Impressions of Hume (review)

Readers of Hume have a new collection of essays. Impressions of Hume adds to the literature twelve essays recounting the impressions Hume has made on specialists from different disciplines: philosophy, literature, and history.

The editors set their agenda adequately in the intention to foster an appreciation of Hume's work as "open texts" (1) and "show the endless fascination of Hume's writing and thought" (9). I believe the book finds its own merit as a successful example of scholarship defeating compartmentalization. With historical-contextual awareness, the volume relocates philosophy from the vacuum of abstract speculation into the "conversible world."

M. A. Stewart's opening essay, "Hume's Intellectual Development, 1711–1752," presents a rich, historical portrait of the young Hume. It lays out, in great detail, Hume's curriculumvitae—his intellectual entourage, teachings, readings, and conversations—from the year of his matriculation to the completion of his Treatise.

Three essays are historical and comparative in different ways. With her "Sympathy and Comparison: Two Principles of Human Nature," Susan James suggests a reading of Hume on the passions as a debt to and a "modification" of Malebranche's naturalistic view. By comparison with Malebranche, one can better appreciate the innovative character of Humean sympathy in the economy of passions and their political implications. In "Hume's Ethical Conclusion," P. J. E. Kail gives us a non-conventional reading of the conclusion to Part IV, Book I of the Treatise. What some readers have seen as an exercise in soliloquy, Kail reads on a background of ethical assumptions and translates into a literal response and attack on Malebranchian ethics. In "Hume—and Others—on Marriage," Sarah M. S. Pearsall offers a comparison of theory and practice. Her historically-oriented essay looks for traces of Locke, Hutcheson, and Hume on marriage and authority in the late eighteenth-century correspondence of an American couple dealing with issues of authority and marital affection.

Two articles come from contemporary epistemology and metaphysics. In "Waiting for Hume," Peter Lipton gives back the beauty, simplicity, and force of Hume's all too familiar analysis of induction, as if heard for the first time. In R. M. Sainsbury's "Meeting the Hare in her Doubles: Causal Belief and General Belief," Hume's "second definition of causation" is appreciated not as a "correct [though brilliant] answer" to a question, but as an "answer to a brilliant question"—which is that the mode of belief in causal generalization is interestingly different from belief in general (93).

Hume on religion is reconsidered, from a distinctively Scottish context, in James A. Harris' "Hume's Use of the Rhetoric of Calvinism." Harris is not so much interested in what Hume thought about religion as in why he wrote his first Enquiry the way he did. Calvinism had the right rhetoric for Hume's purposes of showing skeptical philosophy as better suited to Christianity than his adversaries'. The historical context is still privileged in R. W. Serjeantson's "Hume's General Rules and the 'Chief Business of Philosophers'." Serjeantson explores the background of traditional logic and seventeenth-century ideas on human understanding and explains how and why Hume spoke of the philosophical "business" in terms of formulation of general rules.

In "Quixotic Confusions and Hume's Imagination," Marina Frasca-Spada confronts Hume's Treatise and Charlotte Lennox's 1752 novel TheFemale Quixote on the difference between fiction-reading and history-reading. For its theories of belief and feeling, Hume's Treatise is presented as a "classic" of the eighteenth-century culture of sentiment. With "Hume's Fragments of Union and the Fiction of the Scottish Enlightenment," the literary critic Susan Manning sees in Hume's Treatise the origin of a "literary-grammatical model" of selfhood (246), shaped by political themes of union and fragmentation. She also considers the literary legacy of Hume's Treatise in Scottish Romanticism.

Emilio Mazza's "Hume's 'Meek' Philosophy among the Milanese" adds a cosmopolitan touch to the collection. Mazza finds impressions of Hume, of his...