HUME: A Re-evaluation (review)

114. REVIEW HUME: A Re-evaluation, edited by Donald W. Livingston and James T. King. Fordham University Press, New York. Pp.421. $25.00 cloth, $8.50 paper. This volume contains, besides a useful introduction by Livingston and a name index, nineteen papers by eighteen authors, arranged into six sections. The description "a re-evaluation" rouses hopes that are satisfied in various ways. There are contributions covering the whole range of Hume's writings - epistemology, aesthetics, morals, politics and history - so that the volume provides a perspective broader than most studies by a single author. Some papers discuss neglected topics, and many oppose the common view of Hume as a precursor of twentieth-century phenomenalism and positivism. The two contributions on Hume's moral philosophy, James King's "The Place of the Language of Morals in Hume's Second Enquiry" and Ronald Glossop's "Hume, Stevenson, and Hare on Moral Language", illustrate this last theme. King stresses the differences between the Treatise , which, by its emphasis on the psychology of the passions, lends itself to phenomenalist interpretation, and the Enquiry which, King argues, presents morality as an historical institution revealed in the workings of moral language. Glossop's paper then takes up this theme, and contrasts Hume's account of this language with two contemporary views. He suggests that Hume understands the moral point of view to be objective and "disinterested", and explains this in the Enquiry by appealing to the public nature of language. He contrasts this favourably with Stevenson's account whereby moral terms express essentially individual perspectives. Glossop favours the opinion that Hume did not propose what Hare calls "Hume's Law" about the derivation of "ought" from "is", and then draws ammunition from his interpretation of 115. Hume to attack Hare's requirement that naturalist definitions of virtue contain no terms having, even covertly, "evaluative meaning". This same section also contains a fine paper by Peter Jones on Hume's aesthetics, in which, like King and Glossop, the stress is on the objective nature of aesthetic judgments explained by reference to the language game of aesthetic appraisal and its historically fashioned form of life. Throughout the volume, Hume the historian is to the fore. Sheldon Wolin's "Hume and Conservatism" and Constant Noble Stockton's "Economics and the Mechanism of Historical Progress in Hume's History" discuss his place in the history of political and historical thought, while articles by Craig Walton and Douglass Adair relate him to political thought in America before and after independence. More generally, the editors use the idea of time, and especially the past, as a link between three other papers, Donald Livingston's "Hume's Historical Theory of Meaning", Antony Flew's "Infinite Divisibility in Hume's Treatise" and James Noxon' s "Remembering and Imagining the Past". Part II of Treatise Book I is rarely discussed in detail; but it cannot be said that Flew finds any reason especially to revise the usual judgment of Hume here. (See, for example, J. R. Lucas, A Treatise on Time and Space, pp. 26-30). The merit of his paper lies in the clarity of his account, and in his tracing the origin of Hume's problems . Neither can it be said that Noxon finds new merits in Hume's attempts to distinguish memory and imagination. Noxon gives a cautious endorsement to Hume's causal theory of remembering, but questions the application of the same model to the acquisition of historical beliefs. He remarks on Hume's apparently inconsistent use of "impressions" and "ideas" in the passage (T108) where he speaks of the reader receiving impressions from the conversation and books of travellers and historians, and, referring to the claim that without the authority either of the memory or 116. senses our whole reasoning wou'd be chimerical and without foundation (T83) , says that "Hume's statements give no unequivocal answer to our question of whose impressions are being talked about" ... "the historian's or the eyewitnesses 's?" (p. 279) . In fact, Hume is here talking about the impressions of neither, but about our own impressions on reading or hearing historical narratives. As a result, Noxon does not properly grasp what Hume's...