In "My Own Life," Hume writes:1 During my retreat in France, first at Reims, but chiefly at La Fleche, in Anjou, I composed my Treatise of Human Nature. After passing three years very agreeably in that country, I came over to London in 1737. In the end of 1738, I published my Treatise, and immediately went down to my mother and my brother, who lived at his country house, and was employing himself very judiciously and successfully in the improvement of (...) his fortune. It is thus "chiefly" at La Flèche that Hume wrote one of the masterpieces of early modern philosophy. Hume's stay in France extended from July 1734 to August 1737. He spent a few weeks in Paris in the summer of 1734, hosted by Chevalier... (shrink)

In this paper I consider the context and significance of the first instalment of Hume's A Treatise of Human Nature , Books One and Two, on the understanding and on the passions, published in 1739 without Book Three. I argue that Books One and Two taken together should be read as addressing the question of the relation between reason and passion, and place Hume's discussion in the context of a large early modern philosophical literature on the topic. Hume's goal is (...) to show that the passions do not require government by reason, and to illustrate various ways in which the passions of social beings regulate themselves. The underlying theme of the first Treatise is thus a new theory of sociability: sympathetic sociability. (shrink)

Familiarity with the doctrines presented in Richard Allestree’s devotional work The Whole Duty of Man (1658), which Hume reported having read as a boy, can illuminate the strategy of argument Hume employs in Treatise 2.1.6–2.1.8 to undermine views he attributes to “the vulgar systems of ethicks.” Hume’s explicit critique of the view that pride is a sin and humility a virtue in Treatise 2.1.7 relies on assumptions that are already present in Allestree’s account of pride and humility and are described (...) using similar language. Sections 6–8 of Treatise 2.1 also provide an implicit critique of Allestree’s attempts to induce a general stance of humility based on mortifying considerations about human nature and to inspire episodes of penitential humility for the sins of the day. I argue that the “limitations to this account” gathered together in 2.1.6 are placed there to set up this critique. Together, the limitations imply that defects in our personal character are sufficiently close to us, peculiar to us, discernible to others, of appropriate duration, and supported by general rules to generate the passion of humility when we reflect on them, while reflection on human nature in general and particular episodes of sin are not. (shrink)

Though Hume is often considered the hero of analytic philosophy in its positivistic phase, his concept of sympathy can be understood as an eighteenth- century prototype of Verstehen. Sympathy is central to Hume's moral philosophy, as he considered it the source of human motivation, social interaction, evaluation, and understanding. It has been acknowledged that sympathy, for Hume, was the human ability to associate with the sensations and passions of others. However, he also stated that this association was neither feeling nor (...) passion, but a species of communication. This sympathetic communication included not only passions and feelings, but ideas, opinions, and reason. Though somewhat inconsistently, Hume argued that the process of sympathy was hermeneutic rather than causal. Like the concept of Verstehen, sympathy requires a contextual understanding of human relations. (shrink)

The Physiological Library’s catalogue shows that Hume had access to Malebranche’s sixth edition of De la recherche de la vérité while a student in Edinburgh.1 The Recherche is also included in the David Hume’s Library.2 While Hume did not agree with Malebranche on all things, a number of commentators have argued that Hume borrowed many points from Malebranche, not only concerning causality and the famous example of the billiard balls3 but also on other subjects. Charles McCracken’s Malebranche and British Philosophy (...) compares Hume and Malebranche on causation, self-knowledge, kinds of truth, the relation between imagination and belief, and ethics.4 Peter Kail has more recently devoted three articles to the .. (shrink)

In his De la recherche de la vérité (The Search after Truth) of 1674-75, Nicolas Malebranche makes a number of apparently contradictory remarks about women and their capacity for pure intellectual thought. On the one hand, he seems to espouse a negative biological determinism about women’s minds, and on the other, he suggests that women have the free capacity to attain truth and happiness, regardless of their physiology. In the early eighteenth-century, four English women thinkers – Anne Docwra (c. 1624-1710), (...) Mary Astell (1666-1731), Damaris Masham (1659-1708), and Mary Chudleigh (1656-1710) – engaged with Malebranche’s ideas. Their writings reveal how we might dispel the apparent contradictions in Malebranche’s thinking about women, and reaffirm the liberating potential of Cartesian philosophy for women in the early modern period. (shrink)

Mandeville writes that it was said of Montaigne “that he was pretty well vers’d in the Defects of Man-kind, but unacquainted with the Excellencies of human Nature,” adding, “If I fare no worse, I shall think my self well used.” Mandeville transformed Montaigne’s suggestion into a methodology for his systematic attempt to “anatomize the invisible Parts of Man”. His tale of “the grumbling hive,” and his extensive commentary on it, were designed to demonstrate that “if Mankind could be cured of (...) the Failings they are Naturally guilty of, they would cease to be capable of being rais’d into such vast, potent and polite Societies, as they have been”. (shrink)

in a recent article entitled “Hume on the Passions,” Stephen Buckle opens with the claim that Hume’s theory of the passions has largely been neglected. “Apart from a couple of famous sections in the Treatise concerning the sources of action,” he writes, “the subject matter has rarely excited interest.”1 His analysis of why the subject of the passions in Hume has been uninspiring points to the fact that readers have largely misunderstood the point of Hume’s theory. They usually regard the (...) account as yet another mechanistic analysis of the passions in the vein of seventeenth-century science, alongside the offerings of Malebranche, Hobbes, and Spinoza. Buckle is right to point out that there is a.. (shrink)