Pub Date : 2023-11-01DOI: 10.1353/hms.2023.a910749
Dario Perinetti
Experience, Embodiment, and History: Remarks on Waldow’s Experience Embodied Dario Perinetti (bio) Anik Waldow’s Experience Embodied delves into what she calls the “early modern debate on the concept of experience.”1 In her rich and wide-ranging account, she shows how a group of key early modern philosophers dealt with a puzzle regarding the connection between the subjective and objective aspects of experience. The puzzle stems from the fact that experience reveals as much about the experiencing subject as it does about the experienced world. Waldow believes that a one-sided focus on the role of “the way of ideas” in shaping the subjective aspect of experience has distorted our understanding of early modern views on experience. According to the traditional reading, the puzzle presents an intractable challenge to early modern philosophers. For if we experience the world through ideas, and ideas are internal mental states, it becomes difficult to reconcile the explanations required for the psychology of our mental states with those needed for the natural sciences dealing with objective states of affairs. But, so Waldow claims, the challenge can be successfully faced once we understand experience as embodied: “We have to think of experience as embodied to do justice to both explanatory requirements, because it is the body that connects the experiencing mind and its subjectivity with the factual realm of the world.”2 Waldow disputes the commonly held view that early modern philosophers saw experience as an interaction between mind and world. She contends, instead, that most early modern philosophers understood experience as embodied. The thesis is presented through a series of “case studies” or “snapshots.” These snapshots focus on the way Descartes, Locke, Hume, Rousseau, Herder, and Kant accounted for the [End Page 319] embodied dimension of experience. The case studies are noteworthy because they succeed in revealing the significance of embodied experience for the authors in question. Waldow manages to expose the significance of embodied experience by focusing on the connection between the authors’ central philosophical views and their views on topics like education, the psychology of emotions, and history, which are often considered of lesser interest by contemporary philosophers. For example, in chapter 1, Waldow argues that connecting Descartes’s mind-body dualism with his understanding of reason as a tool for human self-determination and agency, makes it possible to see how, contrary to commonly held assumptions, Descartes’s dualism aligns well with an understanding of experience as embodied. This weakens the view that Descartes defended a conception of reason as disembodied, and instead, allows for a reading of Cartesian philosophy as aligned with a more naturalistic picture of human nature. In her chapters on Hume and Herder, Waldow sheds light on the way these philosophers perceived reason and experience as deeply rooted in bodily sensibili
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Pub Date : 2023-11-01DOI: 10.1353/hms.2023.a910754
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Pub Date : 2023-11-01DOI: 10.1353/hms.2023.a910746
Frederic L. Van Holthoon
Abstract: In this piece, I argue that Hume wrote his Essays to continue writing on political issues after he rather abruptly ended his Treatise , Book 3. Initially he wrote some essays in the vein of Addison and Steele, but he rejected these essays as “frivolous.” In writing on political issues, he became a master essayist and his essays withstood the test of time. “Political” should here be taken in the wider sense as topical issues which readers could immediately recognize as being relevant.
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Pub Date : 2023-11-01DOI: 10.1353/hms.2023.a910744
Rico Vitz
Abstract: In this paper, I show how reading Hume’s moral philosophy in light of seminal works by nineteenth- and twentieth-century African American authors can provide resources for developing a richer and more intentionally relational conception of sympathy. I begin by identifying two phenomena to which African American intellectuals like Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Anna Julia Cooper refer with the term “sympathy.” For ease of reference, I label these phenomena “sympathetic commitment” and “sympathetic understanding,” respectively. I then show that there are concepts in Hume’s moral philosophy that refer to similar phenomena and suggest that Hume scholars can draw on these concepts to develop an enriched and distinctively Humean sense of sympathy.
