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An Enquiry Concerning the Passions: a Critical Study of Hume's Four

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An Enquiry Concerning the Passions: a Critical Study of Hume's Four An Enquiry Concerning the Passions: A critical study of Hume's Four Dissertations Amyas John Henry Merivale Submitted in accordance with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Leeds School of Philosophy, Religion, and the History of Science June 2014 i The candidate confirms that the work submitted is his own and that appropriate credit has been given where reference has been made to the work of others. This copy has been supplied on the understanding that it is copyright material and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowl- edgement. c University of Leeds and Amyas Merivale ii Acknowledgements I am enormously indebted to Helen Steward, my principal supervisor at Leeds, for her tireless attention to the detail of this work and the correction of countless errors along the way. Without her advice and support, moreover, the beast would have been considerably harder to tame, if it had not run away from me altogether. Immeasurable thanks are due to Peter Millican, my long-standing mentor and supervisor at a distance. We agree with each other to such an extent that I now find it difficult to recall where his ideas end and mine begin; both in the planning and the execution of this thesis he has been a generous and invaluable collaborator. I am grateful also to Matthew Kieran, my secondary supervisor at Leeds, for his assistance with the later chapters on aesthetics. In addition, various of the ideas herein have benefited greatly from discussions with James Arnold, Filippo Contesi, and Samuel Rickless. Finally, to Esther: for making this period such a happy one, and for her curiosity, patience, and support. iii Abstract Hume's first work, A Treatise of Human Nature, has traditionally received the lion's share of scholarly attention, at the expense of his later and more polished texts. The tide has started to shift in recent years, with the result that Hume's two Enquiries|his mature investigations of the understanding and morals|are now recognised as important works in their own right (though most commentators still continue to prefer the Treatise). With regard to Hume's work on the passions, however, Book 2 of the Treatise still commands all of the attention. In this thesis, I defend two important claims. The first is that Hume has a mature philosophy of emotion, significantly different|indeed, significantly im- proved|from that of the Treatise. Most strikingly, it is anti-egoist and anti- hedonist about motivation, where the Treatise had espoused a Lockean hedonism and egoism. In parts it is also more cognitivist, and although Hume remains as opposed to moral rationalism as he ever was, his arguments in support of this opposition are very different. The second claim is that Hume's mature philosophy of emotion is to be found, not in the Dissertation on the Passions, but rather in the full set of Four Dissertations in which this work first appeared, including also the Natural History of Religion, Of Tragedy, and Of the Standard of Taste. The passions, I argue, form the unifying theme of this collection, which is in effect Hume's Enquiry concerning the Passions. I maintain that they are profitably studied together on this understanding, and my thesis is offered as the first such study. v Conventions References to Hume's texts throughout use the following abbreviations, followed by Book, part, section, and paragraph numbers (as appropriate): T A Treatise of Human Nature L A Letter from a Gentleman to his Friend in Edinburgh E An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding M An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals D Dialogues concerning Natural Religion N The Natural History of Religion P A Dissertation on the Passions Tr Of Tragedy ST Of the Standard of Taste Other essays are abbreviated in a similar fashion, but only after they have been introduced by name, so that it will be obvious which essay is being cited. Page numbers are to the editions that most Hume scholars would now expect (Selby- Bigge's editions of the Treatise and Enquiries, Miller's edition of the Essays); full references are in the bibliography of primary sources at the end. The quo- tations themselves are taken from the editions, prepared by Peter Millican and me, available at http://www.davidhume.org/. I adopt the same referencing and abbreviation conventions as are used on that site. vii Quotations and references from other primary sources are from the editions listed in the bibliography. The page numbers are from modern editions, wherever these were easily available, but I cite these works using the original publication year, since I consider it desirable to be able to see at a glance when the thing in