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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
In "Hume," part of the esteemed English Men of Letters Series, Thomas Henry Huxley offers a nuanced exploration of the life and philosophy of David Hume, a pivotal figure in the Scottish Enlightenment. Huxley employs a richly analytical literary style, blending biographical detail with philosophical discourse, effectively situating Hume's contributions within the broader context of 18th-century thought. He delves into Hume's skepticism, empiricism, and moral philosophy, examining how these ideas not only shaped contemporary philosophy but also presaged future debates in epistemology and ethics. Thomas Henry Huxley, known as "Darwin's Bulldog" for his defense of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, was deeply influenced by the intellectual currents of his time. His extensive background in natural history, biology, and philosophy informed his appreciation of Hume's critical perspective on human understanding and rationality. Driven by a commitment to clarity in scientific and philosophical inquiry, Huxley sought to illuminate the ideas of thinkers who laid the groundwork for modern philosophy. This volume is highly recommended for readers interested in philosophy, history, and literature alike. Huxley's engaging prose and insightful analysis not only make Hume's concepts accessible, but also resonate with contemporary discussions, making it a treasure for both scholars and general readers seeking to understand the foundations of modern thought. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
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Hume (English Men of Letters Series)
Table of Contents
Introduction
In this concise study, a Victorian scientist takes the measure of an Enlightenment skeptic, tracing how a life of inquiry tests the promises of experience, the habits of common sense, and the pretensions of metaphysics, while pressing the enduring question of what, amid the noise of opinion and authority, we can justifiably know.
Thomas Henry Huxley’s Hume is a compact literary biography and critical essay that situates David Hume—philosopher, historian, and essayist—within the currents of eighteenth-century thought. Issued in the late nineteenth century as part of Macmillan’s English Men of Letters series, the volume belongs to a distinguished line of readable studies intended for a broad audience. It bridges eras: the Enlightenment world Hume inhabited and the Victorian moment from which Huxley writes. Readers encounter a landmark figure in British letters through the lens of a scientist-critic who treats philosophical inquiry as a practical matter of method, evidence, and intellectual temper.
The book offers a spoiler-safe path through Hume’s life and major writings, pairing biographical sketches with clear accounts of his central ideas. Huxley explains how the philosopher’s approach to mind, morality, and knowledge grows from an insistence on experience and careful description. He outlines the character of Hume’s philosophical works and indicates the cultural reach of the historical and essayistic writings, all in a voice that is lucid, patient, and quietly insistent. The result is not an exhaustive academic monograph, but an accessible guide that invites readers to test arguments rather than memorize conclusions.
Key themes emerge with steady emphasis: the scope and limits of empiricism, the problem of causation and expectation, the relation between skepticism and common life, and the friction between philosophical inquiry and religious authority. Huxley, attentive to controversy yet wary of dogma, places Hume’s work within broader debates about what counts as knowledge. He shows how arguments travel from metaphysics to morals to politics, and how a style of reasoning can shape public discourse. The focus remains on ideas in motion rather than partisan victory, allowing Hume’s careful procedures to take precedence over any single doctrinal outcome.
Huxley writes with disciplined clarity, compressing difficult questions into crisp, serviceable prose. The tone is measured, occasionally polemical, and anchored in examples that illuminate rather than overwhelm. He aims to make abstract issues intelligible without thinning them into slogans, and he treats historical context as a tool for understanding rather than a parade of dates. By balancing exposition and evaluation, he demonstrates how to read a philosophical classic as a living interlocutor, attentive to language, argument, and implication. The book’s brevity sharpens its focus, sustaining momentum while leaving room for readers to pursue the primary texts.
For contemporary readers, the study’s relevance lies in its model of reasoning under uncertainty. It asks what it means to demand evidence without denying everyday practice, to respect tradition without surrendering inquiry, and to sustain civil disagreement without evasion. In an age concerned with expertise, belief, and public trust, Huxley’s portrait of Hume foregrounds intellectual humility and methodological rigor. It offers not a set of ready-made answers but a disciplined habit of mind applicable to debates about science, ethics, and policy, where claims must be weighed and principles tested against the stubborn particulars of experience.
Approachable yet substantive, Hume serves as an invitation to encounter a foundational voice in modern thought with guidance from a writer who treats philosophy as a living craft. It will reward students of literature, history, and philosophy, as well as general readers seeking a clear path into a demanding subject. Without presuming specialized training, Huxley sketches the terrain and marks the fault lines, helping readers see how arguments connect and why they endure. The book stands as a compact entry point to Hume’s writings and as an example of how serious ideas can be treated with candor, economy, and grace.
Synopsis
Thomas Henry Huxley’s Hume, in the English Men of Letters series, presents a concise account of David Hume’s life and thought while outlining the structure and significance of his principal works. Huxley follows a largely chronological path, beginning with Hume’s formation and proceeding to his philosophical, historical, and political writings. The book emphasizes Hume’s method, his place within eighteenth-century intellectual culture, and the reception of his ideas. Without engaging in extended polemic, Huxley aims to clarify what Hume argued, how he argued it, and why it mattered. The result is a compact guide to Hume’s biography, theories, and influence across philosophy, history, religion, and public affairs.
