An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding and Other Writings, and: An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding (review)

Of these two new editions of Hume's An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding [Enquiry or EHU], Stephen Buckle's was published in early 2007, Peter Millican's a few months later. Buckle follows the usual prelims (Acknowledgments, Contents), with a 12,500-word "Introduction"; a "Chronology" (1711–1779) of Hume's life and publications; a helpful presentation of "Further reading"; and a "Note on the text." Then, following a lightly annotated text of the Enquiry (with Hume's endnotes converted to footnotes), he adds these other items from the Hume corpus: A Letter from a Gentleman; three essays, "The Sceptic," "Of Suicide," and "Of the Immortality of the Soul"; eight "Selections from Hume's letters"; and My Own Life. A nine-page index of names and topics completes the volume.

Those familiar with Buckle's highly original monograph, Hume's Enlightenment Tract: The Unity and Purpose of An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding [HET] (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) will find little to surprise them in his Introduction to the Enquiry. After brief accounts of Hume's early life and the lack of success of what is characterized as his "decidedly Sceptical" Treatise, a work that describes humans as guided in thought and action by custom and habit rather than by reason, and of his failure in 1745 to win appointment as Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh (ix–xvi), Buckle turns to the Enquiry. Unlike the Treatise, which he describes as presenting "itself as contributing to a new spirit of philosophy already abroad among English philosophers," the Enquiry, he argues, "presents itself as a defence of serious thinking against shallowness, obscurity and superstition." It is with this aim in mind that the Enquiry is said to begin with a defence of serious philosophy joined to an attack on the shallowness of the Christian Stoicism of Shaftesbury and Hutcheson and a further attack on "superstition," Hume's code word, in his 1741 essay, "Of Superstition and Enthusiasm" [E-SE], for Roman Catholicism. This attack on superstition and Hume's focus on Catholic miracles in EHU 10 (from his opening attack on the recurring miracle of the real presence in the Eucharist to his objections to the well-attested miracles at the tomb of the Abbé Paris), coupled with the inclusion of "school metaphysics" among the books said to be deserving of the flames at the close of EHU 12, lead Buckle to suggest that the "official target" of the Enquiry is Catholicism. But while Catholicism may have been the official target of the work, Buckle goes on to say that the anti-Catholicism of the Enquiry was only "a defensive smokescreen," some modest misdirection that Hume could hope would, in the late 1740s, play positively in a Britain at war with Catholic France and Spain and still recovering from the panic produced by the 'Forty-Five' (a pro-Stuart attack on Hanoverian Britain). The Enquiry, Buckle concludes, has as its primary purpose a critique of religion in general (xvi–xx). (Buckle does not mention that in his Natural History of Religion [NHR] Hume routinely treats a wide variety of religions as "superstition." NHR was first published in 1757, nine years after the first edition of EHU, but beginning with the 1758 edition of Hume's collected works, Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects [ETSS], was published coincidentally with EHU and E-SE.)

Buckle next argues that the account of the relation of the Enquiry to the Treatise...