Guided by this general strategy Harris follows the various twists and turns of Hume’s career, which he presents as possessing a real narrative, and as being in some respects improvised and not teleological. Hume, like the rest of us, responded to reversals and unexpected opportunities, and these left a trace on his career. This means that Harris has to follow Hume also in his various kinds of expertise, and one of the impressive features of this book is the author’s mastery of the different fields — philosophical, political, economic, historical, literary — in which Hume wandered. What are the particularly strong points in Harris’s biography?
In the first place, Harris is very sure-footed — and often persuasively surprising — in mapping the relationships of Hume’s arguments to his great predecessors in the post-Renaissance intellectual tradition: to thinkers such as Grotius, Locke, Hutcheson, Berkeley, and Shaftesbury. Most interesting, however, are Harris’s findings concerning Hume’s relation with the iconoclastic and controversial Bernard Mandeville, by whose provocations Hume was initially allured, but only until he found, as he thought, more powerful and subtle arguments for a less inflammatory view of human nature which allowed him to offer a measure of rejection to a man who nevertheless must be acknowledged as a powerful influence.
Harris brings Hume’s relation to ancient philosophy into a particularly sharp focus. As we have seen, Hume wanted to restore to the philosophy of his own day something of the equable temper of ancient philosophy. Of course, this wish was in part encoded disparagement of the dogmatic, intemperate spirit with which Christianity had infected the realm of thought ever since the momentous Church councils of the fourth century.
What it did not mean was that Hume wanted to reintroduce the ancient idea of philosophy as intellectual medicine. Concerning the ends of philosophy Hume was unswervingly modern. For him philosophy was a mode of investigation and a style of thought. It could never be a therapy.
Not that Hume’s world had no need of therapies. After he had abandoned the Treatise he turned his attention to the English and Scottish society in which he lived, and which he found to be riven by disputes bequeathed to it by the 17th century. Hume’s essays and his History of England were calculated as balms to be applied to these disputes, no matter how enraging or inflammatory their arguments might at first sight seem to the combatants. Harris explains Hume’s strategy in these writings with great insight, while at the same time drawing attention to the particular judgments which contradicted the idées reçues Hume considered especially mischievous.
In the first place, Harris is very sure-footed — and often persuasively surprising — in mapping the relationships of Hume’s arguments to his great predecessors in the post-Renaissance intellectual tradition: to thinkers such as Grotius, Locke, Hutcheson, Berkeley, and Shaftesbury. Most interesting, however, are Harris’s findings concerning Hume’s relation with the iconoclastic and controversial Bernard Mandeville, by whose provocations Hume was initially allured, but only until he found, as he thought, more powerful and subtle arguments for a less inflammatory view of human nature which allowed him to offer a measure of rejection to a man who nevertheless must be acknowledged as a powerful influence.
Harris brings Hume’s relation to ancient philosophy into a particularly sharp focus. As we have seen, Hume wanted to restore to the philosophy of his own day something of the equable temper of ancient philosophy. Of course, this wish was in part encoded disparagement of the dogmatic, intemperate spirit with which Christianity had infected the realm of thought ever since the momentous Church councils of the fourth century.
What it did not mean was that Hume wanted to reintroduce the ancient idea of philosophy as intellectual medicine. Concerning the ends of philosophy Hume was unswervingly modern. For him philosophy was a mode of investigation and a style of thought. It could never be a therapy.
Not that Hume’s world had no need of therapies. After he had abandoned the Treatise he turned his attention to the English and Scottish society in which he lived, and which he found to be riven by disputes bequeathed to it by the 17th century. Hume’s essays and his History of England were calculated as balms to be applied to these disputes, no matter how enraging or inflammatory their arguments might at first sight seem to the combatants. Harris explains Hume’s strategy in these writings with great insight, while at the same time drawing attention to the particular judgments which contradicted the idées reçues Hume considered especially mischievous.
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