Boulder Barry Stroud. Hume. The Arguments of the Philosophers. London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977. Pp. xii + 280. $15.00. Professor Stroud's discussion of Hume is guided by a balanced, and in my view correct, understanding of the basic thrust of his phdosophical system. On this understanding, the system is an attempt to replace the rationalist analysis of man as a free agent whose distinctness from the rest of the natural order lies in his capacity to form his beliefs and make his decisions in the light of reason. Hume offers instead an account of man as a bemg whose nature is fully intelligible to science because his beliefs, his evaluations, and his actions are the consequences of passions or sentiments, which occur within him in a manner open to his scrutiny but not his control. To read Hume this way we do not have to deny the reality of his skepticism. For this is merely the "'negative phase" of the naturalistic account of the formation of our beliefs. As a skeptic, Hume demonstrates that we do not, and cannot, form our beliefs about our world and ourselves in the manner that the rationalist analys~s requires. They are supplied, instead, by our natural instincts. These do not, as Stroud puts it, "'successfully meet or resolve the sceptical doubts; they simply submerge them" (p. 115). The description of how they do this is the "positive phase" of Hume's account. The skepticism ISessential to the naturalism and does not have to be explained away to make room for it, as Kemp Smith (to whom Stroud says he owes more than he seems to me to do) suggests that It does. This reading of Hume frees us from the anachronisms of the positivistic understanding of him, which forces us to say that he was really engaged In a priori analysis of concepts, even when he did not realize it, or that he confuses philosophy and psychology, or that he is merely the thinker who finally made clear the skeptical implications of the ideal theory of Locke and Berkeley. The bulk of the book consists In the detailed application of this general interpretation to Hume's treatment of causality (chaps. 3, 4), perception (chap. 5), personal identity (chap. 6), and the relation between reason, the passions, and morality (chaps. 7-9). These discussions show, over and over, that this view of Hume's system is one that not only enables it to make exciting sense as a system but permits the sort of fruitful criticism that a thinker of Hume's verve and clarity deserves, it is not possible to do justice to the many perceptive comments to be found, but I will mention some of them, choosing inevitably points where I have some disagreement. (1) There is an interesting attempt to give a nonsubjectiv~st reading of...