Huxley opens with Hume’s early years in Scotland, his precocious studies in Edinburgh, and an unsuccessful attempt at a mercantile career. He then recounts Hume’s retreat to France, where quiet conditions favored the composition of A Treatise of Human Nature. The Treatise appeared in 1739–1740 to scant notice, a setback that shaped Hume’s plan to recast and clarify his views. Returning to Britain, Hume pursued literary work, accepted modest posts, and steadily built a reputation. Huxley notes these formative stages to connect the circumstances of Hume’s life with the emergence of his mature voice in essays, enquiries, and later historical writing.
The narrative then turns to the Essays, Moral and Political and the Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, which together present Hume’s central epistemological program in a clearer form than the Treatise. Huxley outlines Hume’s distinction between impressions and ideas, the copy principle, and the separation between relations of ideas and matters of fact. He summarizes Hume’s account of belief as a lively idea formed by custom, and the role of experience in fixing our expectations. By tracing these revisions, Huxley shows how Hume reshaped complex positions for a broader audience, preparing ground for further inquiries into causation, probability, and the limits of speculative reason.
Causation and induction form a major focus. Huxley presents Hume’s claim that necessary connection is not perceived but inferred from constant conjunction and habit. The analysis of cause and effect, together with Hume’s treatment of probability and expectation, frames a naturalistic account of reasoning about the world. Huxley describes the argument’s steps, from repeated experience to customary inference, and its implications for scientific generalization. He also summarizes Hume’s position on liberty and necessity, which reconciles human freedom with causal regularity by clarifying terms and ordinary practice. The presentation keeps to Hume’s formulations and examples, highlighting how these positions shaped subsequent debate about method and evidence.
Huxley proceeds to Hume’s mitigated skepticism, the practical stance that balances doubt with everyday and scientific commitments. He explains Hume’s critique of metaphysical speculation, the limits of reason when severed from experience, and the reliance on natural belief in ordinary life. The discussion includes Hume’s analysis of personal identity as a bundle of perceptions and his cautious remarks on substance and the self. Rather than departing into controversy, Huxley tracks Hume’s steps: the challenge to abstract principles, the appeal to experience and habit, and the recommendation to confine inquiry to what can be observed and compared. This approach situates Hume’s skepticism as disciplined rather than destabilizing.
Religion occupies a central section. Huxley summarizes Hume’s famous essay on miracles, which argues that testimony must be weighed against uniform experience and that reported marvels require exceptional proof. He then outlines The Natural History of Religion, tracing the rise of polytheism and the anthropomorphic tendencies of belief, and the Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, which test arguments about design and divine attributes. Huxley records the reactions these works provoked and their careful, measured tone. The account emphasizes Hume’s method: examine evidence, identify psychological sources of belief, and restrict conclusions to what experience warrants, while acknowledging the historical importance of theological debate in Hume’s century.
Turning to ethics, politics, and economics, Huxley presents Hume’s Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals as an empirical study of virtue grounded in sentiment and utility. He outlines Hume’s treatment of benevolence, justice as an artificial virtue sustained by conventions, and the role of sympathy in moral approval. The Political Discourses are summarized for their analysis of commerce, money, interest, and public credit, emphasizing observation and cautious inference. Huxley also notes Hume’s constitutional reflections, favoring balance and stability over faction. In each domain, the presentation underscores Hume’s consistent method: begin with experience, attend to human nature, and draw moderate conclusions suited to practice.
Huxley then surveys Hume’s career as historian. Appointment to a library furnished materials for The History of England, begun with the seventeenth century and extended backward. Huxley recounts initial outcry, later popularity, and the work’s lasting reputational foundation. He sketches Hume’s service abroad, brief office as under-secretary, and prominence in Parisian circles, along with the public dispute with Rousseau. The narrative closes with Hume’s retirement to Edinburgh and his calm final illness in 1776. Huxley assesses Hume’s literary qualities—clarity, composure, and proportion—as integral to both the philosophical essays and the historical narrative.
In conclusion, Huxley gathers the threads of Hume’s legacy across philosophy, history, and public reasoning. The book’s central message is that Hume systematized an empirical approach to knowledge, grounded expectations about causation and belief, scrutinized religious claims by evidential standards, and applied the same temper to morals, politics, and economics. Huxley’s synopsis stresses continuity between Hume’s method and later scientific and historical practice, while recording the controversies his arguments elicited. The volume ends not with a polemic but with a compact profile: a life of letters organized by a consistent approach to inquiry, and a body of work that remained influential long after his time.
Historical Context
Thomas Henry Huxley’s Hume, issued in the English Men of Letters series (Macmillan, London, 1879, under the editorship of John Morley), is anchored in the milieu of eighteenth-century Britain and France while written from late-Victorian England’s vantage. Its subject, David Hume (1711–1776), moved between Edinburgh, Glasgow, London, Paris, and continental courts during the European Enlightenment. The book treats the intellectual and political landscape of Scotland after the 1707 Act of Union and of Britain’s expanding imperial state, alongside the salons and ministries of ancien-régime France. Huxley’s narrative thus inhabits two times and places: Hume’s Scotland-England-France of 1730–1776, and the secularizing, science-forward Britain of the 1870s that reassessed Hume’s legacy.
