Reviewed by Rosalind Hursthouse
Open University, U.K.

This is a particularly challenging volume in the Re-reading the Canon series, not least because the Hume that emerges from it, though fairly familiar to regular attenders of the Hume Society conferences, is not the philosopher most of us were taught about as students The editor, Anne Jaap Jacobson, has titled her Introduction "A Double Re-Reading" and rightly so, for most of the essays do indeed serve this double purpose. On the one hand, in common with essays in the other volumes in the series, they bring feminist interpretations to bear on a wide range of Hume’s writings But, on the other hand, many of them bring a new Hume out of those writings—not the negative skeptic, not the "cheery skeptic" about religion, not the obvious precursor of Ayer’s logical positivism, not "the most thoroughly analytic philosopher ever to have written" before the 20th Century, as the old (l968) MacMillan Modern Studies in Philosophy claimed, but a much more interesting and subtle philosopher. This second re-reading gives the volume an unusual coherence. Notwithstanding the well worn point that feminist philosophy can take a variety of forms, and despite the fact that the essays cover the full range of Hume’s writings (even his historical ones), there is a surprising amount of common ground.

Well, given the Hume revealed in this volume, perhaps it is not so surprising, since the Hume in question has been greatly shaped by the work of Annette Baier (Baier 1991). Although, as Jacobson notes, the second re-reading of Hume actually began with Kemp Smith back in 1941, who both repositioned Hume’s moral philosophy and also read him as rejecting a certain form of foundationalism rather than as a skeptic, somehow it did not catch on. It seems to have taken Baier’s overt feminism and her "ovular" (in Jacobson’s irresistible terminology) work on the passions to make it fly, and the number of references to her in the index testify to her influence. It is no accident that one of her earlier papers on Hume was called "Hume, the Women’s Moral Theorist?" and that she went on to write "Hume, the Reflective Women’s Epistemologist?" (reprinted in the volume as the first essay—a nice touch) (Baier 1987, Baier 1993). Baier’s Hume, though recognizing some dichotomy between reason and emotion, does not downplay the importance of the latter because it is "feminine"; quite the contrary, and a number of essays in the volume demonstrate how fruitful a confidence about accepting the emotions/passions can be to the exploration of philosophical issues. For example, Genevieve Lloyd’s essay, responding to Baier’s reprinted one, considers the passion for truth, a passion that surely every one of us engaged in philosophy is all too familiar with, (how much easier it would be to write publishable articles if one didn’t have it) and yet one that is rarely acknowledged. The result is a "transformed version of reason" in which it is integrated with, not opposed to the imagination and the passions.

Of course, there is a well established reading of Hume’s moral philosophy which officially recognizes "the importance" of the passions, namely that which takes him as the father of noncognitivism. But Jacqueline Taylor argues, following Lovibond, that this perpetuates the standard hierarchy in which the "feminine" passions are inferior to "masculine" reason and winds up devaluing value. Her wide-ranging essay brings together many points from authors currently engaged in the cognitivism/noncognitivism debate and concludes with a fascinating discussion of Hume on change of taste in aesthetics in relation to a feminist rejection of Ovid.

The genuine importance of rightly oriented passions has long been acknowledged in virtue ethics, and Christine Swanton’s essay, "Compassion as a Virtue in Hume," is an exemplary contribution to virtue ethics literature as well as detailed Hume scholarship. Neatly avoiding the pitfalls set by Nietzsche for an ethics of care and the lure of a utilitarian ethics of generalized benevolence, Swanton identifies a number of rarely noticed features of Hume’s account of the mechanism of sympathy, including its "self-protecting tendency." The ethics of care is also the starting point for Nancy Hirschmann’s essay on Hume’s political philosophy, which is more critical of Hume, identifying a persisting individualism in his notion of sympathy notwithstanding its obvious social aspects. It may be that Hirschmann’s objections to Hume are more directed towards the role she takes sympathy to play in his account of the origins of justice (and the obligation thereunto) than to sympathy itself; for certainly both Susan A. Martinelli-Fernandez and Sheridan Hough see it as playing a slightly different role and find it less individualistic. According to Martinelli-Fernandez, each of us is a "relational self" on Hume’s theory; I see myself, once partiality is regulated by the general point of view, as a member of "a community of reciprocal concern." And "the general point of view" is not acquired through an individualistic search for the truth, but through moral education and dialogue (as Baier has frequently stressed).

