Hume's Enlightenment Tract: The Unity and Purpose of An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding

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Stephen Buckle

Hume's Enlightenment Tract

The Unity and Purpose of An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding

Stephen Buckle

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English

Oxford University Press
01 March 2004

Philosophy; Western philosophy: c 1600 to c 1900; Philosophy: epistemology & theory of knowledge; History of ideas

Hume's Enlightenment Tract is the first full book-length study for forty years of David Hume's Enquiry concerning Human Understanding. The Enquiry has, contrary to its author's expressed wishes, long lived in the shadow of its predecessor, A Treatise of Human Nature. Stephen Buckle presents the Enquiry in a fresh light, and aims to raise it to its rightful position in Hume's work and in the history of philosophy. He argues that the Enquiry is not, as so often assumed, a mere collection of watered-down extracts from the earlier work. It is, rather, a coherent work with a unified argument; and, when this argument is grasped as a whole, the Enquiry shows itself to be the best introduction to the lineaments of its author's general philosophy. Buckle offers a careful guide through the argument and structure of the work. He shows how the central sections of the Enquiry offer a critique of the dogmatic empiricisms of the ancient world (Stoicism, Epicureanism, and Aristotelianism), and set in place an alternative conception of human powers based on the sceptical principles of habit and probability. These principles are then put to work, to rule out philosophy's metaphysical ambitions and their consequences: religious systems and their attendant conception of human beings as semi-divine rational animals. Hume's scepticism, experimentalism, and naturalism are thus shown to be different aspects of the one unified philosophy - a sceptical version of the Enlightenment vision.

By: Stephen Buckle
Imprint: Oxford University Press
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 233mm, Width: 157mm, Spine: 20mm
Weight: 1g
ISBN: 9780199271146
ISBN 10: 0199271143
Pages: 366
Publication Date: 01 March 2004
Audience: Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

1. Approaching the Text 1: Clearing the Ground 2: Circumstances and Aim 3: Experimentalism and Scepticism 2. The Argument 1: Of the Different Species of Philosophy 2: Of the Origin of Ideas 3: Of the Association of Ideas 4: Sceptical Doubts concerning the Operations of the Understanding 5: Sceptical Solution of these Doubts 6: Of Probability 7: Of the Idea of Necessary Connexion 8: Of Liberty and Necessity 9: Of the Reason of Animals 10: Of Miracles 11: Of a Particular Providence and of a Future State 12: Of the Academical or Sceptical Philosophy 3. Conclusion Hume's Enlightenment Tract Bibliography, Index

Reviews for Hume's Enlightenment Tract: The Unity and Purpose of An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding

A pleasure to read... This book clearly presents the roles of philosophical thought in the various phenomena constituting the Enlightenment, and so will be of value to scholars and students of Hume, and will be of special value to people who are teaching the Enquiry for the first time and desire to understand how it all 'hangs together.' --Eighteenth-Century Thought<br>