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  • The Concealed Influence of Custom: Hume’s Treatise from the Inside Out by Jay L. Garfield
  • Miren Boehm
Jay L. Garfield. The Concealed Influence of Custom: Hume’s Treatise from the Inside Out. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Pp. xiv + 320. Hardback, $75.00.

One of the interpretive principles Jay Garfield follows in this book is the “cover principle”: “If you are unsure about what Hume is doing, close the book and read the cover” (4). The principle did not help when I was unsure about what Garfield was doing. The book starts with too many and incompatible goals. Garfield claims that book 2 of Hume’s Treatise is foundational to the entire Treatise and that “by taking Book II as foundational, we come to a reading that reconciles Hume’s skepticism and his naturalism, and that the key to [End Page 511] this reconciliation is his communitarianism” (3). But Garfield also insists that we should read the Treatise “as an early text in cognitive science” (6). He also maintains that Hume “almost always deploys exactly the same form of argument: a Pyrrhonian dissolution of an apparently irreconcilable duality” (25). There is also Garfield’s “pseudo-idea principle”: “For most philosophically important terms, Hume will not provide an analysis of an idea, but a demonstration that no idea corresponds to a term that appears to make sense” (22). Additionally, he writes that part of his project is to reveal “resonances between Hume’s approach to philosophy and that of . . . Nāgārjuna and Candrakīrti” (x). None of these themes are truly developed and presented in a cohesive manner in the book.

Garfield’s main thesis is that custom has normative power for Hume. But when he turns to his discussions of various subjects, instead of showing us how custom plays this role, he merely says that it does. In his treatment of the passions, he engages in nitty-gritty analysis of Hume’s distinctions between calm versus violent, direct versus indirect passions, and it is not clear why these extensive discussions are necessary for his purposes. From what I could gather, the passions ground communitarianism because they have other people who are embedded in communities and social customs as their objects. Garfield’s explicit reminders that the passions are unintelligible unless we assume there are other people are very dated, and they address only the concerns of Hume scholars Garfield cites throughout his book who were writing more than forty years ago, including Laird from 1932.

Despite the foundational role book 2 is supposed to play, Garfield focuses heavily on book 1 of the Treatise, and several of his chapters consist mostly of close readings of block quotes. There is a long chapter on the idea of necessary connection that is distractingly repetitive: there is a “warm-up” nine-step argument for a “principal” eighteen-step argument. Then there is a nineteen-step “summary” of the principal argument. Then there is Garfield’s five-step summary of Hume’s summary argument. Finally, there is a five-step “Let us clean things up a bit” argument (133–44). The book includes extended discussions of skepticism with regard to reason and the senses. Garfield devotes a whole chapter, mysteriously called “Living Carelessly,” to Hume’s worry, in the Appendix, concerning the unity of perceptions that constitutes a mind. Garfield’s own solution is “to sink to the physical level, and to locate the original principles that generate the effective illusion of the unity of mind from a plurality of disunified cognitive processes in subdoxastic cognitive and brain processes” (270). However, if Hume thought appealing to the brain would solve this problem, he would have done so, just as he does in other places (T 1.2.5.20, 1.4.2.25, and 1.4.4.13).

I found Garfield’s chapter on some of the historical and social background of the notion of custom most interesting. But Garfield’s main thesis there that Hume’s “custom” is normative and has its origins in “debates about custom in the law and about the relationship between customary and common law in England that occupied British legal theory in the eighteenth...

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