Abstract

Professor Adam Potkay’s interesting, wide-ranging, and well-informed book makes a case for close commonalities between two Enlightenment writers and personalities who have been usually regarded as deeply contrary, indeed, oppositional—namely, David Hume and Samuel Johnson. At places Professor Potkay appears to argue that there is essentially a single broad philosophy discernible in Johnson and Hume; in other contexts a range of striking and hitherto unsuspected similarities, only, is proposed. Methodologically, Potkay seeks to denaturalize Hume, and to naturalize Johnson, at least relatively, in both instances; hence to split a difference, and find the two converging on a middle ground. His book argues that Hume and Johnson are essentially and primarily moralists, with similar analyses of human motivations and of what conduces to human flourishing. Common intellectual roots are seen, in ancient and early modern thought, and a common range of intellectual adversaries, above all, Cartesian rationalism. A broad shared vision of human history also is argued to unite the two thinkers. While differences of view are not denied, especially on religion, Potkay sees more that is common than contrary.