Scepticism, Sentiment, and Common Sense in Hume

Extract

Norman Kemp Smith began his famous work on Hume by reminding us how difficult Hume is: not difficult to follow paragraph by paragraph, but difficult to interpret as a whole. He then went on to try to remedy this situation by offering an overall interpretation that essentially reversed the dominant reading of Hume as a sceptic, and argued instead that he is a naturalist—a thinker who views our beliefs, as well as our moral commitments, as products of the instinctive and passionate natures with which we are endowed. On this view, the key Humean text is the famous pronouncement that reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions; for it is in his account of the passions that we must find the basis of the natural history of our cognitive and moral commitments. This lends a systematic unity to Hume's thought, by making his epistemology and his ethics offshoots of his psychology of the emotions. It also allows Kemp Smith to emphasize the importance of the influence on Hume of the work of his older contemporary Francis Hutcheson.