Contemporary Authors

• Of Liberty and Necessity: The Free Will Debate in Eighteenth-Century British Philosophy Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 2005
• The Oxford Handbook of British Philosophy in the Eighteenth Century Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 2013
• Hume: An Intellectual Biography Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 2015
• Scottish Philosophy in the Age of Enlightenment Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 2015

1. Hume : an intellectual biography https://lccn.loc.gov/2015005354 Harris, James A. (James Anthony) Hume : an intellectual biography / James A. Harris, University of St. Andrews. New York, New York : Cambridge University Press, 2015. xiii, 621 pages ; 24 cm B1497 .H37 2015 ISBN: 9780521837255 (hardback) 2. Of liberty and necessity : the free will debate in eighteenth-century British philosophy https://lccn.loc.gov/2005282300 Harris, James A. (James Anthony) Of liberty and necessity : the free will debate in eighteenth-century British philosophy / James A. Harris. Oxford : Clarendon Press ; New York : Oxford University Press, 2005. xv, 264 p. ; 24 cm. BJ1461 .H277 2005 ISBN: 0199268606 (alk. paper)9780199268603 (alk. paper)

• University of St. Andrews - https://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/philosophy/dept/staffprofiles/?staffid=103

  James Harris

  Head of Department and Professor of the History of Philosophy

  James Harris
  Phone: 01334 462472

  Office: Room 208, Edgecliffe

  Email: jah15@st-andrews.ac.uk

  Early Modern Philosophy and Enlightenment Philosophy (especially Hume and his contemporaries)

  Associate Director of the St. Andrews Institute of Intellectual History

  Profile

  Current projects

  A new edition for Liberty Fund of Lord Kames's Historical Law-Tracts
  Volume 2 of Scottish Philosophy in the Eighteenth Century (co-edited with Aaron Garrett), provisionally entitled 'Mind, Matter, Metaphysics, and Method'
  The British Philosophy in the Eighteenth Century volume of The Oxford History of Philosophy
  A short book about British political thought from Locke to Burke
  See also the PURE research profile.

  Selected publications

  A review article about Istvan Hont's Politics in Commercial Society in The Journal of Scottish Philosophy 14 (2016): pp. 151-63.

  'Hume's Life and Works', in Paul Russell (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Hume, Oxford University Press, 2016, pp. 1-18.

  Hume: An Intellectual Biography. Cambridge University Press, 2015.

  Scottish Philosophy in the Eighteenth Century, Volume 1: Morals, Politics, Art, Religion, edited with Aaron Garrett, Oxford University Press, 2015.

  'Hume In and Out of Scottish Context' (with Mikko Tolonen), in Garrett and Harris (eds.), Scottish Philosophy in the Eighteenth Century, Volume 1, OUP, 2015, pp. 163-195.

  "Liberty, Necessity and Moral Responsibility", in Aaron Garrett (ed.), The Routledge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Philosophy, Routledge, 2014, pp. 320-37.

  The Oxford Handbook of British Philosophy in the Eighteenth Century, ed. James A. Harris, Oxford University Press, 2013.

  "The Government of the Passions", in James Harris (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of British Philosophy in the Eighteenth Century, Oxford, 2013, pp. 270-88.

  "Free Will", in Alan Bailey and Dan O'Brien (eds.), The Continuum Companion to Hume, Continuum, 2012, pp. 214-26.

  "The Early Reception of Hume's Theory of Justice", in Ruth Savage (ed.), Philosophy and Religion in Enlightenment Britain, Oxford University Press, 2012, pp. 210-30.

  "Reid and Hume on the Possibility of Character", in Thomas Ahnert and Susan Manning (eds.), Character, Self, and Sociability in the Scottish Enlightenment, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, pp. 31-47.

  "David Hume: 300 Years On", The RSA Journal Summer 2011: 42-5.

  Hume's Intellectual Development: An Overview, The Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities ('Dialogues with Hume' series), 2011. [28 pp.]

  "The Pastness of Past Moral Philosophy", British Journal for the History of Philosophy 19 (2011): 327-38. [A review article about Jerome Schneewind, Essays on the History of Moral Philosophy (OUP, 2010).]

  Research interests

  My work on Hume has made me interested in the ways in which philosophy in eighteenth-century Britain was different from philosophy in the Anglophone world in the twenty-first century. I want to fill out a picture of the goals, methods, and institutional and social contexts of eighteenth-century British philosophy in my volume for the Oxford History of Philosophy series.

  Teaching modern political philosophy has made me interested in, especially, the political thought of post-Hobbesian philosophers like Locke, Hume, Smith, and Burke. Their concerns seem utterly different from those of, e.g., Rawls, Nozick, and Kymlicka. Their concern is not with the moral ideals on which politics should be founded, but rather with the more fundamental question of how politics is possible in the first place, given the dramatic inequalities that are, so they think, an inevitable feature of modern commercial societies. I want to explore this aspect of eighteenth-century political thought in a short book.

  I am willing to supervise research students on most topics in eighteenth-century British philosophy, and in early modern moral and political thought more generally. Please get in touch if you are interested in being supervised by me, as a full-time, part-time, or visiting PhD/MPhil student.

  Research students

  I am currently supervising Carl Mildenberger and Emma Veitch.

  Additional information

  I studied English at Balliol College, Oxford, before doing an MA in philosophy at the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research in New York. Later I returned to Oxford to do the B.Phil. in philosophy, and wrote my D.Phil under the supervision of Galen Strawson, on the free will problem in eighteenth-century British philosophy.

  I was a Gifford Research Fellow at Glasgow in 2000-1, and a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at St. Catherine's College, Oxford, from 2001 to 2004. I have taught at St Andrews since 2004.

  I have held research fellowships from the Leverhulme Trust (2009-10) and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (2011-12). For the academic year 2012-13 I was a Member of the Historical Studies Program at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton

Harris, James A.: Hume: an intellectual biography
M.G. Spencer
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries.
53.8 (Apr. 2016): p1179.
COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
Full Text: 
Harris, James A. Hume: an intellectual biography. Cambridge, 2015. 621p bibl index ISBN 9780521837255 cloth, $55.00; ISBN 9781316357781
ebook, contact publisher for price
(cc) 53-3457
B1497
2015-5354 CIP
Scholars have long grieved that there are not better biographies of Hume than Ernest Mossner's Life of David Hume (1954; 2nd ed., CH, Oct'80),
a book widely considered deficient. With this volume, Harris (Univ. of St. Andrews, Scotland) sets a standard for a biography of Hume's
intellectual life. Harris argues that attempting to locate a systematic thinker behind Hume's various works as philosopher, political economist, and
historian is wrongheaded. He notes in the front matter that Hume's interests "do not fit together to form an organized system." Instead, one should
"take seriously Hume's description of himself as having intended from the beginning to live the life of a man of letters" above all else. What
unifies Hume's works is not the pursuit of a system, or a doctrine, but instead "the disengaged, skeptical, philosophical frame of mind of their
author"--a "commitment to dispassionate, disengaged analysis, even with respect to the most vital moral, political and religious beliefs." Much is
covered in this clearly written volume, but there is still a need for a life that includes more of Hume's life biography and incorporates more 18thcentury
responses as a window on Hume's intellectual intentions. Summing Up: *** Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates
through faculty; general readers.--M. G. Spencer, Brock University
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
3/14/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1489547811870 2/2
Spencer, M.G. "Harris, James A.: Hume: an intellectual biography." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, Apr. 2016, p. 1179+.
General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA449661588&it=r&asid=93526ae68da0069dbafa69b2bd84221d. Accessed 14 Mar.
2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A449661588

DAVIS, DAVID J.
Source:
American Conservative. May/Jun2016, Vol. 15 Issue 3, p51-53. 3p.

