Book contents
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- List of Contributors
- Abbreviations
- Introduction: Hume and his Intellectual Legacy
- 1 Hume and the Enlightenment
- 2 Will the Real Enlightenment Historian Please Stand Up? Catharine Macaulay versus David Hume
- 3 Philosophy, Historiography and the Enlightenment: A Response to Green
- 4 Hume's Enlightenment Aesthetics and Philosophy of Mathematics
- 5 Part 9 of Hume's Dialogues and ‘The Accurate Philosophical Turn of Cleanthes
- 6 ‘Strange Lengths’: Hume and Satire in the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion
- 7 A Modern Malignant Demon? Hume's Scepticism with regard to Reason (Partly) Vindicated
- 8 Hume on Sympathy and Cruelty
- 9 Hume's Natural History of Justice
- 10 Hume and Rawls on the Stability of a Society's System of Justice
- 11 Can Hume's Impressions of Reflection Represent?
- 12 Mechanism and Thought Formation: Hume's Emancipatory Scepticism
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
1 - Hume and the Enlightenment
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- List of Contributors
- Abbreviations
- Introduction: Hume and his Intellectual Legacy
- 1 Hume and the Enlightenment
- 2 Will the Real Enlightenment Historian Please Stand Up? Catharine Macaulay versus David Hume
- 3 Philosophy, Historiography and the Enlightenment: A Response to Green
- 4 Hume's Enlightenment Aesthetics and Philosophy of Mathematics
- 5 Part 9 of Hume's Dialogues and ‘The Accurate Philosophical Turn of Cleanthes
- 6 ‘Strange Lengths’: Hume and Satire in the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion
- 7 A Modern Malignant Demon? Hume's Scepticism with regard to Reason (Partly) Vindicated
- 8 Hume on Sympathy and Cruelty
- 9 Hume's Natural History of Justice
- 10 Hume and Rawls on the Stability of a Society's System of Justice
- 11 Can Hume's Impressions of Reflection Represent?
- 12 Mechanism and Thought Formation: Hume's Emancipatory Scepticism
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
David Hume was one of the outstanding thinkers of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, and, in general surveys of the period, is uncontroversially recognized as such. Moreover, he enjoyed this status at the time: not only in England and his native Scotland, but also across the Channel in France, and so in what is typically regarded as the Enlightenment's heartland. Thus, after his diplomatic posting to Paris in 1763 (and so after the success in France of his History of England), he quickly became a friend of major intellectual figures of the French scene, d'Alembert in particular, and something of a favourite exhibit in the Parisian salons: le bon David. In this light, he seems to be quintessentially a figure of the European Enlightenment.
Nevertheless, to think of Hume as an Enlightenment figure is to run into obstacles. These obstacles come from both ends, so to speak: they derive both from common understandings of Hume's philosophy, and from equally common conceptions of the Enlightenment. It will be helpful, then, to begin by surveying some of the more familiar of these obstacles.
Hume or Enlightenment?
If we begin from the Humean side of the issue, three obstacles stand out. The first is very general, the fruit of a philosophical outlook: it is the conviction amongst philosophers that philosophy is fundamentally a historical, concerned with the eternally true.
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- Hume and the Enlightenment , pp. 13 - 38Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014