Abstract

I explicate and compare the accounts of sympathy found in the writings of David Hume, David Hartley, and Adam Smith, particularly with respect to their historical and doctrinal relations with earlier conceptions of sympathy. I argue that Humean "anatomical" sympathy bears some interesting relations to the concept of sympathy current in eighteenth-century Scottish medicine, most notably in the works of Hume's Edinburgh contemporary Robert Whytt. I briefly outline the history of medical sympathy from Hippocrates and Galen through Thomas Willis at Oxford and Hermann Boerhaave at Leiden, whose students dominated early eighteenth-century Edinburgh medicine. Hartley, himself a physician, also made reference to medical sympathy, but was more interested in what I call "millenarian" sympathy, a conception of sympathy as the progressive psychological coalescence of all human consciousness, the result of which is self-annihilation. The roots of millenarian sympathy, I suggest, may be traced to such works as Plotinus' Enneads and Robert Fludd's Philosophia Moysaica. Adam Smith, in contrast, took a "theatrical" view of sympathy that owed much to the sentimentalist celebration of man's "good nature" that had arisen in response to the perceived cynicism of Hobbes and Mandeville. ;Having established some possible historical bases of the three authors' conceptions of sympathy, I analyze the function that sympathy plays in each of their moral theories. In Hume's case, this involves a significant revision of the received view---I attempt to show that Hume's view of sympathy was not inspired by sentimentalism so much as by the need to fill an important epistemological gap in his moral theory. I argue that this emphasis was in keeping with that found in a number of less celebrated writers whom Hume is known to have admired: Abbe Dubos, Levesque de Pouilly, and Lord Shaftesbury. ;The dissertation includes discussions of sympathy as it appears in works by such figures as Aristotle, Pliny, Porta, Digby, Samuel Butler, Paul Chamberlen, Thomas Browne, Mersenne, Malebranche, Burke, and Stewart, as well as several examples of sentimentalist poetry composed on Smithian and Hartleyan themes