David Hume, Lonely Philosopher by Dav i d J. Dav i s Hume: An Intellectual Biography, James A. Harris, Cambridge University Press, 633 pages

I n the Old Calton cemetery in Edinburgh, David Hume’s mausoleum, a stout, cylindrical tower, dominates the surrounding tombstones. Contrasting with this imposing tomb, Hume insisted that it carry a simple inscription: “only my name with the year of my birth and death, leaving to posterity to add the rest.” Unfortunately, given Hume’s importance to Western philosophy, posterity has done a rather lopsided job in adding much to this epitaph. Part of the reason for this lopsidedness is Hume’s own doing. James Harris explains in his much-anticipated book Hume: An Intellectual Biography that Hume was obsessed with his persona, crafting a public façade as “a sedentary man of letters, able to make light of his own pedantries and foibles, but all the same dedicated wholly to his books.” His late-in-life essay “On My Own Life” gives very little in the way of biographical detail, focusing its attention only upon the image of Hume as a man of letters. He writes, “this Narrative shall contain little more than the History of my Writings; as, indeed, almost all my life has been spent in literary pursuits.” As a philosopher Hume tends to engender knee-jerk reactions. His explorations into empiricism, skepticism, atomism, and anti-religion receive adulation or condemnation, depending upon the audience. His biography is often told as a series of flashpoints: his failure to win any academic posting, his friendship with Adam Smith, his nuclear falling-out with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and his deathbed meeting with diarist James Boswell. These moments are like fireworks on a dark gray biographical backdrop that spanned over half of the 18th century. They obscure as much as they illuminate. Fortunately, Harris’s biography does an excellent job of brightening much of this gray backdrop, offering readers a narrative of Hume’s life that runs through his writings. By treating Hume’s own self-representation as an integral aspect of his life and thought, Harris delivers a rich portrayal of the Scottish philosopher that, while lacking in the kinds of human details that readers may expect, provides the most sustained examination of Hume’s philosophy within the context of his life. Here we see a Hume who rejects all forms of dogmatism, except, of course, his own. Even the Enlightenment heroworship of the classical world fails to entangle him for very long. Like most of the philosophes, Hume was a dilettante, both self-obsessed and exceedingly opinionated. He was capable of a high degree of self-reflection and charity, however, rarely returning a harsh word of criticism—of which there were many—with another. Perhaps the best examples of this charity come from Hume’s friendships with fellow Scottish thinkers Francis Hutcheson and Adam Smith. Both of these men, at different times, opposed Hume’s attainment of a university professorship. In 1744, Hutcheson declined a faculty position at the University of Edinburgh, and when the university’s provost suggested Hume as an alternative, Hutcheson voiced his disapproval, siding with city leaders who despised Hume’s well-known religious heterodoxy. Then in the early 1750s, after Adam Smith accepted the chair of moral philosophy at the University of Glasgow, Hume was proposed to take Smith’s vacated faculty position as professor of logic. While Smith voiced his affection for Hume as a friend and thinker, he, as Harris explains, “never thought that Hume was a plausible candidate,” expressing concerns similar to Hutcheson’s. Hume’s response to these betrayals seems to have been mild, remaining on good terms with both men without any hint of a grudge. Born into a Scottish noble family in 1711, Hume was educated at Edinburgh, but he rejected the study of law for that of “literature,” eschewing a life of social advancement for a life of good books. Hume’s voracious reading habits dictated his late teens and early twenties, as he consumed everything from Cicero and Virgil to natural philosophy and advanced mathematics. He suffered not only from melancholy and poor health but also from financial shortfalls, forcing him to rely upon friends and family, even having to retreat to his brother’s home at Ninewells for two years. Although he worked hard, he bounced between the educated equivalent of odd jobs, serving at various times as a tutor, secretary, librarian, and bureaucrat. He longed for financial independence through his philosophical publications, which he would eventually achieve by writing them “with Addisonian concision and perspicacity.” He wanted to write philosophy that people would read. Key to Harris’s biography is his argument that, for Hume, philosophy was “a habit of mind” rather than an academic discipline or “a body of doctrine.” Hume’s philosophy was not a profession so much as a way of life and thought. It compelled him at a young age toward classical Stoicism, which nearly led to a psychological breakdown, and it drove his relentless application of Lockean empiricism that has made his epistemology so preeminent, and indefatigable, in Western thought. While Harris does not deny the differences between Hume and Locke that other scholars have harped upon, he explains that what separates them are matters of revision and improvement more than contradiction. Hume believed that “he was following in Locke’s footsteps,” yet he was not slavishly devoted to the earlier thinker. Harris eschews the two popular views of Hume’s philosophy, either as a terribly divided affair—often separating his early and later writings—or as a failed effort at “a unified and systematic study of human nature.” These readings are too simplistic and ahistorical, according to Harris, and most importantly they fail to appreciate Hume’s desire for popular approbation. In his philosophical magnum opus The Treatise of Human Nature, which was also his first published work, Hume wrote that he was “like a man, who having struck on many shoals, and having narrowly escap’d shipwreck in passing a small firth, has yet the temerity to put out to sea in the same leaky weather-beaten vessel, and even carries his ambition so far as to think of compassing the globe.” This is Hume at his most honest, simultaneously self-aggrandizing and selfeffacing, aware—perhaps more than anyone else of his time—of the limits of human reason and still able to boast of his abilities. He saw himself as an intellectual Odysseus, and what he needed was a Homeric style to tell of his adventures. Unfortunately, the Treatise, as profound as it was, lacked the aesthetic quality to which Hume so desperately aspired. Much of the confusion surrounding Hume’s philosophy comes from the seemingly drastic shift in his career following what he called “the dead-born from the press” publication of the Treatise. Although Hume never attempted a complete revision of the Treatise in an effort to garner better sales, he did summarize and popularize many portions of it in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), and he then reworked much of the Treatise’s third book in An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751). Harris argues that Hume never abandoned his early philosophy; instead, he refashioned his authorial identity by changing the way he wrote philosophy. In order to achieve the financial independence and literary acclaim he desperately craved, Hume, according to Harris, determined that the “manner not the matter” of the Treatise needed to be altered. It was this manner that Hume reworked in his later writings, particularly in his widely successful Essays. The skepticism nurtured by his reading of Pierre Bayle, George Berkeley, and Bernard Mandeville can be seen in both the Treatise and in his later works, but in the later works it would be dressed up with the rhetorical flair of a Joseph Addison or a Samuel Johnson. The Essays won him the popular acclaim he sought, eventually erasing what Hume called “my former disappointment,” and it was the Essays that he encouraged even his most educated readers to buy. The same purposes rest at the heart of Hume’s The History of England. Hume believed that his philosophy provided him with an impartial perspective, with which he could write a history that would be read, as Harris explains, “in the study but also in … [the] drawing room and coffee house.” On display throughout the History is Hume’s virulent anti-dogmatism. Hume disdained the popular Whiggish reading of the English past, writing, instead, a history of politics that was “willing to offend everyone,” Whig and Tory alike. He rejected the idea of an ancient constitution in England, as well as the legitimacy of the divine right of kings, dismissing both of the political philosophies that dominated the English Civil War. For Hume, the Tudors and Stuarts were all tyrants, and Oliver Cromwell was no better, appearing in the History as a power-hungry “hypocrite,” who justified his misdeeds by “religious inspiration.” In the end, Hume achieved something unique in the historiography of his time. His History was, in Harris’s words, an “emotional engagement with the victims of history” that entertained his readers without fitting neatly into any existing political narrative. It is this sense of Hume’s inapproachability—the fact that he does not fit any comfortable categories— that sets Harris’s biography apart, capturing something of the philosopher that is so easily forgotten. Like his mausoleum, Hume imposes himself upon the Western intellectual skyline, yet as Harris reminds us, “he had no disciples and propagated no school.” Humeans have been hard to come by in the last two centuries. This is not only due to the fact that Hume’s philosophy is not systematic but also due to Hume’s steady antidogmatism, regardless of whether the dogma was Rousseau’s view of human society or the Christian view of salvation. While Hume could boast of having many friends and many readers who marveled at his intellectual travels, he remains a supremely solitary figure, alone at sea in his “leaky weather-beaten vessel.” David J. Davis is assistant professor of history, and director of the Masters in Liberal Arts program, at Houston Baptist University

Skepticism Renewed. By: BOURKE, RICHARD, Nation, 00278378, 5/9/2016, Vol. 302, Issue 19/20