The Scottish Enlightenment (c. 1740–1770), centered in Edinburgh and Glasgow, forms the principal backdrop. Institutions such as the University of Glasgow (with Francis Hutcheson’s moral philosophy, d. 1746) and the University of Edinburgh, together with clubs like the Select Society (founded 1754), fostered public debate. Figures including Adam Smith (1723–1790), Adam Ferguson (1723–1816), William Robertson (1721–1793), and Lord Kames (Henry Home, 1696–1782) articulated a science of man, political economy, and historical sociology. Hume’s Essays (1741–1742), Enquiries (1748, 1751), and later History of England fit this civic-intellectual program. Huxley presents Hume as the movement’s most rigorous empiricist, aligning him with Victorian scientific method and disciplined skepticism.
Britain’s seventeenth-century constitutional crises—the Civil Wars (1642–1651), the regicide of Charles I (1649), the Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell (1653–1658), the Restoration (1660), and the Glorious Revolution (1688–1689) with the 1689 Bill of Rights—dominate Hume’s History of England (published in parts, 1754–1762). Hume challenged Whig triumphalism, criticized religious enthusiasm, and reassessed the Stuarts’ policies, provoking intense controversy in London and Edinburgh. Huxley analyzes these episodes to illustrate Hume’s method: a secular account of causation in politics, wary of ideology. By situating Hume’s interpretations against the documentary record and partisan responses, the book mirrors Britain’s long struggle to balance authority, liberty, and confessional pluralism.
Religious politics in Scotland and England provided continual pressure on heterodox thinkers. After the blasphemy execution of Thomas Aikenhead in Edinburgh (1697) set a grim precedent, the Church of Scotland’s zeal persisted into Hume’s lifetime. Hume’s candidacy for the Edinburgh chair of moral philosophy (1744–1745) collapsed under clerical opposition; he instead became Keeper of the Advocates’ Library (1752). The General Assembly’s 1755–1756 attempt to censure Hume and Lord Kames for impiety failed, yet signaled the risks faced by skeptics. Posthumous publication of Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779) underscores ongoing constraints. Huxley uses these episodes to demonstrate how ecclesiastical power shaped intellectual careers and the circulation of ideas.
Dynastic conflict and great-power war intersected with Hume’s service. The Jacobite Rising of 1745, culminating in the Battle of Culloden (16 April 1746), occurred as Hume served as secretary to General James St. Clair. He joined the British expedition against the French port of Lorient (1746) during the War of the Austrian Succession (1740–1748), and later accompanied St. Clair on embassies to Vienna and Turin (1748–1749) as the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle took effect. These experiences informed Hume’s cool view of military and diplomatic affairs. Huxley treats them as empirical case studies through which Hume observed the machinery of state, the contingency of strategy, and the limits of patriotic myth.
The Franco-British realignments after the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763) frame Hume’s famed Parisian interlude. Following the Treaty of Paris (10 February 1763), Hume served as Secretary to the British Embassy in Paris (1763–1765), then as Chargé d’Affaires (1765), engaging with salons of Mme Geoffrin and philosophes such as d’Alembert and d’Holbach. The Jesuit suppression in France (1764) and debates over toleration and authority formed the backdrop to his celebrity. The Hume–Rousseau quarrel (1766), erupting after Hume brought Rousseau to Britain, exposed the politics of sensibility and reputation. Huxley reads these episodes as evidence of a trans-Channel Enlightenment and as tests of Hume’s measured skepticism amid volatile public opinion.
Huxley writes from the Victorian crisis of faith and the rise of professional science. After Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) and the Oxford debate (1860), Huxley championed secular education, co-founded the X Club (1864), and popularized “agnostic” as a stance on ultimate questions (term publicized in 1869). John Morley, the series editor, a Radical liberal, aimed to recast national culture through biography. By 1879, state schooling (Elementary Education Act, 1870) and widening public debate made Hume newly pertinent. Huxley’s book connects these nineteenth-century reforms to Hume’s eighteenth-century empiricism, presenting him as a progenitor of evidence-based inquiry against metaphysical systems and confessional dominance.
As social and political critique, the book exposes how clerical authority, party mythologies, and inherited hierarchies distort judgment. Huxley highlights Hume’s analyses—of superstition in The Natural History of Religion (1757), of faction in the History, and of commerce, money, and liberty in the Essays (1741–1752)—to challenge coercive confessionalism, selective constitutional memory, and mercantilist thinking. By underscoring Hume’s failed professorship amid ecclesiastical pressure and his measured reassessment of the Civil War and 1688, Huxley indicts intolerance and partisan historiography. The portrayal of Hume’s cross-class, transnational networks further critiques closed elites, suggesting a public sphere grounded in open inquiry, civic moderation, and secular governance.
