Abstract

Impressions of Hume consists of an editorial Introduction and twelve original essays, most of which were earlier presented at the “Hume Studies in Britain” interdisciplinary workshops held in Cambridge, Edinburgh, and Oxford. This collection is a valuable one, especially for those interested in the intellectual contexts of Hume’s metaphysics and ethics. It might be shelved alongside—in parts it seems an extension of—M. A. Stewart and John P. Wright’s edited collection from 1994, Hume and Hume’s Connexions. Indeed, Impressions of Hume begins with M. A. Stewart’s 47-page article, “The Intellectual Development of Hume, 1711–1752,” which covers Hume’s life of reading in detail from the curriculum at the College of Edinburgh through his bookish interests of 1725–1729, and then leaps ahead, in more summary fashion, to Hume’s professional interests in the decade after completing the Treatise, including his ongoing concern to distance himself from that work, culminating in the 1775 “Advertisement” and 1776 “My Own Life.” Rich in archival research and in full command of Hume’s intellectual and social milieus, Stewart’s article whets the appetite for the full-blown biography of which this seems a partial draft. According to this volume’s “Notes on Contributors,” however, Hume’s intellectual biography is now in the hands of James A. Harris, whose contribution here, “Hume’s Use of the Rhetoric of Calvinism,” marks him as a worthy successor to Stewart and the other scholars—Harris cites Roger Emerson and James Moore—who have set the understanding of Hume’s life on a whole new footing since E. C. Mossner’s second edition of The Life of David Hume. Harris argues that Hume used fideistic pronouncements, especially in the first Enquiry, to align himself strategically with the Calvinist opponents of the neo-Stoic moderates in church and university, including Hutcheson, who blocked Hume from securing the Edinburgh moral philosophy chair in 1745. Hume’s intention, according to Harris, “was to discredit by whatever means possible the revolution in moral philosophy being engineered by Hutcheson, and so to imply a need for a return to the time when moral philosophy was one thing, and the teaching of natural religion another”.