Books & the Arts
Over the past 50 years, the philosopher who's played the most significant role in the cultural life of the United States isn't Richard Rorty, Jerry Fodor, or Martha Nussbaum, but rather Immanuel Kant. This is largely because of his impact on postwar trends in moral philosophy. Kant's influence during this period coincided with the rise of ethics as a dominant concern in political theory. John Rawls, Ronald Dworkin, and Thomas Nagel are among the most prominent examples of this widespread tendency. It is possible to exaggerate the novelty of this development; after all, questions of morality have always had a place in reflective debate about politics. Yet the strict subordination of politics to morals in recent decades does represent some kind of departure, or at least a return to a style of Kantian thought that had long been out of favor. Compared with current tendencies in political philosophy, normative inquiry was of marginal importance to the leading political thinkers in the first half of the 20th century, among them Max Weber, Otto Bauer, Michael Oakeshott, John Maynard Keynes, Friedrich Hayek, Raymond Aron, and Hannah Arendt.
I don't mean to suggest that these thinkers took no interest in human values. Because politics is a product of the struggle over values, political thinking can hardly avoid such a pivotal issue. But there's a difference between the study of human preferences and attachments and a preoccupation with an ideal theory of value. An ideal view of politics begins with a normative approach to power; it operates with a purely moral conception of how social and political relations ought to be organized. From this perspective, as Kant proposed in an essay he wrote in 1793, the rules of prudence ought to be sacrificed to the dictates of moral law. Dishonesty in politics might well be advantageous, to take one example, but from where Kant was standing, it could never be morally right.
The normative turn in political philosophy has overlapped with the rise of moralism in certain areas of US policy, most obviously in international affairs. This tendency came to prominence in the early years of the new millennium, as Dick Cheney and George W. Bush set about reconceiving the international order in terms of ideal values. Because democracy was now regarded as a "universal" norm, it was thought that it might systematically replace dictatorships across the globe: With the aid of strategic military intervention, authoritarian regimes would fall like dominoes throughout the Middle East. In line with this approach, practical obstacles were wished away under the influence of a crusading righteousness.
In general terms, the retreat of political philosophy onto the terrain of abstract morals has exacted a heavy cost. The loss has been twofold. First, a narrow focus on the absolute obligations of duty is prone to disregard the tangible desires of human beings. Second, an exclusive interest in what is unconditionally justified can lead to the suspension of all concern with what is beneficial. In the decades before Kant set about converting political theory into a branch of moral inquiry, the great Scottish philosopher and historian David Hume had been cultivating what amounted to the opposite perspective. Hume's program had two core features: It examined what actually motivated people instead of what they ought to do in principle; and it calculated the advantages that emerged from a course of action as opposed to evaluating its intrinsic merits. This approach might be seen as a criticism of Kantianism before Kant. More accurately, it can be viewed as a rejection of Stoicism, elements of which were later revived by Kant in combination with strands of Lutheran pietism. It is right, in Kant's analysis, that the Stoics were ultimately deemed deficient, but they were to be praised for equating happiness with "purely moral perfection."
Remarkably, James Harris's intellectual biography of Hume is the first to have been attempted. As such, it covers the full trajectory of Hume's intellectual career—from his earliest experiments in epistemology and ethics, through his views on religion, economics, and politics, to his mature efforts to complete his classic History of England. The result is an engrossing reconstruction of his ideas along with his position in 18th-century intellectual life. A significant place is given to Hume's "anatomy" of human nature, and thus to the criticism of Stoicism which he developed in that context.
Much of Harris's achievement derives from his capacity for cogent synthesis. For the first time, the various advances made by two generations of innovative scholarship about Hume are brought together in a comprehensive treatment. At the same time, Harris's book brings its own distinctive analysis to bear on the full range of Hume's output. Harris emphasizes three main points: Hume's ambition as a writer, the diversity of his pursuits, and the implications of his skepticism. It was above all as a skeptic that Hume took issue with attempts to revivify the philosophy of Stoicism.
Each of these claims is subtly implicated in the others. As Harris shows, it was partly Hume's yearning for fame as an author that drove him to pursue a variety of literary ventures. This diversity, in turn, was held together by a general skepticism about the mental and moral aptitudes of human beings. In his 20s, Hume was determined to improve his "talents in literature." At the end of his life, he recollected the landmarks in his career in terms of a sequence of "literary occupations." Throughout, he resolved to experiment in a variety of genres—historical narrative, philosophical argument, the essay, and the dialogue. As Harris emphasizes, Hume's craft in each was a constant preoccupation and a source of pride. The goals of elegance and precision guided everything he wrote, and whatever he undertook was elaborately revised. The desire for recognition encouraged literary experimentation, increasing the range of subjects to which he could apply his skepticism.
At certain points after his death, Hume was regarded primarily as a philosopher, while at other times he was seen as a historian. For the Whig politician Henry Brougham, he was a sagacious chronicler; for John Stuart Mill, his only accomplishment was in philosophy. Harris argues that instead of trying to compartmentalize Hume in accordance with a modern academic division of labor, we should see him as a "man of letters" who contributed to a variety of fields. It becomes clear that the copious range of Hume's assignments is best explained in terms of his vocation as a writer. His self-conscious attachment to the role of author is partly explained by his relative financial independence: He was not forced to survive by the "trade" of writing, nor to make his way in one of the professions. At the same time, he was able to remain aloof from the entanglements of patronage.
The image of the philosopher has been transformed over the past 200 years, especially since the rise of a professional class of faculty members, which began around the end of the 19th century. In the 17th and 18th centuries, the role was less clear-cut. Locke's Two Treatises of Government was a political polemic rather than an academic tract. Rousseau chose to write fiction and autobiography as well as works on natural law and political economy. Adam Smith saw his Wealth of Nations as an exercise in philosophy and regarded himself in a Humean vein as a "philosopher" in the broad sense. Although Harris makes plain that Hume was bent on succeeding as a man of letters, he also shows that he pursued this task in what he termed a "philosophical" mode. What Hume meant was that his philosophy would be a vehicle for his skepticism. As he embraced the intellectual modesty that he thought characterized a skeptical outlook, he also reconceptualized what skepticism could achieve.
After an early crisis of confidence, Hume spent his mid-20s studying philosophy in France, moving from Paris to Rheims in 1734 before settling in La Flèche in the Loire Valley the following year. Over the next two years, he came to terms with the writings of French luminaries like Nicolas Malebranche and Pierre Bayle. All the while, he was gestating a series of major works that would transform our understanding of epistemology, politics, and morals by subjecting many of the verities of ancient and modern philosophy to forms of doubt that were paralyzing and liberating at the same time.
In his first book, A Treatise of Human Nature, an astonishingly precocious work of philosophical genius published in 1739 but drafted two years earlier, we are invited to consider the limitations of forms of dogmatism that pretend to reach beyond the confines of our understanding to uncover the underlying principles of the universe—extending to the nature of God, his attitude toward his progeny, and the nature of our obligations to his will. For Hume, fundamental principles in metaphysics, such as final causes in nature or the ultimate grounds for human psychology, are as inaccessible to reason as the basic questions in natural religion: "Any hypothesis," as he put it, "that pretends to discover the ultimate original qualities of human nature, ought at first to be rejected as presumptuous and chimerical." But while Hume regarded it as impossible to penetrate the hidden machinery of the universe, it was possible, he insisted, to improve our "knowledge of man." Explicitly following in the footsteps of Locke and the Third Earl of Shaftesbury, among others, Hume hoped to establish the "science of man" on the same foundations on which Bacon and Newton had advanced our knowledge of nature: by experimental observation of the empirical world, carried out with due attention and circumspection.
The science of human nature would therefore have to begin with individuals as they took part in the common affairs of life. Yet this proposed anatomy of social psychology was preceded by a critique of the powers of reason to explain the world outside the bounds of experience. This critique was directed against improbable hypotheses that had been generated by earlier systems of philosophy, from the ancients to Descartes and beyond. Hume's skepticism about earlier attempts to fathom the unfathomable bred in him a melancholy mixture of doubt and despair: "Where am I, or what? From what causes do I derive my existence, and to what condition shall I return? Whose favour shall I court? And whose anger must I dread?" Skepticism, Hume was indicating, unsettles the precepts of religion and ultimately destroys all trust and belief. Luckily, our nature soon distracts us from these uncertainties and prompts us to take comfort in the truths of custom and common sense.
For Hume, skepticism about metaphysical subjects ended in an indolence born of seclusion. The only solution was to transfer the skeptical impulse in philosophy from the solitude of the study to the wider social world. Under these circumstances, skepticism fostered equanimity rather than discontent. In society, the true skeptic acknowledged the value of common sense without submitting slavishly to its whims. Skepticism in this context was profitable and enabling; it criticized without destroying the conditions of criticism, which depended on the existence of society and government. The positive results of criticism could be seen in society, politics, and morals. Philosophy could expose damaging ideas in ethics, unsocial attitudes in religion, and dangerous postures in politics. We might usefully think of Hume as having tackled each of these in turn.
Harris adroitly captures the extent to which Hume was doubtful about all reigning systems of moral philosophy—including theories that based ethical conduct on the precepts of reason, those that traced social harmony to a shared sentiment of justice, and those that grounded moral judgment on the appetite for pleasure. In exposing each of these doctrines, Hume's skepticism was rewarding rather than incapacitating. It offered incisive correctives instead of a descent into abysmal uncertainty. In this spirit, Hume took issue with what he called "the selfish system of morals," associated in his 1751 Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals with Hobbes and Locke, whom he interpreted as seeking to reduce every human motive to self-interest or self-regard. Plainly, Hume believed, benevolence was all around us—evident in families, friendships, and clubs. Yet he also criticized the view, popularized by Francis Hutcheson, that moral sentiments were sufficient to guarantee the peace of society. Benevolence was real but not extensive, Hume concluded. It could flourish under favorable circumstances, including prosperity and benign government, but it would never simply be implemented at the behest of reason.
Hume's skepticism about the effectiveness of our rational faculties in moral judgment was partly directed against divines like Samuel Clarke, who tried to discover the criteria for virtue in an immutable measure of rightness accessible to the mind. At the same time, it was directed against latter-day Stoics like Shaftesbury, for whom the idea of virtue was sufficient to motivate good conduct. In fact, Hume believed, morality had its origins in moral feelings, not rational principles. Incitement to action could only be sparked by a driving passion in the individual, not purely by the notion of what they ought to do. As Hume put it in a letter to Hutcheson in 1739, "virtue can never be the sole motive to any action."
On the basis of this insight, Hume reconceived the task of philosophy. It ought not to be championed, as the ancient schools had done, as a "medicine for the mind." Nor was it a source of rules for action that would guarantee righteousness. Its role was critical reflection rather than exhortation or consolation. Accordingly, such Stoic precepts as were to be found in Seneca or Epictetus were deemed to be misbegotten aspirations. Mere arguments could never move us without engaging our affections. Ideas of the good, in order to be effective, had to be rooted in what was agreeable. Philosophy for this reason had to educate through taste, by appeal to active psychological preferences. It was idle to prescribe what ideally ought to obtain. More than this, enforcing ideals that had no traction in existing mores would undermine the fabric of society.
Because philosophy, for Hume, was charged with intervening in social affairs, it was obliged to understand the current state of society as well as its processes of change. In that sense, it was a skeptical commentary on its own time, guided by historical understanding. This perspective makes sense of Hume's choice of projects after the Treatise: His Essays, written and revised from the 1730s through the 1770s, were a series of attempts to expose the prejudices of the age, while his History set those prejudices in a longer-term perspective by elucidating the reasons for their emergence. History, like philosophy, could not transform human behavior, but it could deepen our grasp of the circumstances in which we operated.
During his final 13 years, until his death in 1776, Hume extended his social repertoire and cultivated new friendships. He became acquainted with the leading French philosophes of the day and gained some knowledge of the rhythms of popular politics in London. However, his labors as a philosopher and historian were largely over, leaving him to refine his political ideas against the backdrop of metropolitan strife in the 1760s and then rebellion in the American colonies. As befitted a historically grounded social philosophy, the object of his skepticism shifted as circumstances changed.
Skepticism for Hume did not mean cynicism; it did not entail deriding cherished attitudes and opinions. As Harris notes, the outright atheism broadcast in Parisian salons seemed dogmatic and rebarbative to Hume. Even the "paradoxes" of Rousseau appeared pointlessly provocative. Rather than expose harmless prejudices to contempt, Hume set about exploring the consequences of belief. His aim was to eradicate counterproductive assumptions rather than dismantle benign customs. Religious dispositions, economic hypotheses, and political presuppositions could usefully be subjected to constructive criticism. An undertaking of this kind would not remodel entrenched "proclivities," but it could deepen our understanding of the context in which they operated. With this end in view, Hume challenged prevailing ideas about political parties, the contract of government, and the balance of trade. Heated disputes about each of these topics had ensured that they were misunderstood. By comparison, sober investigation revealed systematic confusion, showing how many of our beliefs frustrated our desires.
Harris's study cumulatively demonstrates how Hume brought history and philosophy together. Since philosophy is powerless to prescribe the terms of its application, to be effective it has to understand the world in which it operates. More recent developments in Anglo-American thought have tended to withdraw from practical analysis into speculative accounts of ideal value. This has resulted in a species of political philosophy that has lost any grasp of the social world on which it pretends to reflect. The sterility of many of the resulting debates serves to recommend Hume's ambition to make philosophy historical and to render history philosophical.

