An Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections, with Illustrations on the Moral Sense (review)

Hume Studies Volume 30, Number 1, April 2004, pp. 208-209 FRANCIS HUTCHESON. An Essay on the Nature and Conduct ofthe Passions and Affections , with Illustrations on the Moral Sense. Edited with an Introduction by Aaron Garrett. Indianapolis: The Liberty Fund, 2002. Pp. xxv+226. ISBN 0-86597-386-5, cloth, $20.00. ISBN 0-86597-387-3, paper, $12.00. With the reintroduction of Hume's philosophical works in the form of the Green and Gross editions, and the concomitant decline of the British Hegelians about a century ago, respect for Hume's philosophical talent rose enormously. Our respect and admiration for Hume's genius, whether we entirely agree with his work or not, has been a sustained, perhaps ever growing, philosophical attitude throughout the time since. However, we have been much slower to recapture and appreciate the philosophical discourse that helped to shape Hume's thought. One can, I think, argue that doing justice, in a historical sense as well as a moral sense, requires sufficient attention to Hume's immediate predecessors. And perhaps the most important figure in that sense is Francis Hutcheson, for even the most cursory study of Hutcheson's works reveals and sheds much light on where Hume found many ideas on the moral sense and moral psychology, as well as ideas concerning the very nature of moral philosophy as a discipline of inquiry. Yet, Hutcheson's works have not been widely available, nor very critically reprinted in our time. Serious scholars of Hutcheson have typically looked to the Hildesheim edition of Hutcheson collected works (seven volumes, Hildesheim: Olms, 1969-1971). But that multi-volume set is really nothing but a facsimile edition , offering no critical apparatus. Peter Kivy produced a helpful critical edition of Hutcheson's Inquiry Concerning Beauty (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), but that edition neglected the second of Hutcheson's inquiries, the one on moral good and evil. And Bernard Peach presented an edition of the Illustrations on the Moral Sense (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), an edition which made no real claim to being fully critical and which, for whatever reasons, chose to overlook the Essay on the Nature and Conduct ofthe Passions and Affections, which was bound with the Illustrations as a single volume in Hutcheson's time. And, interesting to note, the most helpful of critical editions of Hutcheson, at least to date and as evidenced by the footnotes of the scholars who work on Hutcheson, has been the editions produced in Italian by Luigi Turco. For all these reasons, and more, it is a delight to see Aaron Garrett's critical edition of Hutcheson's An Essay on the Nature and Conduct ofthe Passions and Affections , with Illustrations on the Moral Sense. While I have differences of opinion concerning some of Garrett's choices, they are relatively minor differences. First, Garrett, following a long-standing Hume Studies Book Reviews 209 and rather staid tradition of editorial work (drawing from scholarship in English literature, particularly Shakespeare scholarship), has chosen the first edition as his copy text, presenting textual changes from later editions in endnotes. I would have preferred the third edition as copy text, on the rationale that it would best reflect Hutcheson's own final thoughts on his work. However, my preference here certainly represents a minority view, while Garrett's represents mainstream editorial principles. Second, I would have preferred to have the textual variants noted on the page rather than in endnotes. Garrett's justification for using endnotes is that the inclusion of all the minor variations (such as capitalization, spelling, etc.) would hopelessly clutter the reading page. And I suppose that may be true. At the worst, the interested scholar simply has to flip from reading page to endnote page in order to note textual changes: a tad inconvenient, but still quite feasible. Third, I would have wished for a richer philosophical introduction. But here one might justly reply that this is meant as an edition of Hutcheson, not a book about Hutcheson. On the specifically positive side, my own spot checks from microfilm copies affirmed the textual accuracy of Garrett's work. And, unlike Peach's edition, which was presented with rather unorthodox...