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Pub Date : 2023-11-01DOI: 10.1353/hms.2023.a910747
Lorne Falkenstein
The Clarendon Edition of Hume’s Essays Lorne Falkenstein (bio) David Hume. Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary: A Critical Edition. Edited by Tom L. Beauchamp and Mark A. Box, with Michael Silverthorne, J. A. W. Gunn, and F. David Harvey. 2 volumes. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2021. Pp. 1200. ISBN: 97880198847090. $175. As reflected in its title, the Clarendon Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary contains essays that appeared over the course of Hume’s lifetime under the titles Essays, Moral and Political (EMP) and Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary (EMPL). (The latter appears as a subtitle within Hume’s larger Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects [ETSS].) It includes pieces that were withdrawn from EMP or EMPL in later editions, as well as essays Hume added to EMPL in 1764 and 1777. These are the essays familiar to those who know Eugene Miller’s Liberty Fund collection of Hume’s Essays with some exceptions: My Own Life, “Of Suicide,” and “Of the Immortality of the Soul” are not included. Essays that Hume decided to withdraw from later editions of EMP or EMPL precede the retained essays, collected in parts by withdrawal date. (This is a nice touch, which better captures the history of their appearance and disappearance.) A dedication to John Home, which appeared in some copies of Four Dissertations, and a list of “Scotticisms,” which appeared at various places in some copies of the first edition of Hume’s Political Discourses (incorporated into EMP and EMPL) are included as appendices. These are decisions that reflect the contents of the published texts, as they appeared from 1741 to 1777 (1:xxvii–xxviii). Hume wanted My Own Life to be prefaced to the posthumous 1777 edition of ETSS (1:444–45), but his publisher, Strahan, chose to publish it as an independent pamphlet instead. The essays “Of Suicide” and [End Page 297] “Of the Immortality of the Soul” were only briefly intended for publication in Four Dissertations (incorporated into ETSS) and did not appear in the released edition. They, too, only appeared posthumously. The editors project a volume containing Hume’s posthumous writings (1:401n1), which should include these works. Though the essays on suicide and immortality are not included, their history is presented over 1:430–31, importantly supplemented by 1:467–68. The dedication to John Home was published during Hume’s lifetime, though only in his Four Dissertations of 1757. As the editors note (1:695–96) it was highly controversial at the time and historically significant, both as an episode in Hume’s own troubles with the Scottish Kirk, and as an indication of the weakening of the control of the clergy over Scottish culture. It merits inclusion somewhere in a critical edition of Hume’s writings. The obvious place is in the company of the works that originally appeared in Four Dissertations. Those works are distributed over three volumes of the Clarendon Hume editions, those containing the Enquiry concerning Human Understanding,
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Pub Date : 2023-11-01DOI: 10.1353/hms.2023.a910743
Julia Wolf
Abstract: In the Appendix to the Treatise , Hume argues that there is a significant problem with his earlier account of personal identity. There has been considerable debate about what this problem actually is. I develop a new version of an internal inconsistency reading, where I argue that Hume realised that his original account of the connexion between perceptions in terms of an association of the ideas of the perceptions was not a viable means of explaining the connexion between perceptions as it leads to an infinite regress of ideas of perceptions. This is only stopped by accepting that the mind perceives a connexion between perceptions. This, however, is something Hume cannot accept. As a result, Hume is left without a positive account of the self, as he has no account of the connexion between perceptions.
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Pub Date : 2023-11-01DOI: 10.1353/hms.2023.a910748
Hynek Janoušek
Meanings of “Embodied Experience”: A Response to Anik Waldow’s Book Hynek Janoušek (bio) Anik Waldow, Experience Embodied: Early Modern Accounts of the Human Place in Nature Anik Waldow’s book, Experience Embodied: Early Modern Accounts of Human Place in Nature, is a welcome contribution to an interesting topic worthy of wider discussion. That topic is the question of how the concepts of embodied experience and reason were understood in seventeenth-and eighteenth-century philosophy. This problem, according to Waldow, is often treated too narrowly, namely by concentrating on the problems of the theory of knowledge. Instead, Waldow shows that the main philosophers of the time understood experience and reason in a broader way and that not only the content of the concept, but also the angle from which experience was considered was not purely theoretical but moral and practical—and this, in turn, led them into researching experience as embodied experience. Indeed, on the one hand, according to most of these theories, our experience is born of a response to the causal action of the external environment on our body and of the body itself; on the other hand, the bodily subject of experience experiences herself as a being who actively and reasonably acts in the world and transforms it. We are aware of this active role.1 Since, in this period of philosophy, a fact is defined as that which is given to us by