Gallie, Roger1
Source:
Journal of Scottish Philosophy. Spring2006, Vol. 4 Issue 1, p86-88. 3p.

James Harris, Of Liberty and Necessity: The freewill Debate in EighteenthCentury
British Philosophy, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2005. xvi + 264pp.
ISBN 0-19-926860-6
In this interesting and important work the author aims to enhance our understanding
of a crucial aspect of the eighteenth-century British philosophical debate
on the freedom of the will. That aspect is 'the nature of the relation between
motives ... and acts of choice'(p. 5). More exactly, do motives merely dispose or
incline choices, or, rather, necessitate them? For the most part the participants in
the discussion are inclined to allow that the issue of the kind of influence motives
have on the will is a matter for aposteriori rather than apriori investigation. Moreover,
with the exception of Hume and one or two other participants, who are
inclined to address their attention to the results of observations of the conduct of
others, the main burden of the aposteriori investigation is officially carried by a
faculty or power of consciousness or internal sense whose deliverances are held to
provide the crucial data for discussion.
It must be said that this difference between participants in the debate is not very
much emphasised by the author, even though he does mention considerations from
Leibnitz and from Hume and some later writers, notably Crombie, such as the
arguable existence of unconscious perceptions, which might put the extensive reliatice
on consciousness throughout the period into further question than he seetns
to want to put it. A related point is that the author does not have a chapter, or even
a section, devoted to the relevant portions of the Leibnitz-Clarke correspondence,
even though he devotes plenty of space to expounding Locke's views and those of
Clarke. But in fairness to him there is a due amount of consideration of the balance
and weights model of motivational influence throughout his exposition.
The author rightly devotes considerable attention to Clarke's efforts to explain
the relationship between 'the last judgement of understanding' and 'the act of volition,
or rather the beginning of action' (p. 50). That last judgement Clarke assures
us there, 'is not itself a physical efficient, but merely a Moral Motive, upon which
the physical efficient or motive Power begins to act'. This characterisation looks
suspiciously like occasional causation. But maybe it is not, for the author tells us
on the very next page that it is Clarke's view that we retain the capacity to ignore
what the understanding tells us, and to choose the worse thing, while knowing the
better. And we are offered a useful illustration of this in terms of a healthy and sane
man of whom we are told that there is a sense in which he cannot commit suicide.
He sees no reason to jump off a cliff once he has climbed to its top. But, the author
rightly claims, it is not impossible for him to do so even while he remains healthy
and sane.
But how is this? What if he suddenly realises that from here on it is all downhill
and he may as well go over? Is that to be dismissed as mere caprice? Must his
sanity have disappeared at that moment? If not the occasional cause account of

