Hume

If you are familiar with the ideas of David Hume (or shaken by them as I was) and are interested in the background of his thinking, this book is ideal. Harris goes into extensive detail about the effect of earlier thinkers on Hume and it turns out that, like all creative ideas, seeds of Hume’s ideas were present in several people who preceded him, especially writers like Mandeville, Malebranche, Bayle and Locke. In philosophy classes there is often a fairly straight line drawn from Locke’s empiricism to Hume’s. This is not inaccurate and makes sense for a course syllabus but, as Harris shows, it leaves out critical influences that, if Harris is right, were more influential on Hume’s overall development than Locke was. Harris also details Hume’s response to his own work and his ambivalent (sometimes quite negative) response to the Treatise of Human Nature written when Hume was a young man. It is not that he abandoned most of the key ideas in the Treatise (like his radical critique of the traditional view of causality) but that he was disturbed by the reaction (or lack of it) to his writing. Hume very much wanted to be viewed as a “man of letters” so he revised not just the Treatise but all his major works (and revised them quite regularly) to be more readable and amenable to the educated public he hoped would be his audience. Harris gives excellent summaries of all Hume’s most significant works, shows where and what he revised, and clearly shows the development of Hume’s thought over his lifetime.As Harris notes several times Hume claimed he was not out to destroy religion (or science) but to simply stand back and see how the human mind functioned in these critical areas of life. But in doing so Hume ended up attacking the fundamental religious ideas of his culture. Hume never called himself an atheist but ended up with a concept of “religion” that had no content. Harris lets the reader see how Hume got to that point and what he was trying to do but most of Hume’s contemporaries were not fans of Hume’s project and reacted as one might expect (and react now for that matter). Hume’s writings on religion show again the contrast between Hume the painfully honest philosopher of experience and Hume the “man of letters” who put off the publication of the Dialogues concerning Natural Religion until after he was dead.The “radical” Hume of philosophy was counterbalanced in Hume’s life by his love of history and Harris goes into extensive detail about Hume the historian. The reader follows Hume in his research and again Harris shows the influence of both previous historians of England and the work of Hume’s contemporaries. To someone only familiar with Hume the philosopher this part of Hume’s intellectual life gives a much fuller dimension to the man.This is an excellent book on the intellectual development of one of the most important people in the history of Western thought. The extensive work that went into the research and writing of this book is a gift to anyone interested in the thought of David Hume.

Every time I dip into this book I am reminded of what an amazing achievement it is. It is difficult to imagine that anyone will ever write a better account of Hume's intellectual biography.Given the paucity of available source materials on Hume's education and the period in which he composed his Treatise of Human Nature (which is perhaps the most interesting and important part of the story for philosophers who study Hume), the author does an amazing job of building an account that feels accurate and provides more context than we knew before. I wish there were more, but alas unless new letters or contemporary accounts come to light (as seems quite unlikely) this is the best account possible.One way this book will be good for philosophers who study Hume is that it demonstrates that Hume was so much more than just his philosophy. His intellectual and political interests were wide-ranging--plus, of course, the massive time and effort he devoted to his multi-volume History of England. All the detail you could ever want on those parts of Hume's life are to be found in this book. The story of the end of Hume's life is familar to many Hume readers but is here rounded out with more detail and with contributions from more sources.The notes and sources are very extensive, allowing a researcher to follow up on any point that might catch her eye.

Writing a proper biography of an intellectual subject presents the author of history with a difficult task. When your subject is a writer, or, worse yet, a philosopher, reflecting on the relationship between their thinking and their personal experiences in a way that is both entertaining and insightful can oftentimes be a challenge greater than the abilities of many, even very serious scholars.The problem is very frequently a consequence of confusion about what counts as proper 'experience'. Hume, in many ways, lived a relatively boring life, at least externally speaking. He never seemed particularly interested in getting himself, or remaining 'fix'd' in some stable way of life. He worked few jobs, held only a handful of secretarial posts, and often spent many years at a time sequestrated at his family estate in NineWells reading. This is not a life of swashbuckling adventure or political intrigue, it is the life of someone who spent most of their time reading, thinking or writing. Tempting as it though may be, the philosopher does not always present himself as the most promising candidate for psychoanalytical investigation, in fact, in the case of Hume, little of his personal correspondence or private writing survives from which to draw any singular conclusions regarding, say, the impact of childhood trauma on his development as a thinker.The success of "Hume: An Intellectual Biography" probably derives from Harris' relative disinterest in pursuing a purely psychological or biographically speculative account of his subject. He does not attempt to reconstruct Hume's thought from the purely physical circumstances of his life, such as his upbringing, his education, his profession, or his personal experiences. Instead the majority of the present volume is devoted to an intellectual account, a life of the mind. He realizes that ones cannot count on the general reader to have a full background in all of the literature with which Hume would have been familiar with, if only by contemporary reputation. Thus he takes the time to discuss the works and ideas of the many of authors whom Hume preoccupied himself for much of his life. The contextualization this book's biggest strength and greatest source of appeal.Only in one or two pages at the beginning and end of each chapter does the author explicitly turn his attention to the immediate circumstances of Hume's life. The bulk of each chapter then is taken up with a chronicling of what book's Hume was reading, and furthermore, of which books were available to him or otherwise would have at least been known to him in some capacity. It is then the task of the author to sort out how Hume synthesized this material, and to explain why sometimes some ideas prevailed with him over others, usually by means of an appeal to contemporary party politics or their attendant prejudices.Overall this is a very satisfying volume, it is at once very readable and very informative. It does not necessarily offer any great insight into Hume's, but it does present a very enjoyable intellectual narrative in which the various influences, both positive and negative, on Hume are connected to one another in a continuous and persuasive chain of interpretations.

I am a quarter way through it and would recommend it to someone who wants to learn about how the Treatise came to be.

Superb, balanced and erudite.

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