Abstract
On his visits to David Hume in London in 1766, Jean-Jacques Rousseau would often find a copy of his epistolary novel La Nouvelle Héloïse lying on his host’s desk. Months later, after their notorious falling out, Rousseau would reinterpret this detail, at first sight so flattering, as an underhanded provocation: “As if I didn’t know M. Hume’s taste well enough to be sure that, of all the books in existence, the Héloïse must be the most tedious to him.”
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
A version of this chapter was published as “David Hume, Literary Cognitivism, and the Truth of the Novel,” SEL Studies in English Literature 1500–1900, 54, No. 3 (Summer 2014), 625–648.
- 2.
The Letters of David Hume, ed. by J.Y.T. Greig, 2 vols. (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1932), ii. 389, n. 1, ii, 28, ii, 206, n.4, i, 210, and ii, 206. Henceforth cited parenthetically as L. The passages by Rousseau and Crébillon are originally in French (the English translation is my own).
- 3.
Dabney Townsend, Hume’s Aesthetic Theory: Taste and Sentiment (New York: Routledge, 2001), 208; Claudia Schmidt, David Hume: Reason in History (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003), 316. Jesse Molesworth, Chance and the Eighteenth-Century Novel: Realism, Probability, Magic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 174.
- 4.
See David Fate Norton and Mary J. Norton’s The David Hume Library (Edinburgh, 1996), 125.
- 5.
See James Fieser, Early Responses to Hume’s Life and Reputation, Vol. 1 (Bristol, UK: Thoemmes Press, 2003), 372. Anette Baier claims that Hume helped Madame Riccoboni translate Amelia into French, but Riccoboni’s freely adapted Amélie came out in 1762, a year before she first met Hume in France. Baier was probably thinking of Hume’s assistance with the publication of Riccoboni’s Miss Jenny in England. See Baier’s Death and Character: Further Reflections on Hume (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 104, and Hume’s Letters, i, 426 and 490.
- 6.
Philosophical studies of Hume’s aesthetics have tended to emphasize his theory of taste rather than his applied criticism. Examples include Townsend’s Hume’s Aesthetic Theory, Peter Jones’s Hume’s Sentiments (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1982), and Timothy Costelloe’s Aesthetic and Morals in the Philosophy of David Hume (New York: Routledge, 2007). Studies by literary scholars have prioritized instead the literariness of philosophical writing and the presence of Humean themes in the work of novelists like Fielding and Sterne. Examples include John Valdimir Price’s The Ironic Hume (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1965) and John Richetti’s Philosophical Writing: Locke, Berkeley, Hume (Cambridge and London, Harvard University Press, 1983). Even when they take Hume’s practical criticism into account, these approaches emphasize Hume as literature and in literature, while still leaving much to be said about Hume on literature. Three books that pay close attention to Hume’s work as a literary critic, but without saying much about the novel, are Mark A. Box’s The Suasive Art of David Hume (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), Ernest Campbell Mossner’s The Forgotten Hume (1946), and Teddy Brunius’s David Hume on Criticism (1952). Two doctoral dissertations from the early 1950s also deserve mention: Charles Noyes’s “Aesthetic Theory and Literary Criticism in the Works of David Hume” (UT 1950) and Ralph Cohen’s “The Critical Theory of David Hume” (Columbia 1952). Cohen condensed his views in his helpful article “The Rationale of Hume’s Literary Enquiries,” Southwestern Journal of Philosophy, 7, No. 2 (Summer 1976), 97–115, but again without much attention to the novel.
- 7.
Locke, John, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1975), 3.10.34, p. 506.
- 8.
Hume, David, Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller, rev. edn. (1985; rprt. Indianapolis IN: LibertyClassics, 1987), 564. Further references will be to this edition, cited as E.
- 9.
Locke, ECHU, 3.10.34.
- 10.
Hume, David, An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. Tom L. Beauchamp (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 12. Further references will be to this edition, cited as EPM.
- 11.
Marina Frasca-Spada, “Quixotic Confusions and Hume’s Imagination,” in Impressions of Hume, ed. Marina Frasca-Spada and Peter J. E. Kail (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005), 161–186.
- 12.
Hume, David, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. David Fate Norton and Mary J. Norton. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) 1.4.7.6. Further references will be to this edition, noted as THN.