the relationship between volition and understanding is, thus far, undamaged. But
now it is hard to see how it is then impossible in any sense for a healthy and sane
man to eohimit suicide. No wonder Clarke concedes (p, 50) that a Moral Necessity
is 'no Necessity at all'. And no wonder it is hard to distinguish his position from
that of King,
We are told on page 51 that it is King's position that we are most free when we
choose for the sheer pleasure of ehoosing, indifferent to the deliveranees of the
understanding. Admittedly the example given above of the sudden suicide does
not seem to be of this type. The author elaborates on this strand of King's position
on page 45, But it must be said that it is impossible to tell from the examples that
he considers from King whether there is a ease truly without a maxim that King
has to offer. If there is not then the occasionalist position suggested above as being
Clarke's is still not really in danger. Or so it would seem.
However some might be led to think that the view that the understanding causally
determines the will is about to fall on our heads when reflecting on Hume's
position on such matters in his first Enquiry, Section VII, Part II:
But when one particular species of event has always, in all instances, been
eonjoined with another .., [we] then eall the one object. Cause; the other.
Effect. We suppose that there is some connection between them; some power in
the one, by whieh it infallibly produces the other, and operates with the greatest
certainty and strongest necessity.
Can Hume consistently reinstate something like Clarke's moral neeessity within
his position? The problem looks unsolvable at first glance. After all are not the
conjunctions between motives, circumstances and actions as constant as those
between impact and motion among billiard balls? But the author has a go nonetheless,
saying:
Hume is asking the libertarian to focus upon where we get our idea of cause
from, and to tell him where to find the notion of a non-necessitating cause. If
it transpires that there is no empirical source for such a notion, this should not
worry the libertarian unduly, because the necessity involved in necessitating
causes is, so far as we know, only a projection, (p, 81)
That is, Hume is 'intent on voiding the universe of eausal eonneetions as traditionally
conceived' (p, 85). This is a contention which flies in the faee of mueh
contemporary Hume scholarship, which, in the case of John P, Wright, argues
for Hume's endorsement of 'active, motion-producing powers in nature itself.
Nevertheless it can be said that this interpretation was the one that no less a person
than Thomas Reid made of Hume's position. Even so libertarians will scarcely feel
comforted by the view 'that the eommon distinction betwixt moral and physieal
necessity is without any foundation in nature' which is what emerges from the
above proceedings if the Reidian interpretation is adopted. Moreover we should
not forget Hume's endorsement of an intuition we all have when he said. Treatise,
Book II, Part III, section U, Selby-Bigge, p. 410:
Let no one, therefore, put an invidious construction on my words, by saying
simply, that I assert the necessity of human actions, and place them on the same
footing with the operations of senseless matter.
Turning now to the discussion of Reid, let us note another startling claim by
the author on p. 192:
there is an alternative to both the view that choices are determined by constitution
and circumstances (for short: by motives) and the view that the choices
can only be in our power if chosen. The alternative is that what determines, or
causes, choice is the agent himself.
Startling because it seems to be intended as a gloss on the following Reidian
passage cited just above it, part of which I now present:
I consider the determination of the will as an effect. This effect must have a
cause which had power to produce it; and the cause must either be the person
himself, whose will it is, or some other being.
So the choice, the determination of a will, has to come from an exercise of power
and it does seem that Reid thinks that the only conception we have of exercises
of power is that such exercises involve determinations of an agent's will. Note the
author's endorsement of this point on p. 195. Otherwise his treatment of Reid is
without serious blemish.
Overall the book is a valuable addition to the growing literature on eighteenth
century philosophy. The author quite rightly introduces us in his clear way to
the thought of both lesser and greater contributors to this debate and thereby
enables us to better appreciate both the contributions in the canonical texts and the
substance of the whole debate. His own reflections may be brief but are certainly
not unstimulating.
Roger Gallie
University of Aberdeen, Scotland

Spencer, M.G. "Harris, James A.: Hume: an intellectual biography." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, Apr. 2016, p. 1179+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA449661588&it=r. Accessed 14 Mar. 2017.

• Philosophical Reviews
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  JAMES A. HARRIS

  Hume: An Intellectual Biography
  James A. Harris, Hume: An Intellectual Biography, Cambridge University Press, 2015, 621pp., $55.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780521837255.

  Reviewed by Paul Russell, University of British Columbia/University of Gothenburg
  James A. Harris's biography of David Hume is the first such study to appear since Ernest Mossner's The Life of David Hume (1954). Unlike Mossner, Harris aims to write a specifically "intellectual biography", one that gives "a complete picture of Hume's ideas" and "relates Hume's works to the circumstances in which they were conceived and written" (vii). Harris's study turns on four central theses or claims about the character of Hume's thought and how it is structured and developed. The claims are:

  Hume's Treatise has no claim to any sort of "privileged" status in relation to Hume's other major works -- which include his Essays and his History of England.
  There is no system, doctrine, or fundamental aims or ambitions that serve to unify Hume's thought.
  Irreligious aims and interests are not of any particular or unique importance for Hume's thought. Moreover, whatever irreligious aims and objectives Hume may have had, they reflect his moderate, neutral and detached attitude to this and all other subjects -- there is no underlying animus or hostility against religion that motivates his contributions to this subject.
  Hume's thought should be understood and explained not in terms of his concern with some specific subject matter or body of doctrine but rather in terms of his style and his identity as a "philosophical man of letters".
  The general picture of Hume that emerges from this study, as constructed around these four core theses, is, as I will explain, incomplete, unconvincing and, in important respects, seriously flawed and misleading.

  I

  In his Introduction Harris claims that there is a deeply entrenched and persisting consensus within Hume scholarship that the philosophy of the Treatise deserves a "privileged" position with respect to our understanding of Hume's thought and the way it has developed (13). Harris aims to persuade us that if we hold the view that the Treatise is Hume's "greatest work", or simply a particularly important work, then we will inevitably slide into the implausible view that the Treatise is Hume's only important work and, in consequence of this, neglect or diminish the significance of Hume's later works (8-14). This is a troubling start for this study, since there is no reason at all to accept the faulty inference involved. Clearly it is entirely possible to acknowledge the particular importance and significance of Hume's Treatise without denying the importance and significance of Hume's other works (or claiming that the Treatise is Hume's only important work).[1]

  The view that the Treatise should be accorded some privileged status is, Harris maintains, closely linked with the suggestion that we can identify or uncover some sort of underlying unity or system in Hume's works (vii, 12-14, 24-25). Harris argues that if there was any such unity to be discovered in Hume's thought, and it had its roots and basis in the Treatise, then it would be impossible to explain how Hume could have introduced any "new ideas" in his later works or how he might have changed or altered his ideas over time (12, 476n61). This argument is similarly confused and unconvincing. There is no reason to suppose that because a thinker is committed or devoted to a particular aim or ambition of some kind that he must be locked into some fixed, rigid set of ideas or arguments. The suggestion that there is some identifiable form of unity or system in Hume's thought in no way implies or commits us to the view that Hume's interests, ideas and arguments did not evolve and change over time. Harris's worry that views of this kind are "harmful to serious thought about Hume's intellectual development" or pose a "danger" to any proper appreciation of his later works (9,13) is not just exaggerated, it is spurious and fabricated and generated by his confused analysis of what such views imply and are committed to.

  II

  It is particularly ironic, given Harris's aim to deflate the "privileged" status of the Treatise, that his account of Hume's thought and its development depends entirely on the credibility of his own general interpretation of the Treatise. That is to say, since Harris's deflationary aim is to show that the Treatise does not merit any "privileged" position among Hume's other works, and is not related or connected to them in any way that might justify such special status, this must be argued for on the basis of a detailed, careful analysis of the central aims and arguments of the Treatise. Failing this, Harris's claims would be a matter of mere assertion, rather than grounded on any secure or firm foundation. It is disappointing, therefore, to find that Harris's account of the Treatise is highly compressed and schematic -- moving very rapidly through a series of brief synopses covering the dense, difficult material of this long and complex work. Moreover, much of what Harris has to say about the three Books of the Treatise is generally familiar. He presents Hume as a moderate skeptic whose "main constructive project" in Book I was to offer a "new theory of rationality" (94; but cp. 101); whose "overriding ambition" in Book II was to offer a taxonomy of the passions (111; and cp. 294-5); and, finally, in Book III, was principally concerned with the question of whether or not morality was "natural" or the result of custom and education (120-1). In describing the origins and genesis of Hume's concerns in the Treatise, Harris places heavy emphasis on the influence of Shaftesbury, Mandeville and Hutcheson -- all moralists. He gives little weight to the influence of metaphysicians and epistemologists of this period, such as Malebranche, Locke, Samuel Clarke and Berkeley, all of whom he treats relatively lightly. Harris reviews the various particular topics and issues raised in the Treatise in a breezy and somewhat cavalier manner, often advancing controversial interpretive claims and conjectures that are provided with little or no detailed support. Many of his summary accounts are too slight and thin to even flag the difficulties involved in their analysis or what their deeper significance might be in relation to the overall argument of the Treatise. Taken as a whole, the account given of the Treatise is both incomplete and unconvincing.

