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Wright's Enquiry Concerning Humean Understanding*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 April 2010

Fred Wilson
Fred Wilson
Affiliation:
University of Toronto
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Extract

From the time of Reid through Coleridge to T. H. Green, Hume was interpreted as a sceptic and as a wholly negative philosopher. And from their perspective such an interpretation no doubt makes some sense, given the vested interest in religion and the absolute of the idealists: from that perspective it is an essential part of a positive position that it take one beyond the realm of ordinary objects known by sense experience to a realm of entities that transcend that world of everyday life. That interpretation lingers on, like bad jokes, to retail in Philosophy 100 classes. On the other hand, in an age where the demand that one have access to a transcendent entity is less insistent, it has become possible to challenge the orthodox reading of Hume. The first to do this was Norman Kemp Smith, who argued that, while Hume was a sceptic, he in fact also had a positive view, not to be sure that of Reid & Co., but that of a naturalist, that is, one who holds that our beliefs, and our moral commitments, are none of them rational, none of them products of reason, but rather are products of our instinctive and passionate natures. This interpretation continues to have important defenders such as Popkin and Stroud. More recently, however, some scholars have gone further and argued that there are good senses in which Hume is not a sceptic, and that he constructs a case that our instinctual beliefs are not only natural but also rational. Major works defending this reading of Hume as a naturalized epistemologist are those of Livingston and Jones. The Kemp Smith interpretation has, however, found a major new defender in John Wright's The Sceptical Realism of David Hume.

Type
Critical Notices/Etudes critiques
Information
Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review / Revue canadienne de philosophie , Volume 25 , Issue 4 , Winter 1986 , pp. 747 - 752
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1986

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References

1 Smith, Norman Kemp, The Philosophy of David Hume (London: Macmillan, 1941).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 Popkin, R., “David Hume: His Pyrrhonism and His Critique of Pyrronhinism”, in Chappell, V., ed., Hume: A Collection of Critical Essays (New York: Doubleday, 1966), 53–98;CrossRefGoogle ScholarStroud, B., Hume (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Livingstone, D., Hume's Philosophy of Common Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984)Google Scholar; Jones, P., Hume's Sentiments: Their Ciceronian and French Context (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 1982).Google Scholar Cf. also Wilson, F., “Hume's De-fence of Causal Inference”, Dialogue 22/4 (1983), 661–694,CrossRefGoogle Scholar and “Is Hume a Sceptic with regard to Reason?”, Philosophy Research Archives 10 (1984), 275–320;CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Capaldi, N., David Hume: The Newtonian Philosopher (Boston: Twayne, 1975)Google Scholar.

4 Numbers in parentheses are page numbers to Wright's work. References to Hume, D., Treatise of Human Nature, ed. Selby-Bigge, L. A.. 2nd edition revised by Nidditch, P. H. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978),Google Scholar are by page number preceded by “T” and references to Hume, D., Enquiries concerning Human Understanding and concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. Selby-Bigge, L. A., 3rd edition revised by Nidditch, P. H. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975),CrossRefGoogle Scholar are by page number preceded by “E”.

5 These theories had gained currency through their incorporation into Ephraim Chambers' very popular Cyclopaedia (1st ed.; London: James and John Knapton et al., 1728)Google Scholar; cf., e.g., Art, “Imagination”. Wright cites this article (189), and argues for the importance of Chambers' to Hume (115, fn. 13). For another connection between Hume and Chambers, see Wilson, F., “The Origins of Hume's Sceptical Argument against Reason”, History of Philosophy Quarterly 2/3 (1985), 323–336Google Scholar.

6 According to Hume, the abstract idea of red is the disposition to apply “red” to ideas and impressions which resemble in a certain respect, to wit, in respect of their redness (T20, E158n). In parallel fashion, the abstract idea of “cause” in the first sense is the disposition to apply “cause” to pairs of impressions and ideas in which the first members resemble in respect of a certain kind and the second members resemble in respect of a certain kind, and where (ordered) pairs resemble in respect of being conjoined. The abstract idea of “cause” in the second sense is the disposition to apply "cause'' to pairs of the same sort save that the pairs resemble in respect of having ideas of themselves associated in thought. Wright, to his cost, pays little attention to Hume's doctrine of abstract ideas and, more generally, Hume's account of thought in terms of words (coming to be) associated with kinds of impressions and ideas.

7 The same point could be made with respect to substances. We have a natural belief in external objects (T125), but we have an idea of these, though it is a relative idea rather than an idea of what they are in their specific features (T68; cf. Flage, D., “Hume's Relative Ideas”, Hume Studies 7/1 [1981], 55–73,Google Scholar and “Relative Ideas Revisited”, Hume Studies 8/2 [1982], 158–171CrossRefGoogle Scholar —Wright seems oddly unaware of these important discussions of Flage). Both the peripatetics and the mechanical philosophy took the external object to be a substance (T219, 232), but of this sort of entity, like that of objective necessary connection, we have no idea (T234; cf. T16). In addition, while Hume allows that there are many minute parts to the world, often unsensed, and therefore holds that in this sense there are hidden powers that underlie patterns of overt behaviour (T132), nonetheless the mechanical philosophy assumes that it has a greater knowledge of these powers than just analysis of our ideas and of available evidence could justify (E73n). So Hume is sceptical too of these claims of the mechanical philosophy, though he does not deny the intelligibility of such hypotheses, as he denies the intelligibility of the notion of substance. Wright tends to run these three things (external object, substance, hidden powers) together (cf. 59, 109, HI, 173) to claim illegitimately that we can have natural beliefs involving unintelligible notions.

8 Cf. Wilson, F., “Hume's Defence of Causal Inference”, Dialogue 22/4 (1983), 661–694.CrossRefGoogle Scholar I would argue the same thesis for our belief in external objects.

9 For a discussion of Foucher, see Watson, R. A., The Downfall of Cartesianism (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1966).Google Scholar Malebranche's controversy with Foucher is discussed in chap. 4.

10 Malebranche, N., De la Recherche de la vérité, introduction et texte établi par Geneviève Lewis, 3 vols. (Paris: J. Vrin, 1945), Bk. 4, chap. 3–4.Google Scholar