A Cultivated Reason: An Essay on Hume and Humeanism by Christopher Williams (review)

96 much as eighteenth-century radical Pietists discovering the operations of the Holy Spirit in human history found much in this Apocryphal work to engage their imagination. 2 Esdras became the subject of philological and theological controversies to our modern times. What is missing here is discussion of how such New Englanders as John Eliot, Thomas Shepard, Samuel Sewall, Cotton Mather, and Jonathan Edwards responded to the Apocryphal 2 Esdras. Theirconcern with Native Americans as the descendants of the Lost Tribes and with America’s place in the Christian geography of Christ’s millennial reign was similarly shaped by their response to 2 Esdras, either directly or indirectly through Joseph Mede and Manasseh ben Israel. Mr. Hamilton’shighlyrewardingstudy deserves a prominent place on the bookshelf of every scholar interested in the history of Western philology and the evolution of early modern hermeneutics.Its complementary history of 2 Esdras in the Eastern Church remains to be written. Reiner Smolinski Georgia State University CHRISTOPHER WILLIAMS. A Cultivated Reason: An Essay on Hume and Humeanism . University Park, PA: Penn State, 1999. Pp. vii ⫹ 190. $35; $19.95 (paper). Mr. Williams’s engaging and elegant treatment of Hume encourages us to cultivate Humean reasonableness and take lessseriouslythe‘‘rationalistimperative’’ critiqued by Mr.Williamsinphilosophers such asPlato,Descartes,Kant,andHegel. Developing and updating Hume’s arguments , Mr. Williams shows us how rationalism ’s obsession with finding and following intellectual transparency leads us into a skeptical impasse, especially in ethics. Using Hume’s neglected essay The Sceptic, Mr. Williams argues that the only way out of this impasse is through grasping the comic nature of the unnaturally serious use of reason. This still allows a limited role for reason in the embodied ethical response, reason cautiously reflecting and correcting, historically , multi-generationally, and socially rather than the individualized and dogmatic rationalism of the Cartesian meditator. As polytheism embodied its gods, so persons, quintessentially rationalist conceptions , must take flesh without being reduced to flesh, and Mr. Williams carefully distinguishes such embodiment from ‘‘aestheticizing,’’ which reduces persons to mere objects of gratification. We treat persons better as embodied people , with sympathy and humility, rather than with ethical formulae produced by the hubris of reason. Although engaging and stimulating, Mr. Williams’s discussion has certain drawbacks. He tends to paint oversimplified portraits of the philosophers he argues against, most notably Kant. And in tryingtomakecoherentHume’sownconflict between scientific objectivity and anti-rational skepticism, Mr. Williams appears to overlook the possibility that Hume may be interesting precisely because he is both scientific and skeptical. Moreover, such an attempt at coherence suggests the very intellectual and rationalist transparency Mr. Williams is anxious to undermine. Nonetheless, through Hume, Mr. Williams recalls the importance in ethicallife of embodied social and historical communities . When communities fragment, disembodied rationality may be more helpful than Mr. Williams is willing to 97 admit, but what he and Hume remind us of, in the spirit of contemporary thinkers like Alasdair MacIntyre, is that we need not revel in this fragmentation, in thisdistance from the body and the senses—we ought to try to recover embodiment and community while holding on to a cultivated and limited reason. Suma Rajiva Skidmore College JANET GLEESON. Millionaire: The Philanderer , Gambler, and Duelist Who Invented Modern Finance. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999. Pp. 304. $24. The subtitle may exaggerate, but the amazing life of John Law is a story worth telling. Though derivative, Ms.Gleeson’s account ought to give popular history a good name, yet for all her lively writing, Law’s intriguing personality still seems ratherabstract,probablybecausesomuch of the evidence is derived from thirdparty observations. Some of his letters survive. Those to his common-law wife are surprisingly touching, but it was the way his deals and schemes worked, not the papers recording them, that reveal the machinations of an arrogantgamblerwho took on the French financial system and imposed paper money on a reluctant public . Along with paper money, chimerical riches were promised by his creation, the Mississippi Company. Once Law had started the inflation roundabout, he could not jump off it without breaking his neck. Lionized as long as stock pricesremained high, reviled of course when they crashed, Law—watched carefully from London...