  A brief review cannot cover all the gaps and problematic assertions that arise in Chapter 2, which Harris devotes to the Treatise. For our present purposes, I will focus attention and scrutiny on two important and related dimensions of the Treatise which are indicative of some of the more serious shortcomings of Harris’s study. The first concerns the "plan" and structure of the Treatise and which work or works, if any, it may have been modelled after. Obviously this is an issue that is directly relevant to Harris's sceptical, deflationary claims about the unity of Hume's thought and the relative importance of the Treatise in relation to his later works. This is an issue that needs to be treated in a careful and convincing manner if Harris is to be in any secure position to support and sustain his strong, sweeping, deflationary claims. When he comes to explain the plan of the Treatise Harris focuses his attention not on the plan that Hume actually executed and completed but on Hume's remarks in his Advertisement to the first Book. In this context Hume remarks that "the subjects of the understanding and the passions make a complete chain of reasoning by themselves", as reflected in Books I and II, published together in 1739. Hume also states that he hopes to "proceed to the examination of morals, politics, and criticism; which will complete this Treatise of human nature." Harris suggests that this project was never completed since "The treatments of politics and criticism never appeared" (81). Later on Harris contorts Hume's remarks into the claim that Hume projected five different Books for the Treatise and that "Book IV on criticism" and "Book V on politics" never appeared (141-2). There is, however, no basis, in the cited Advertisement, for this claim. Harris's talk of Books IV and V is a matter of sheer confabulation -- something which undermines confidence in his judgment and reliability when dealing with issues of this kind.

  What we do know is that in Book III, "Of Morals", Hume covers politics as well as morals but does not discuss criticism -- this part of his design was dropped. The plan we are actually presented with is, nevertheless, clear enough. We have, moreover, Hume's more interesting and relevant remarks in the Abstract concerning the plan of the Treatise. In this context Hume remarks that the Treatise "seems to be written upon the same plan with several other works that have had great vogue of late years in England" (AB, 1). Since Harris does not cite or discuss these opening remarks of the Abstract, he offers his readers no suggestions about what this plan might be or which works Hume has specifically in mind. What Harris does acknowledge, however, is that Hobbes published "a book on human nature the structure of which is strikingly similar to the Treatise" (83). The significance of this is much greater than Harris's passing comment suggests. The relevant structure of this project appears in both Hobbes's The Elements of Law and the first two parts of his Leviathan -- the latter being a hugely important work that cast a long shadow of influence well into the 18th century. When Hobbes's Elements was first published in 1650 it appeared in the form of two works, Human Nature and De Corpore Politico. In the latter work Hobbes's refers to the former in more than one context as his "treatise of Human Nature". Hume's Treatise has, therefore, both a Hobbist plan and a Hobbist title. All this is, of course, of considerable importance and relevance when assessing the significance of Hume's "plan" but Harris mentions none of it.

  The deeper and further significance of Hume's Hobbist plan can be better appreciated when it is considered in relation to the title-pages of the Treatise, a matter which Harris also treats in an incomplete and unsatisfactory manner. Although he discusses Hume's title-pages in a separate context from his discussion of the plan of the Treatise, they are intimately related. The title-pages of the Treatise Books I and II contain an epigram from Tacitus that has considerable significance. The epigram not only raises the issue of freedom of thought and expression but also was used by Spinoza for the title of the last chapter of his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, a work that was especially influential among radical freethinkers in the early 18th century context. Hume's use of this epigram clearly flagged what one early reviewer (in the German journal Neuen Zeitungen) described as his "evil intentions" and marked him out as a "new freethinker". The epigram that appeared on the title-page of Book III is also of related significance. It is taken from Lucan's Pharsalia and introduces a long speech by Cato that contains a series of irreligious themes and doctrines. The speech by Cato appears prominently in Anthony Collins's Discourse of Freethinking (1713) -- another important work that had enormous impact at this time. Hume's use of the epigrams on his title-pages is a clear and obvious example of the practice of esoteric communication -- a mode of presenting dangerous ideas that was familiar to freethinkers in the early 18th century context (and recommended by, among others, Shaftesbury). None of this is explored or even mentioned by Harris. Nor does he explain the general freethinking significance of the epigrams or the way in which they are intimately related to Hume's Hobbist plan and title. The significance of all this should, however, have been obvious to Harris as, apart from anything else, he makes some (brief and passing) reference to Hobbes and Spinoza and their shared reputations as leading representatives of modern "atheism" (53, 63, 66). In sum, Harris not only omits key points of evidence and interest in relation to these matters, he fails to link and relate the evidence that he does cite in a manner that brings to light the deep and systematic freethinking, irreligious features of Hume's Treatise.

  We encounter a second set of omissions and distortions in Harris's study as it concerns the relevance of Clarke for Hume's philosophy. Clarke was, of course, a towering figure of early 18th century British philosophy and he surfaces in various specific contexts relevant to Hume's philosophy -- particularly as it concerns the Treatise. Clarke's reputation not only rested on his association with Newton and his defence of the Newtonian philosophy in the celebrated correspondence with Leibniz (1717), but also was founded upon his hugely influential Boyle Lectures, which were published in 1705 as a Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God. In the Demonstration Clarke seeks to refute the atheistic philosophy of Hobbes, Spinoza and their followers and advances a powerful set of arguments, employing demonstrative reason, to prove the existence and attributes of God, along with other key doctrines that he judged essential to the Christian religion, such as the immortality of the soul and free will. Clarke's philosophy plays a crucial role in at least three related but distinct domains that are all essential for a proper understanding of Hume's philosophy in the Treatise.

  The first of these concerns the significant and substantial set of debates and controversies that took place in the Borders of Scotland in the late 1720s and early 1730s, where Hume was residing when the Treatise first began to take shape. One of the most important figures in this context is Andrew Baxter. Harris treats Baxter as a marginal and peripheral figure -- someone whose writings Hume "might have been aware of" (68). Contrary to the impression Harris gives, Baxter was a very important figure in this context and was generally regarded by his own contemporaries as the most distinguished and prominent representative and defender of the Clarkean philosophy, which includes not only the argument a priori but also other important doctrines, such as the immortality of the soul and free will. Among other significant details relating to Baxter that Harris omits are that Baxter "abhorred the early work of Mr. Hume" and that one of Baxter's closest friends and greatest admirers was William Warburton, Hume's lifelong nemesis and arch critic. It would be obvious to both Hume and his contemporaries, as it was to Baxter, that the core content of the Treatise stands in direct and systematic opposition to all that Baxter argues for (as per the Clarkean philosophy).

  Another context where the importance of Clarke's philosophy surfaces is in the early reviews of the Treatise. The two most substantial of these pay particular attention to Hume's criticism of the argument a priori, as advanced by both Locke and Clarke. These early reviews also allude to the affinities between Hume's philosophy and the views of Hobbes, Spinoza and other "freethinkers" and "minute philosophers". One of the most egregious gaps in Harris's study is that he says little or nothing about these early reviews (Harris, 118; cp. Mossner, Chap. 10, who discusses them in some detail). A third domain in which Clarke's philosophy plays a prominent role concerns Hume's unsuccessful application for the Chair of Philosophy at Edinburgh University in 1744-45. The key document dealing with these events is the Letter from a Gentleman (1745), which also contains various "charges" levelled against Hume by a critic. In dealing with this material Harris presents several loose and unconvincing speculations about the motivations of Hume's critic. He does not, however, draw the most obvious inference, which is that Hume's critic, who Harris identifies as William Wishart, was an admirer and adherent of the Clarkean philosophy and (correctly) recognized that Hume's philosophy is directly opposed to Clarke's doctrine and principles and that it aims to advance freethinking and atheistic doctrines instead. Harris also fails to mention that Wishart was a subscriber to Baxter's Enquiry in 1733 and that one of Wishart's key allies in the machinations against Hume's candidacy was Gavin Hamilton, who published Baxter's Enquiry in 1733. These individuals were particularly well placed to appreciate the irreligious significance of Hume's philosophy and how it stood in relation to both the battle against the atheism of Hobbes and Spinoza and, more specifically, its obvious relevance to the heated and acrimonious debates relating to Clarke's philosophy in Scotland at this time. Most, if not all of this, is lost on Harris's account. This level of neglect does much to explain why Harris fails to locate Hume's work in its most significant context -- the Radical Enlightenment -- and also accounts for Harris's related failure to identify the multiple layers and dimensions of irreligious themes and aims that are advanced in the Treatise.