On this picture, it will be an obvious consequence of Hume’s account that while women’s voices are not heard in the dialogue, there will be little chance of human beings, Hume included, developing the fully enlarged sympathy which would lead them to review women’s lot in society. One of Hume’s less sympathetic remarks about women is that, unlike men, they must be socially shaped to be chaste and modest because men need reassurance about their paternity, and Hough compares this claim with Nietzsche’s view that feminine manners are the result of socialization. Nietzsche denies essentialism and thus, on the face of it, leaves open the possibility of social change, whereas Hume, apparently, does not. However, Hough argues that imaginative sympathy could play a role in the reconstruction of gender roles and discusses Hume’s neglected essay, "On Love and Marriage," in which he argues for sexual equality.

Space does not permit me to pay equal attention to equally interesting essays in the volume—Christopher Williams on Hume’s aesthetics, which forms a thought-provoking companion piece to Taylor’s, Kathryn Temple’s exploration of the association between gender and genre in Hume’s History of England, and Jennifer A Herdst’s critical discussion of Hume’s failure to develop the implications of his critique of religion—for I must reserve a little for two of the most challenging and far-reaching.

The editor’s own paper discusses three of the most thoroughly worked over topics in Hume—his treatment of the existence of the external world, causation, and our knowledge of the unobserved. But she does so in order to highlight the tensions, inconsistencies and ambiguities within them and thereby to raise general questions of philosophical methodology. On the traditional view, the ideal philosopher has "a single, consistent, well-argued position," but Hume simply does not. Generations of academic philosophers have taken it upon themselves to provide "the correct" (and hence consistent) interpretation of him rather than question that ideal, but Jacobson forces us to look at it. After all, since Hume is, indisputably, part of the traditional canon, one of our ideal philosophers, surely the nature of his texts should determine the ideal, not the parasitic secondary literature. What do we think we are doing when we tidy him up by leaving out inconsistencies in the text?

Further self-questioning may be prompted by Aaron Smuts, who takes the unusual path of discussing Hume’s skepticism with regard to the senses in the Treatise and the Enquiry in terms of the rhetorical effects of Hume’s gendered metaphors. Nature and Imagination are both feminine and, in the Treatise, it is the feminine as the seductress who "displays herself," prone to flights of fancy, unreflective, and unreliable who is prominent. In the Enquiry, by contrast, Smuts finds Nature/Imagination feminised as Mother Nature, who "taught us the use of our limbs, without giving us the knowledge of the muscles and nerves" and who protects her foolish (male) children from excessive skepticism. In either role, she is very powerful, more so than Reason (Smuts has a little difficulty with the latter, since it/she is, as a faculty, also traditionally female, as is reflected in Hume’s usage, whereas reasoning and reflexion are in the male domain), but clearly the power exercised by the mother figure is beneficent and wise whereas that exercised by the seductress can only be dangerous. Reading Smuts, I was led to wonder to what extent our resistance to grounding philosophy in facts about human nature stems from the influence of these still powerful metaphors. To be sensible of the dangers is one thing, but do we not also, like rebellious adolescents, yearn to prove that we are independent and autononmous by showing that we can manage without any appeal to Mother?

It is sad to note that no author has referred to any of Anscombe’s many reflexions on Hume (Anscombe 1981), which are invariably interesting, deep, and, in the case of her paper, "Rules, Rights and Promises," more illuminating, in my view, than anything else that has been written on "natural unintelligibility." Either an interest in Hume scholarship or a bit of feminist solidarity might have led one to her writings, and I would have expected the two combined to make her required reading for at least some of the authors. It would have been nice to see her work acknowledged in such a splendid volume.

Works Cited

Anscombe, G.E.M. 1981. Collected Philosophical Papers. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Baier, Annette. 1987. "Hume, the Women’s Moral Theorist?" In Women and Moral Theory, ed. Eva Feder Kittay and Diana T. Meyers. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.

__________. 1991. A Progress of Sentiments. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

__________. 1993. "Hume, the Reflective Women’s Epistemologist?" In A Mind of One’s Own, ed. Louise Antony and Charlotte Witt. Boulder, CO: Westview.

Kemp Smith, Norman. 1941. The Philosophy of David Hume. New York: MacMillan, repr. Garland, l983.