Hume by Don Garrett (review)
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Don Garrett’s Hume constitutes a demanding introduction to the entirety of Hume’s philosophy as articulated in the Treatise, the two Enquiries, and the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. Its goal is to provide a clear representation of the problems Hume addresses, the solutions he provides to those problems, and the arguments he constructs in so doing. Achieving its three goals remarkably well, Garrett’s Hume provides what, in my judgment, is the very best introduction to Hume’s philosophy available. It will be an invaluable resource for students—undergraduate and graduate—encountering Hume’s work. It would prove accessible and illuminating for scholars in fields other than philosophy but interested in eighteenth-century thought. If ostensibly introductory, it is essential reading for philosophers, and historians of philosophy, with an interest in Hume. And it would be illuminating indeed for philosophers and others interested more generally in questions about mind, mental representation, and consciousness.
In the central eight of his ten chapters, Garrett focuses on the characterization of Hume’s views—and of Hume’s arguments for those views—on the topics perceptions and their principles, the mind and its faculties, sense-based concepts, normative concepts, induction and causation, skepticism and probability, morality and virtue, and religion and God.
Taking Hume’s philosophy of mind as foundational to his wider philosophizing, Garrett provides an extraordinarily interesting and illuminating account of Hume’s theorizing about mind. In the first of two chapters, Garrett examines basic distinctions among Humean perceptions, the causal principles governing perceptions, complex ideas, abstract ideas (concepts), space and time, and mental representation. On Garrett’s rendering, Hume’s approach to perceptions is akin to contemporary explanatory work in the cognitive sciences: Hume takes causal theorizing about the mind as propaedeutic to scientific theorizing about other philosophical matters. Crucially, on Garrett’s interpretation, abstract ideas must be understood as concepts (of which, more below). In the second of the two chapters, Garrett explores Hume’s views on mind and consciousness, imagination and memory, reason or the understanding, the contrast between demonstrative and probable reasoning, the senses, the passions and taste, and the will.
Construing abstract ideas as concepts, Garrett proceeds, in the pivotal and compelling chapters 4 and 5, to explore Hume’s representations of two classes of concepts: sense-based concepts and normative concepts. Sense-based concepts, including those of beauty, virtue, causation and probability, have their origin in a four-stage developmental process of repeated activation of a distinctive sensibility, initial generalization, natural correction via standards and rules, and relational attribution. Many normative concepts, including aesthetic and moral concepts, as well as those of truth and probable truth, are similarly sense-based. Garrett’s representation of Hume’s conceptions of both sense-based and normative concepts is an invaluable contribution to the interpretation and assessment of the whole of Hume’s philosophy.
Given the interpretive analyses provided in chapters 2–5, Garrett turns to extended examinations, each highly illuminating, of other central topics in Hume’s philosophy enumerated above. For brevity’s sake, I here focus on the first of these, induction and causation. Hume has been represented, variously, as a reductionist, as a skeptical realist, and as a projectivist about causation. Each representation, Garrett concedes, captures some element of the truth, but to isolate the elements of truth it is important to locate them within Hume’s overarching philosophical project of discovering “springs and principles” (82, 208) underlying the operations of the human mind, including those governing the making of causal judgments themselves. In Garrett’s very attractive rendering, the concept of causation is, for Hume, a sense-based concept, one derived from a sense that consists in the dual capacity to make causal inferences and to feel the impression of necessary connection in doing so. Hume’s account of the origin of the concept of causation is an instance of his concept empiricism. His psychological theory of causation is projectivist. His epistemological theory of causation is reductionist. His semantic theory of causation is skeptically realist. [End Page 172] And his metaphysical theory of causation...
