Hume Studies

Waldman Review of O'Brien

Elizabeth Radcliffe — 2025-08-05

None

Mills review of MA Stewart collection

Dan Jayes O'Brien — 2025-08-05

Zubia review of Stuart-Buttle

Dan Jayes O'Brien — 2025-08-05

Painted Red: the Soviet Interpretations of Hume’s Epistemology

Viacheslav Zahorodniuk — 2025-08-05

In this article, I discuss the ambiguous nature of the Soviet approach to the history of philosophy through the example of the leading Soviet researcher, Igor Narskyi, and his book The Philosophy of David Hume. On the one hand, his approach conforms to some stereotypes about the Soviet history of philosophy. During his analysis of such basic Hume’s topics as perception and reflection, he accuses Hume of terminological ambiguity and suggests Marx’s notion of “disposition” as the one to describe human perception in the best way. On the other hand, some Narskyi’s ideas are interesting and even ahead of his time. He claims that Hume does not distinguish between ideas and notions in his “representationalist” theory of abstraction and concludes that Hume neglected the role of language and social ties in the formation of general ideas. It is sound with modern tendencies in Hume studies - I will show how researchers such as Karl Schafer, Johnathan Cottrell and Donald Ainslie are answering those accusations by implementing the linguistic reading of Hume.

Christianity in Crisis

Paul Wood — 2025-08-05

The meaning and aetiology of 'atheism' in eighteenth-century Scotland has attracted little scholarly attention. This article investigates what the term 'atheist' and its cognates meant to Scottish clergymen and religious apologists in the period in order to shed light on reactions to Hume's writings in Scotland in the 1750s and 1760s. In particular, the article focuses on the response of Thomas Reid and his circle of moderate clergymen to Hume's critique of religion, and locates the origins of Reid's Inquiry in the debates over Hume's atheism which took place in Scotland during the middle decades of the eighteenth century.

Voltaire’ s Review of Hume’s History of England

Marc Hanvelt — 2025-08-05

An original English language translation of Voltaire’s review of David Hume’s History of England. The original French text of the review, which appeared in the 2 May 1764 supplement to La Gazette Littéraire de l’Europe, is also transcribed in full. Close reading of the review points out valuable avenues of study into eighteenth-century historiographical debates that involve two of the century’s leading European historians.

A Quantitative and Comparative Approach to Royalist and Whig Sources in Hume’s History of England

Ville Vaara — 2025-08-05

This paper quantifies sources used by David Hume in his History of England. We have used computational methods to detect 347,323 instances of reuse of different published texts in Hume’s History of England. We have then qualified, clustered and compared them. The motivation is to test previous claims about Hume’s Tory and Royalist bias against extensive evidence about Hume’s use of historical sources. We focus particularly on the use of Royalist texts in the description of Charles I and his time. By comparing Hume’s use of previously published historical texts to Rapin’s, Carte’s and Guthrie’s Histories, we conclude that claims made by near contemporaries about Hume’s extensive use of Royalist sources are largely overstated. In addition, Okie’s and MacGillivray’s later influential arguments about Hume’s Tory bias based on his use of sources are not justified. There are, therefore, good reasons to take Hume’s own claims about his attempt to be impartial seriously, but the situation therein appears altogether more complicated. In the end, we will show how this endeavour, which initially aimed to assess the accuracy of claims regarding Hume’s political bias, has illuminated deeper insights into the methodologies of source utilisation and intertextuality within eighteenth-century historiography.

Humean Loyalty

Avital Hazony Levi — 2025-08-05

In this paper I offer a novel theory of loyalty based in Hume’s psychology, and I argue that loyalty is a virtue on Hume’s account of the virtues. First, I argue that Hume’s account of pride discloses a view of the self that extends to include other individuals and groups. Second, I offer an account of loyalty as acting on the motive to take up the interests of those who are part of one’s extended self, and distinguish loyalty from Humean sympathy. Third, I contend that Humean loyalty explains the virtue of loyalty: loyalty is useful and agreeable to others because it offers a dependable motive to act on their behalf, and it is useful and agreeable to the self because it motivates the individual to allocate time and resources to act on behalf of those whose success also strengthens the individual.