Hypatia

Marina Frasca-Spada makes the following observation about relations among philosophy, its history, and its readers in her review of The Dictionary of Eighteenth-Century British Philosophers,¹ setting a bar of sorts for rereading canonical figures:

[The] Dictionary is an attempt at increasing our historical sensitivity to past questions and past significances. It does so . . . by offering us a wealth of the resources needed for a detailed reconstruction of the ambiences in which philosophical investigations were once pursued; and hence, crucially, by enabling us to get behind our disciplinary categories and our canonical figures in these categories. In this sense it is aimed at intellectual historians, historians of the sciences and of medicine, and all scholars interested in eighteenth-century matters, as well as at historians of philosophy. It does also address today's philosophers, but only in so far as they are prepared to face up to a view in which the relation between philosophy and its history may turn out to be reversed: perhaps they are one and the same thing not because philosophical questions are eternal, but rather because philosophical questions do not even begin to make sense outside their settings and apart from their genealogies.²

Perhaps one of the most compelling virtues of this collection of essays on David Hume, edited by Anne Jacobson for the Re-Reading the Canon series, is the confidence of its undertaking: rereading Hume is both philosophically charged and challenging especially for his feminist rereaders. First, Anglo-American scholars, traditional keepers of the Hume of the canon, are debating revisions to the official interpretation of his work.³ New entries to the arena of Hume scholarship compete with the importance this debate has taken on for Hume scholars. As Anne Jacobson makes clear in her Introduction and also in her own essay, treating Hume as a canonical figure is a funny business from the start, primarily because, as she says, "it looks very much as though Hume [h]as been [End Page 206] badly misread for more than two centuries" (5). Any rereading pursued out from under the umbrella of traditional, largely analytic, understandings of Hume is going to present a Hume almost unrecognizable to casual or traditional readers of his work. The Hume of this collection, greatly to its credit, is unlike both the so-called New Hume⁴ and, by implication, the "old" Hume. Hume of the philosophical⁵ canon in any time is a narrow, unsympathetic, ahistorical figure; opened up by efforts at rereading, including feminist rereadings, a completely different figure appears.

Second, the assurance with which the editors and contributors position their readings of Hume is extraordinary because, as his intimate readers know and the essays all reveal, Hume is a very attractive figure.⁶ The urge to excuse and so to salvage him for the cause of feminism, and in turn to contort and compromise the very concerns motivating the collection, would be very powerful in less dexterous hands. These essays declare that Hume's work is unusually rich and promising in general as well as for "reflective women epistemologists"⁷ , for feminist readers, and for many others. They are also quite explicit about the fact that there are many aspects of Hume's work that are obnoxious to the concerns of feminism. This does not render ineligible for consideration those other strands and objects which are sympathetic and useful to the preoccupations of feminists. Hume doesn't get away with the problematic claims, observations, remarks, or ideological implications of his work, but neither do his feminist readers deny themselves the utility or pleasure of exploring and mining his work for valuable material.

Part of the foundation for the poise of the project lies in its explicit reliance on the work of Annette Baier,⁸ whose essay begins the collection. As a model for rereadings of Hume (or any other canonical figure) Baier's work is excellent: she does not confine her sources to any one philosophical tradition or period and she is unusually nonideological in her treatment of...