Abstract

Who other than Don Garrett could construct a work this rigorous and comprehensive, encompassing Hume’s aesthetics, political philosophy, and philosophy of religion—not as add-ons but tightly integrated into a genuinely new interpretation? Garrett’s intricate reading has no equal in the architectonic it locates in Hume’s philosophical corpus. This elegantly crafted work will reinvigorate thinking about Hume’s theory of normativity across the epistemic and moral realms.1 I center my comments on a central line of argument in chapters 4, 5, and 7. In chapter 4, Garrett focuses on four “sense-based” concepts or pairs of such concepts: virtue, beauty, causation, and probability....