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Hume Studies Volume 27, Number 2, November 2001, pp. 345-348 D. Z. PHILLIPS AND TIMOTHY TESSIN, eds. Religion and Hume's Legacy. London: Macmillan Press Ltd., and New York: St. Martin's Press Inc., 1999. Pp. xx + 282. ISBN 0-333-74850-0 (Macmillan) and 0-312-22526-1 (St. Martin's), cloth, $69.95. Collections of essays and conference papers are always liable to two defects . One is that the essays are not all of the same quality. The other is that the collection is ad hoc with no structural unity or organized purpose. The present collection—arising from the 1997 Claremont conference on the philosophy of religion—almost unavoidably exemplifies the first defect. I myself would pick out the contributions of Simon Blackburn, D. Z. Phillips R. W. Beardsmore (alas there can be no more from him), Jane McIntyre, Antony Flew, and Peter Jones as the most interesting. Many of the others are well worth the attention of Hume scholars, but two or three are turgid, over-annotated examples of argument by authority of the sort "Wittgenstein tells us . . ." compounded with emotive appeals to what is alleged (not argued) to be Hume's insufferable moral narrowness. But as I say, the uneven quality of contributions is a standard hazard of conference collections. The second hazard —lack of structure—is much less in evidence. There is a real coherence of subject and purpose in the eighteen sections that make up this book, and an effort has been made to relate the articles to each other. An odd omission is, however, the absence of any standard system of reference to agreed editions of Hume's works. It happens, for example, that most contributors refer to the Selby-Bigge edition of the Enquiries, but this is an accident of common usage not a virtue of editorial policy. There is a general index. The volume is divided into six parts: (I) Hume's Epistemological and Moral Critique (S. Blackburn, W. H. Brenner); (II) Hume's "True Religion" (M. J. Ferreira, V. A. Harvey, D. Z. Phillips); (III) Hume on Miracles (R. W. Beardsmore, S. T. Davis); (IV) Hume on Superstition (M. Bell, J. L. Mclntyre); (V) Philosophy of Religion after Hume (A. Flew, N. Murphy, B. R. Tilghman); and (VI) Hume in Historical Context, which contains a single elegant and informative contribution by P. Jones. In each part except the last, the papers are followed by several pages of "Voices in Discussion" where the reader is offered some account of the ensuing conference discussion. The discussions are tidied up to avoid repetition (and, one presumes, sloppy syntax and conversational punctuation) by Phillips, who somewhat confusingly remarks in his introduction, "I have to emphasise that the reactions to what they [speakers in the discussion] had to say are mine," thus leaving the reader to puzzle Hume Studies 346 Book Reviews rather uncomfortably about the invisible boundaries between editorial reactions and what was actually said. Rather than attempt an inadequately brief discussion of all thirteen essays , let me make a general comment and then look at just two of the contributions in the light of it. The general comment concerns the tendency of too many essayists on Hume to focus all their critical skills on one or two paragraphs or small sections of the original, and then follow out their idiosyncratic and ingenious interpretative agenda without reference to the wider picture of Hume's philosophy , or even to other texts in which the item under discussion appears. As a consequence, a key term may become distorted by excessive attention to one occurrence, qualifications lost, or a crucial distinction so muddled that it has to be reinvented in other words. The term "true religion"—so much used in part II of this collection—is a serious candidate for distortion and muddle. To understand Hume's use of the term one must refer not only to the Dialogues and Natural History (as almost everyone does) but also to the second Enquiry, the History of England, letters and biographical anecdotes (as few do). However in the present volume, I am most bothered by a certain tendency to overlay the invented term "natural belief" with words (and...

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