question was first said. The works often went through several editions in their authors' lifetimes, receiving additions and revisions in the process. My rule is to use the date of the earliest edition in which the quoted passage appeared. This has the effect that the same work is sometimes referred to with a different year. Butler's Sermons, for example, are typically referred to as \Butler (1726)"; but when I am quoting from Butler's preface, which was first added in the second edition, I use \Butler (1729)". A glance at the bibliography of primary sources will quickly reveal that these refer to different editions of the same text. viii Contents Introduction1 0.1 An enquiry concerning the passions.................1 0.2 Four/three/five/four dissertations..................3 0.3 Editing the Treatise ..........................6 0.4 Epicureans, Stoics, Platonists, ..................... 10 0.5 ... and Sceptics............................ 13 I The Butler Moment 19 1 Some Late Philosophers in England 21 1.1 Hutcheson against Clarke....................... 21 1.2 Hutcheson against Hobbes and Mandeville............. 23 1.3 Butler against Hobbes and Clarke.................. 26 1.4 Shaftesbury against Hobbes and Locke............... 30 1.5 Egoists, Sentimentalists, Rationalists................ 35 2 Motivation 39 2.1 The Butler paragraph......................... 39 2.2 Hedonism in the Treatise ....................... 42 2.3 The dignity of human nature..................... 45 2.4 The two Enquiries .......................... 47 2.5 Desire in the Dissertation on the Passions ............. 51 ix 3 Hume's Classification of the Passions 55 3.1 Impressions and sentiments..................... 55 3.2 Three more distinctions....................... 58 3.3 The Butler paragraph (again).................... 61 3.4 Calm and violent........................... 65 3.5 Some peculiar feelings........................ 69 4 Association, Comparison, Sympathy 73 4.1 The double relation theory...................... 74 4.2 Comparison.............................. 77 4.3 Sympathy............................... 79 4.4 More applications of sympathy.................... 83 4.5 The indirect passions......................... 88 5 Original Instincts 93 5.1 Object-directed desires and original instincts............ 93 5.2 Later traces of sympathy and comparison.............. 97 5.3 Ambition, vanity, and parental love................. 100 5.4 Sympathy and benevolence...................... 105 5.5 Sympathy and the rules of art.................... 108 6 The Development of Hume's Thought 113 6.1 Anti-egoism in the Treatise ...................... 113 6.2 Egoism, careless egoism, and anti-egoism.............. 117 6.3 Butler, not Hutcheson........................ 120 6.4 Going back to the source....................... 124 6.5 Why so much resistance?....................... 129 II The Third Enquiry 133 7 Superstition and the Passions 135 7.1 Reasons and causes.......................... 136 x 7.2 Superstition and true religion.................... 139 7.3 Hope and fear............................. 144 7.4 The origin of polytheism and monotheism............. 147 7.5 The miraculous and the momentous................. 149 8 Some Comparisons 153 8.1 Hobbes on the origin of religious belief............... 153 8.2 Comparisons between monotheism and polytheism......... 155 8.3 The bull-rush argument....................... 158 8.4 Hume's agnosticism and Hume's atheism.............. 160 8.5 The three Enquiries ......................... 163 9 The Intentionality of the Passions 167 9.1 Cognition and the passions...................... 167 9.2 The representative quality argument................ 171 9.3 Simple and complex.......................... 176 9.4 The double-relation passions..................... 178 9.5 The double relation theory (again)................. 183 10 Reason and Passion 189 10.1 Malebranche against the passions.................. 190 10.2 Clarke against the passions...................... 194 10.3 Hutcheson against the rationalists.................. 197 10.4 Hume against the rationalists.................... 202 10.5 The representative quality argument (again)............ 206 11 The Chemistry of the Passions 211 11.1 Two overlapping theories....................... 211 11.2 Du Bos................................. 214 11.3 Fontenelle............................... 217 11.4 Hume's change of mind........................ 219 11.5 Hume's later account......................... 222 xi xii 12 The Conversion Principle 227 12.1 Swallowing up: passions or emotions?................ 228 12.2 Movements in the spirits....................... 231 12.3 Conversion............................... 233 12.4 Before and after............................ 236 12.5 A subtler interpretation....................... 240 13 Passion and Value 245 13.1 The sceptical principle........................ 245 13.2
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