- 13.
Hume, David, An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, ed. Tom L. Beauchamp (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). Further references will be to this edition, cited as EHU.
- 14.
Norman Kemp Smith, The Philosophy of David Hume (London: Macmillan, 1941).
- 15.
Hume uses the word “reason” to mean different things at different times, but when discussing induction the meaning he has in mind is “deductive reasoning.”
- 16.
Donald Livingston, for instance, sees skepticism as one phase in a dialectical process towards Hume’s true philosophy, a “philosophy of common life”; Miriam McCormick, in turn, argues that radical skepticism is just a “temptation” Hume is able to discern but also to resist. See Livingston, Hume’s Philosophy of Common Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), and McCormick, “A Change in Manner: Hume’s Scepticism in the ‘Treatise’ and the first ‘Enquiry,’” Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 29, No. 3 (September 1999), 431–447.
- 17.
In what follows I am drawing on Peter Millican’s claim that Hume views induction as “a cognitive process which depends on a non-cognitive sub-process,” so that while making inductive inferences qualifies as “an operation of reasoning,” the inferences themselves cannot be traced all the way down to a cognitive foundation. Millican, “Hume’s ‘Scepticism’ about Induction,” The Continuum Companion to Hume, ed. Alan Bailey and Dan O’Brien (London and New York: Continuum, 2012), 86. In spite of their differences, a number of commentators agree in viewing Hume’s defense of induction as based on non-epistemic factors. See, for instance, John Lenz, “Hume’s Defense of Causal Inference,” Hume. Modern Studies in Philosophy, ed. V.C. Chappell (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press: 1968), 169–186; Robert Fogelin, “The Tendency of Hume’s Skepticism,” The Skeptical Tradition, ed. Myles Burnyeat (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1983), 397–412; and David Owen, “Philosophy and the Good Life: Hume’s Defence of Probable Reasoning,” Dialogue, 35 (1996), 485–503.
- 18.
For a good account of Hume’s methodology as a historian, see David Fate Norton, “History and Philosophy in Hume’s Thought,” David Hume: Philosophical Historian, ed. David Fate Norton and Richard H. Popkin (Indianopolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1965), xxxii–l.
- 19.
Hume, David, The History of England, ed. William B. Todd (Liberty Classics, 1983), Vol. I, 4.
- 20.
See Margareth Schabas’s “Hume’s Monetary Thought Experiments,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 39 (2010), 161–169.
- 21.
Green, “How and What We Can Learn from Fiction,” 357.
- 22.
Swirski, Of Literature and Knowledge. Explorations in Narrative Thought Experiments, Evolution and Game Theory (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), 6.
- 23.
John Bender, “Enlightenment Fiction and the Scientific Hypothesis,” Representations 61, Special Issue (Winter 1998), 9.
- 24.
John Bender, “Novel Knowledge. Judgment, Experience, Experiment,” in This is Enlightenment, ed. Clifford Siskin and William Warner (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2010), 300.
- 25.
Prince, “A Preliminary Discourse on Philosophy and Literature,” in The Cambridge History of English Literature, 1660–1780, ed. John Richetti (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 411.
- 26.
Carrie Shanafelt makes this point in her doctoral dissertation “Common Sense: The Rise of Narrative in the Age of Self-Evidence” (CUNY, 2011), 117.
- 27.
Frasca-Spada, “Quixotic Confusions,” 174.
- 28.
Private Papers of James Boswell from Malahide Castle, Mount Vernon, N.Y., W.E. Rudge, 1928–1934, Vol. 1, p. 127. Reproduced in Early Responses to Hume’s Life and Reputation, ed. James Fieser (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 2003), Vol. II, p. 141.
- 29.
Hume’s famous remark about Tristram Shandy has often been read as a form of praise. I argue elsewhere, by looking at the full range of Hume’s statements about Sterne, that Hume was seriously critical of the novel. See my “Hume’s Opinion of Tristram Shandy,” The Shandean, 25 (Winter 2014), 89–98.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2016 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Maioli, R. (2016). David Hume and the Empiricist Challenge. In: Empiricism and the Early Theory of the Novel. Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Cultures of Print. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-39859-4_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-39859-4_2
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-39858-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-39859-4
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)