Reading Hume on Human Understanding: Essays on the First Enquiry (review)

Hume Studies Volume 30, Number 1, April 2004, pp. 183-187 Book Reviews PETER MILLICAN, ed. Reading Hume on Human Understanding: Essays on the First Enquiry. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002. Pp. xvi+495. ISBN 0-19-875211-3, cloth, £57.50 / $95.00; ISBN 0-19-875210-5, paper, £17.99 / $24.95. Peter Millican's Reading Hume on Human Understanding is a comprehensive overview of the philosophy of the first Enquiry and of the secondary literature on that work. As Millican notes, the first Enquiry has standardly been received as "a watered-down version of Book I of the Treatise, a more elegant and less taxing easy-read edition for the general pubUc, with the technical details omitted and a few controversial sections on religion added to whet their appetite and provoke the 'zealots'" (40). To the contrary, Millican views the first Enquiry as the canonical statement of the mature Hume's views. In Millican's estimation it corrects mistakes made in the Treatise and refocuses attention on those themes and arguments that subsequent philosophers have found to be the most enduringly valuable. For this reason alone it deserves more attention than it has been given. Together with Stephen Buckle's Hume's Enlightenment Tract (Oxford: Clarendon, 2001), Reading Hume goes a long way to remedying this oversight. Reading Hume incorporates contributions from a number ofthe people whose names have come to be closely associated with work on the different sections of the first Enquiry, but it is an unusual anthology given the extent of the contribution made by its editor. Millican contributes almost 200 of the book's pages, beginning Volume 30, Number 1, April 2004 184 Book Reviews with an introductory essay on the individual essays it contains, aimed at orienting those new to the study of Hume to the issues raised in those essays, to summarizing their main lines of argument, and to highlighting divergences and convergences in interpretation. Millican has further provided an introductory chapter on the context, aims and structure of the first Enquiry, in which he argues for that work's superiority to the Treatise. He also contributes a long paper on Enquiry 4, which provides a close exegesis of Hume's argument in that section, and is dedicated to demonstrating that, despite its skeptical conclusions concerning the warrant for causal inferences, Enquiry 4 provides the basis for distinguishing between good and bad causal inference, and so establishes the foundations for an inductive science. Finally, Millican has written an extensive bibliographical essay (running to over 60 pages) on the secondary literature on the first Enquiry. Works of this latter sort are few and far between, in large part because, while they are very time-consuming , the academic credit one receives for doing them does not sufficiently reflect the value they provide to the scholarly community. Because Millican has made that investment, future scholars will be able to review an outstanding collection of summary descriptions of books and articles on Hume and the first Enquiry, and will be that much more quickly able to focus their research and inform their reflections. We all owe him for that. I do have reservations about Millican's argument for the superiority of the first Enquiry as a work of philosophy. In good part, this argument rests on the claim that Hume largely abandoned the associationist psychology so proudly presented in the Treatise (43). But Millican is far from denying that what Hume called "custom" plays a central role throughout the Enquiry, and it is hard to see how Hume could have retained a commitment to this particular associative mechanism while simultaneously doubting or abandoning associative psychology in general. In fact, the Enquiry continues to invoke other associative mechanisms. Witness its appeal to "the passion of surprize and wonder," which, "being an agreeable emotion, gives a sensible tendency towards ... belief" (Enquiry 10.16, cf. Treatise 1.3.10.4), its claim that "nothing is more usual than to apply to external bodies every internal sensation, which they occasion" (Enquiry 7.29 n.17; cf. Treatise 1.4.5.12), its various ways of accounting for differences in the cognitive capacities of humans and animals (Enquiry 9.5 n...