  III

  When Harris goes on to discuss Hume's "recasting" of Book I in the form of the first Enquiry (i.e. the Philosophical Essays concerning Human Understanding, 1748) it becomes clear how detached he is from the main fabric of both the texts and contexts involved. As I have explained, Harris not only seeks to deflate the importance of the Treatise in relation to Hume's thought taken as a whole (i.e. qua his doubts about the privileged view), he also aims to deflate the importance and salience of irreligion for Hume's thought in general and for the Treatise in particular. In pressing this theme Harris endorses the familiar view that Hume "castrated" the Treatise and removed much of its irreligious content (117). Harris pairs this with the matching claim that issues relating to "the rational justification of religious belief are much more prominent" in the first Enquiry (199). Although this view of the relationship between the Treatise and the first Enquiry has been long and widely held it is, nevertheless, thoroughly mistaken. Harris's account adds to the confusion and errors involved. He suggests, for example, that Hume's Letter in 1745 suggests that the argument a priori "has fallen into disrepute" (213). It is not true that Hume suggests this, any more than it is true that the argument a priori had fallen into disrepute. Why would Hume (or Harris) claim this in a context where Hume's critics and accusers plainly regard the argument to be both important and convincing? Why would Hume make a claim of this kind when he went on to write the Dialogues, where he devotes an entire section (Dialogues, 9) to the refutation of the argument a priori? It is also misleading to suggest that in the first Enquiry Hume dropped his skeptical critique of the argument a priori (Harris, 212, 225-6; cp. 65-6, 82, 450). In the Enquiry, no less than in the Treatise, Hume makes clear that "if we reason a priori, anything may appear able to produce anything" and that "divinity or school metaphysics" that aim to demonstrate the existence of any object (i.e. God) "can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion" (EU, 12. 29-34). Contrary to what Harris supposes, the first Enquiry is loaded with arguments that serve to discredit the argument a priori, not just the argument a posteriori. This is something that should be obvious to any one with a sure or firm grasp of the core arguments involved.

  Although Harris cites, in fragments, Hume's remarks at the end of the first Enquiry, he denies that these remarks, or any other remarks of a similar kind, are indicative either of any fundamental or systematic irreligious concerns in this work or that they reveal any particular hostility or animus towards religion or religious philosophy in general. With regard to the first issue, Harris suggests that Hume wrote the first Enquiry as a way of repackaging the contents of Book I of the Treatise in the manner of an "essayist" (221) and that Hume's central motivations and aims in this work concern his account of probabilistic reasoning (223; cp. 92-4, 101, 119). What makes the Enquiry account different, Harris suggests, is not only the manner of delivery (qua "essayist") but that in this work Hume also draws out the religious implications of his account of probable reasoning (223). According to Harris however, irreligious themes are not Hume's exclusive or his primary concern in the Enquiry, any more than they were in the Treatise. It should be evident, however, that if the irreligious interpretation of the Treatise is correct and accurate, then Harris's view of Hume's aims and argument in the first Enquiry are also misguided and mistaken. The fundamental aim of Hume's set of sceptical arguments relating to the limits of human understanding with respect to both demonstrative and probable reasoning is to discredit the whole edifice of Christian theological speculation and metaphysics -- just as Hume's (sharp) concluding remarks to the first Enquiry plainly suggest. Harris has absorbed little or none of this.

  When we turn to the various irreligious themes and concerns that Harris does manage to identify and consider, Hume's attitude with regard to religion is presented as one of consistent "moderation", "impartiality" and "detachment", and as lacking any practical aims or agenda of a specifically irreligious nature (see, e.g., 19, 22-3, 205, 227, 297, 343-5, 414, 416, 456). This is a recurrent theme -- if not a dominant theme -- that runs throughout Harris's study. It is of a piece with his general picture of Hume, outlined in his Introduction, as a "philosophical man of letters", whose primary identity rests with his style rather than any particular doctrine or subject matter (viii, 2, 15, 18, 24-5). According to this view, Hume approached all issues and topics, including religion, with a detached and disinterested attitude that excludes any form of passion or practical aspirations or ambitions of any kind. It excludes, more specifically, any picture of Hume as being aggressively, consistently, and assertively hostile towards religion -- as this would be entirely at odds with the distant and anodyne picture that Harris wants to draw. The difficulty that he faces, throughout his study, is that there is a mountain of recalcitrant evidence, relating to both Hume's texts and context, that tell against this rather drab and insipid view of Hume's character and thought. Although Harris avoids mentioning, much less reviewing, much of this evidence he still has to engage with any number of passages and episodes that tell against it.

  One contribution that disturbs Harris's general easy confidence on this subject is Hume's famously harsh and hostile remarks about the clergy in his essay "Of National Characters". These remarks are plainly directly at odds with Harris's preferred picture of Hume as a friend of the "Moderate" clergy who considers all problems and topics of religion in a detached manner and with little or no agitation or animus.[2] Harris is, therefore, rightly puzzled by Hume's "outburst of spleen" (244-5). The more fundamental problem for Harris is that this is by no means an isolated example -- as many other strongly worded, hostile "outbursts" can be found. This is especially true with regard to matters of religion, where Hume's language is frequently anything but detached and moderate and veers heavily in the direction of ridicule, sarcasm and, occasionally, invective. Examples of this can be found within Harris's own work (see, e.g. 292, where he cites Hume's notorious "sick men's dreams" passage in the Natural History of Religion; and also 301 and 420 where he cites Hume's sharp and severe remarks about Warburton and Rousseau). Contrary to the simplified and distorted picture that Harris tries to force upon his readers, Hume was a complex character with complex and variable motivations and attitudes. Although he was, as the more sentimental and overdrawn picture of "le bon David" would suggest, temperamentally moderate and measured in his modes of expression and his dealings with others, Hume was in no way reluctant to bite hard when an appropriate and deserving target came his way.[3] This is especially true when it comes to his dealings with religious bigots of various kinds and it is also true of his philosophical writings as they concern matters of religion in all its familiar forms (and not just in the local form of orthodox Calvinism, as Harris would like to persuade us). In general, it is a mistake to try and defang as well as deflate Hume's attitude towards religion -- there is simply too much weighty evidence against it.

  IV

  It should be clear, in light of the above, that Harris's study is deeply flawed in respect of its central claims about the structure, content, and development of Hume's thought. It is also incomplete and unreliable in respect of many of the important details as they concern these matters. It has, nevertheless, some redeeming features. Consistent with his deflationary views concerning the relative importance of the Treatise and Hume's philosophy, Harris devotes a considerable amount of attention and space to Hume's Essays and his History of England (e.g., two full chapters on the History -- more than 100 pages or nearly a quarter of the whole book). Harris's commentary is lucid and occasionally illuminating in relation to these works -- he is at his best here. Although we may all agree that these other works are also of some interest and importance, I doubt that Harris's extended discussion and examination of the Essays and History will persuade many that we should join him in rejecting the privileged view or throw weight back onto the contributions of the Essays and History. On the contrary, interesting and worthwhile as Harris's commentary may be, in places, these works receive an excessive amount of attention and emphasis in relation to Hume's overall contribution and achievements. A more balanced intellectual biography would, for example, have much more to say about the Dialogues, which receive slight and superficial treatment in comparison with both the Essays and the History (444-56). Finally, although this study is dense with details and facts -- sometimes too many, sometimes too few, and sometimes unreliable -- it is still readable and clearly presented. Nevertheless, taken as a whole, these merits do not compensate for the more serious failings and flaws.

  Contrary to the portrait Harris paints, although Hume certainly cared about his style, and may well have regarded himself as a "philosophical man of letters", he cared about much more than this. He was, in particular, deeply and systematically concerned with issues and problems of religion -- especially as they concern the corruption of both philosophy and morality. These themes and issues inform much of what motivates and directs Hume's thought. They constitute, moreover, the strong, sturdy spine of Hume's thought and his intellectual achievement. The whole body of Hume's thought, like the Treatise itself, is to a considerable extent shaped, animated and directed by these core concerns and issues. Harris's study systematically obscures and distorts these features of Hume's fundamental motivation and thought and, as such, to use Harris's own language, does "harm" and poses a real "danger" to our understanding and appreciation of Hume's life, work, and achievement.

  REFERENCES

  Mossner, E.C. (1980). The Life of David Hume. 2nd ed. Clarendon Press.

  [1] It is worth considering this debate about whether Hume's Treatise was just "great", or "one of the greatest", or "the greatest" of Hume's works with reference to Hume's own remarks in the Dialogues (12.7) concerning "merely verbal" controversies in philosophical and theological enquiries.

