David Hume on Morals, Politics, and Society ed. by Angela Coventry and Andrew Valls

Reviewed by: David Hume on Morals, Politics, and Society ed. by Angela Coventry and Andrew Valls Naohito Mori Angela Coventry and Andrew Valls, eds. David Hume on Morals, Politics, and Society. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2018. Pp. lvi + 350. Paperback ISBN 978-0-300-20714-9, $15.00. This is a fascinating collection of Hume's texts and essays by experts on Hume. It introduces students and general readers to a panorama of his moral and political philosophy in a readable and informative way. The collection consists of the following sections: Introduction by Andrew Valls, Index of Names, "Texts," and "Essays." The texts include the entirety of An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, and selected essays from "Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary." This is followed by four "interpretive essays" by Mark G. Spencer, Elizabeth S. Radcliffe, Frederick G. Whelan, and finally Peter Vanderschraaf and Andrew Valls. In his introduction, Valls contends that Hume on morals and politics is still relatively neglected, in spite of the extraordinary richness of his texts (xi). This volume, published in the series Rethinking the Western Tradition, is intended to make that richness more accessible. It is highly successful in doing so. Besides its compact size and affordable cost, the fresh combination of the second Enquiry and a selection from "Essays" will enable a broader spectrum of readers to follow the texts, as Valls expects (xiv–xv). Hume himself wished for this sort of accessibility; indeed "Essays" and the Enquiry were included in his own edition of Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects. Valls's introduction vividly provides a synopsis of Hume's thought by helpfully referring to the interpretive essays in the collection, and by engaging characteristics of his thought by comparison with other great thinkers. In the primary texts section, diction and punctuation diverge in a few places from other editions like that of Hume Texts Online (https://davidhume.org) and the texts are slightly less understandable where divergences occur. Moreover, on page 21, the first five lines of paragraph 25 are duplicated and appear at the end of paragraph 24 as well. While there are minor editorial errors, there are also editorial merits. For instance, the editorial annotations added to the footnotes, specifically translations of Hume's quotes in Latin and so on, are beneficial. The essays by the masterful contributors evidence another outstanding merit of the present collection. The contributors detail how one can understand the main theses of Hume's texts and situate them in both their historical backgrounds and in our contemporary debates. Readers will find here considerably wider, deeper, and more interdisciplinary resources than in a typical editor's introduction (though sometimes, a single introduction has unusual width and depth, like Eugene Rotwein's monumental introduction to his edition of Hume's Writings on Economics, [End Page 110] republished with a new introduction by Margaret Schabas (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2007). The first essay by Spencer focuses on the historical Hume. It illustrates how his works were composed, read, and responded to by reviewers of his time and great thinkers such as Adam Ferguson, Henry Home, Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, and James Madison. Spencer's succinct but lively intellectual biography prompts readers to see Hume's works from viewpoints of the past. One fascinating episode recounted is Thomas Ewell's assemblage of the first American edition of Hume's works in 1817 (257). It is inspiring to see Hume's wish to make his works "accessible to many beyond the learned few" (245) was respected by Ewell's edition, and has been even further realized by the present volume, as American students and readers in the twenty-first century will see. Radcliffe's essay explicates the decisive relevance of Hume's moral philosophy for various studies in contemporary ethics. She focuses on the impact of Hume's motivational anti-rationalism, moral sentimentalism, and discussions on the "is-ought" gap (265–66), and carefully measures both connections and differences between Hume's theses and contemporary theories. In surveying diverse comments on the "is-ought" gap, for example, Radcliffe finds Nicholas Sturgeon's view of attributing moral distinctions to sentiment and thereby accepting a move from "is...

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.