experience, and our bodily actions in the world are given to us in this way, our corporeality, and our action through it, are facts that must somehow be brought into harmony. However, man does not experience herself only as a machine mechanically bound to the sensory stimuli of her own body, but as an active agent who can use her reason and will to shape her life and the world in which she lives. But does man still really possess a reason and a will of her own, which distinguish her actions from the instinctive actions of animals, and which allow her to distance herself from immediate [End Page 305] sensory affects and to act? How can reason and will be interpreted in the context of an embodied and causally determined human experience? And if human moral determination points to self-determined and responsible action, and if this possibility is acquired through learning and education, what kind of self-determining reason are we talking about?2 Finally, the question is how society should shape experience of its individuals so that they can develop their reason and thus the possibility of self-determined action. Waldow chooses the works of Descartes, Locke, Hume, Rousseau, Kant, and Herder to discuss these topics. The book thus covers authors of all three major linguistic areas in early modern philosophy. The text of the book is divided into three sections. The first discusses Descartes and Locke and the moral dimension of human experience. The second focuses on Hume, Rousseau, and Herder and the question of how the development of our higher cognitive and a
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Pub Date : 2023-11-01DOI: 10.1353/hms.2023.a910752
Zuzana Parusniková
Reviewed by: Academic Skepticism in Hume and Kant: A Ciceronian Critique of Metaphysics by Catalina González Quintero Zuzana Parusniková Catalina González Quintero. Academic Skepticism in Hume and Kant: A Ciceronian Critique of Metaphysics. Cham: Springer, 2022. Pp. 268. Hardcover. ISBN: 978-3-030-89749-9. £99.99. This book is a valuable contribution to the rapidly expanding field of research into the formative impact of ancient skepticism on early modern philosophy. This new paradigm was introduced several decades ago, as González Quintero acknowledges, by the pioneering work of Richard Popkin; and while Popkin emphasized the constitutive role of Pyrrhonism in this process, recent philosophical debates have been characterized by a more measured approach, carefully differentiating between the Academics and the Pyrrhonists, and their respective influence on modern skeptics. Gonzáles Quintero opts for the Academic interpretation of Hume’s skepticism, applying it to both his Treatise and the first Enquiry, and extending it to both of Kant’s Critiques—an area much less explored in the context of ancient skepticism. She thus heads into a complex philosophical landscape. The reader may be somewhat puzzled by the book’s subtitle, one which seems to add yet another theme to its already broad structure. However, as Gonzáles Quintero explains in the Introduction, she wants to take the discussions of Academic skepticism beyond the field of empirical science and concentrate on the attitude of the skeptics towards metaphysics; her aim is to show how Cicero, Hume, and Kant “used skeptical means to examine the justification of metaphysical claims and to determine, in this way, which resulting beliefs could be held non-dogmatically and for practical purposes” (1). Perhaps then, the book may be more accurately titled Academic Skepticism and Metaphysics: Cicero, Hume and Kant. Though this may seem a reduction in the scope of the topics, in this particular case it is an expansion, since the author reconstructs how the attitude of the skeptics to metaphysics unfolds from their general epistemological skepticism concerning the limits of reason. She divides the book into three main parts (Cicero, Hume, and Kant), with the first chapter of each part describing the skeptical method of that particular philosopher or school, and the second examining its application to metaphysical matters. This is a huge undertaking for one book, requiring the author to navigate a vast field of philosophical material, including a significant amount of primary and secondary literature, while turning it all back toward the main question concerning the role played by Academic (Carneadean) skepticism in the ancient, Humean, and Kantian treatments of religion and other metaphysical issues. The danger of topic-overload arises and a selective approach is crucial to avoid “dropping the ball.” Gonzáles Quintero tackles this task with varying success. [End Page 346] The first chapter of the first p
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Pub Date : 2023-11-01DOI: 10.1353/hms.2023.a910742
Taro Okamura
Abstract: Many scholars have claimed that the psychology of the indirect passions in the Treatise is meant to capture how we come to regard persons as morally responsible agents. My question is exactly how the indirect passions relate to responsibility. In elucidating Hume’s account of responsibility, scholars have often focused not on the passionate responses themselves, but on their structural features. In this paper, I argue that locating responsibility in the structural features is insufficient to make sense of Hume’s account of responsibility. I argue this on the grounds that without reference to the passions, Hume does not have the resources to distinguish between responsible and non-responsible entities. Instead, I attribute to Hume a distinctive, sympathy-based response-dependent conception of responsibility.
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