  [2] Further evidence of Harris's lack of balance in relation to these matters may be found in his account of Hume's various friendships. Harris in various places emphasizes that Hume was on friendly terms with members of the moderate clergy in Scotland, some of who were among his closest friends (22, 298-99, 499n94). In contrast with this, Harris suggests that there was "little genuine intellectual affinity between Hume and the philosophes" and that Hume had little sympathy with their more "radical" attitudes about religion (414, 439). This way of contrasting Hume's respective relations with his friends among the moderate clergy in Scotland and the philosophes in France is misleading and oversimplified. A more balanced assessment would say that Hume enjoyed close friendships (in various degrees) with members from both groups and that he also had disagreements with both about matters of religion and philosophy. The crucial point is that one thing Hume certainly shared with the philosophes was that he was highly critical of religion -- even if he did not endorse their dogmatic attitudes and stance.

  [3] In a number of respects Harris's general view of Hume's character and philosophical orientation is similar or close to that of Mossner -- especially the picture of Hume as "le bon David", a moderate philosophical skeptic, with a mild, gentle manner and disposition. Although Harris is critical of Mossner's biography (ix, 474-5n48, 480n102) there is, generally speaking, much less distance between their accounts than Harris's remarks would seem to suggest.

• Scottish Philosophy
  http://www.scottishphilosophy.org/james-a-harris---hume-an-intellectual-biography.html
  Word count: 1210

  James A Harris.
  Hume: an intellectual biography
  (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2015) hb pp xiii + 621

  This long awaited volume has been many years in the making. Unquestionably, however, it is a worthy outcome of all the labour that has gone into it. Harris’s intellectual biography of Hume is hugely informative, immensely readable, innovative and insightful. It is certain to be the definitive work on this subject for a long time to come. That is partly because it is the first truly intellectual biography. E C Mossner’s well known Life of David Hume, first published in 1954, is a wonderful repository of information, but it lacks the kind of coherence that Harris has achieved.

  To say that Harris’s book is the first of its kind is not to suggest that Hume’s intellectual biography is a subject on which commentators have been silent. On the contrary, it has been very widely assumed that it does not need a great deal of explication since we are thoroughly familiar with its general outline. In fact, there are at least two versions of this outline that have circulated. According to the first, Hume was a philosopher whose work was accomplished early in life. His radically innovative thinking met with little success and his philosophical brilliance was not really recognized until after his death. But had he died much younger than he did, his intellectual accomplishments, and his philosophical legacy, would not have been much different. According to the second version, Hume began as a philosopher, was disappointed by the failure of his philosophical work to command much attention, and accordingly turned to other things – first essay writing, and then history.

  Harris examines both these contentions in his opening chapter. They are not exactly wrong, he contends, but they completely fail to capture a genuine, life-long unity in Hume’s work. The key to uncovering this unity is to be found in Hume’s ambition, from start to finish, to be a man of letters. The ‘man of letters’ properly adjusts himself to times and fashions, and accordingly what he writes about will range over different subjects and adopt appropriately different styles. The principal concern is not to produce scholarly or scientific work that will endure across the ages, but to contribute to the discussion and formation of ideas that are of contemporary interest and importance.

  One significant result of interpreting Hume’s intellectual biography in this way is that it must lead to a major re-assessment of the relative importance of his oeuvres. Hume’s Treatise was not as ‘still born’ as he alleged, but it was the rather different ‘Political Discourses’ that really enabled him to reach a wide audience, and began the career as a writer that made him rich. These ‘discourses’ are so clearly related to the issues of Hume’s day that they receive only antiquarian attention nowadays. Yet Hume could as readily describe them as ‘philosophical’ as he could the Treatise or Enquiries. This is because his ambition as a man of letters was to write about both perennial and contemporary matters in a spirit that rose above, or at any rate left to one side, the rhetoric that is inevitable when they are treated primarily as issues between factions, political or religious. To be a philosopher in this sense is not to be an academic philosopher as we now understand it.

  It is philosophy so understood, Harris argues, that characterizes all of Hume’s intellectual endeavours, and thus unifies his life as an intellectual. With this understanding, we can see that there is no deep rupture or radical change of direction between the youthful author of the Treatise, the accomplished essayist, and author of the voluminous History of England. It is the same conception that enables Harris to throw new light on the posthumously published Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. Commentators who identify Hume with the sceptical Philo have often been puzzled by the volte-face that Philo seems to make at the start of the final section. But Harris makes an impressive case for thinking that Hume’s purpose in the Dialogues is not primarily one of advancing a conclusion about God. Rather the Dialogues are a literary illustration, a demonstration perhaps, of how, in an ideal world, philosophical discussion would go. Differences of opinion, even of the deepest kind, would not be converted into point scoring, or lead to personal animus and division. In the Dialogues, we might say, we find civility dramatized.

  If this was Hume’s ideal, it goes some way to explaining his enduring friendships with so many of the Presbyterian clergy, and their friendship with him for that matter. It also explains why, in the end, he chose Edinburgh for his final home rather than Paris which he liked greatly and where he had been warmly welcomed. Despite his own lack of religious belief, Hume’s ‘philosophical’ cast of mind found the company of moderate Scottish Christians more congenial than the company of dogmatic French atheists.

  Harris’s book has much more to offer than this brief review can indicate. The book is especially good at conveying Hume’s somewhat intense concern with his own reputation as a man of letters. Harris adds an Afterword to the main text that on Hume’s own account of his life, and the manner of his death. He brilliantly reveals just how the apparent straightforwardness and modesty of ‘My Own Life’ can disguise Hume’s desire to shape the way that posterity would come to see him.

  There is one respect, though, in which the book might disappoint some of its readers. Treating Hume’s philosophical works as the modern academy identifies them, as just one manifestation of a larger intellectual ambition occasions relatively little critical engagement with them. Harris does not devote any more attention to the adequacy of Hume’s arguments in the Treatise, for instance, than he does to the accuracy of his sources for the History of England. Yet the fact is that some of Hume’s works warrant a kind of attention that others do not. These are the works that have proved able to sustain philosophical debate over more than two centuries. Possibly despite his own understanding of what ‘philosophical’ and ‘philosophy’ mean, Hume in the Treatise, the Enquiries, some of the Essays and the Dialogues succeeds in articulating conceptions of action, motivation, knowledge, morality and religion that strike human beings, in quite different times and places, as either coming close to the truth, or as embodying profound errors. Again and again he produces ingenious arguments whose validity demands to be examined. Are they conclusive or sophistical? It is Hume’s ability to do this that has led these writings, correctly, to be regarded as enduring contributions to philosophical thinking of the sort that connects Plato to Wittgenstein. In short, while Harris shows just how much is to be learned if we place Hume firmly within the intellectual context for which he wrote, he is less good at showing why Hume continues to be of philosophical interest long after that context has slipped into the past.

  Gordon Graham

• Australian Book Review
  https://www.australianbookreview.com.au/abr-online/current-issue/186-october-2016-no-385/3612-janna-thompson-reviews-hume-an-intellectual-biography-by-james-a-harris
  Word count: 405

  Janna Thompson reviews 'Hume: An intellectual biography' by James A. Harris
  font sizedecrease font sizeincrease font sizePrintEmailCommentJANNA THOMPSONPublished in October 2016, no. 385
  Janna Thompson reviews 'Hume: An intellectual biography' by James A. Harris
  HUME: AN INTELLECTUAL BIOGRAPHY
  by James A. Harris
  Cambridge University Press $79.95 pb, 633 pp, 9780521837255
  Janna Thompson
  Janna Thompson
  Janna Thompson is a professor of philosophy at La Trobe University. She is the author of Taking Responsibility for the Past:...
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  David Hume earned his place in the philosophical pantheon mostly because of the uncompromising empiricism of his early work A Treatise of Human Nature (1738). He looked into his mind and found no such thing as the will or an agent that directs it. He found nothing in the world to explain causal connection and concluded that predicting the future depends on an inclination of mind. Sympathy and utility, he argued, are the ground of morality, and reason is the slave of passion. Generations of philosophers have contended with Humean scepticism about knowledge and agency.

  In this intellectual biography, James A. Harris aims to present a different Hume from the one known by philosophers. He pays equal attention to Hume's political, economic, and historical writings and gives an account of his intentions that challenges the prevailing interpretation of his intellectual trajectory.

  Hume was born in 1711, the second son of a lowland Scottish family that was well off but not so rich as to relieve him of the need to find a profession. However, the need was not so pressing as to force him into an uncongenial occupation, and he spent much of his early adulthood in his family home immersed in books. Later, he became the secretary of an ambassador. He travelled in Europe and lived in Paris and London. But he was content to settle down in Edinburgh in the company of his friends. He was proud of being a Scot.

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