This book offers the first comprehensive critical study of David Hume¿s Four Dissertations of 1757, containing the Natural History of Religion, the Dissertation on the Passions, and the two essays Of Tragedy and Of the Standard of Taste. The author defends two important claims. The first is that these four works were not published together merely for convenience, but that they form a tightly integrated set, unified by the subject matter of the passions. The second is that the theory of (...) the passions they jointly present is significantly different¿indeed, significantly improved¿from that of the earlier Treatise. Most strikingly, it is anti-egoist and anti-hedonist about motivation, where the Treatise had espoused a Lockean hedonism and egoism. It is also more cognitivist in its analysis of the passions themselves, and demonstrates a greater awareness of the limits of sympathy and of the varieties of human taste. This book is an important contribution to the scholarly literature on Hume¿s work on the passions, art, and superstitious belief. (shrink)

Hume’s Dissertation on the Passions stands to Book 2 of his Treatise as the first and second Enquiries stand to Books 1 and 3 respectively. However, while the two Enquiries are evidently substantial reworkings of their Treatise ancestors, containing much that is different and new, the Dissertation appears to consist merely of superficially adapted excerpts from Treatise Book 2. I argue that this first impression is mistaken, by showing how Hume’s view of the indirect passions is modified in the later (...) work. In the Treatise, he views them as simple impressions; in the Dissertation, they are complex perceptions, part impression and part idea. I argue, furthermore, that Hume’s account of the origin of the indirect passions only works on this later view, and suggest that this is why he changed his mind. The Dissertation, I conclude, is an improvement on its Treatise forerunner, and not merely a précis of it. (shrink)

The principle with which Hume accounts for the seemingly unaccountable pleasure that we take in tragic drama is placed in its theoretical context, and the various metaphors that Hume uses in describing this principle are examined. These metaphors are then brought to bear on an interpretative controversy concerning the result of Hume's principle for the subordinate passion. It is argued that, while Hume's considered position should have been that this passion is destroyed at the end of the process, it is (...) most likely that Hume did not consider the question very carefully, so as to form a definite answer in his own mind. (shrink)