Hume Studies

Hume Studies Volume 33, Number 2, November 2007, pp. 289-296 On the 2007 Clarendon Critical Edition of David Hume's A Treatise of Human Nature PETER S. FOSL I. Situating the Clarendon Critical Edition The Clarendon Edition of the Works of David Hume1 (hereafter the Clarendon Hume) was conceived thirty-four years ago in 1975, the year preceding the bicentennial of Hume's death. General editors of the Clarendon Hume are Tom L. Beauchamp, David Fate Norton, and M. A. Stewart. In Beauchamp's words, "Hume scholars had increasingly begun to appreciate that available editions of Hume's work were often textually and historically inaccurate, biased in favor of certain textual interpretations , and lacking in basic information essential for scholarly work on the text."2 The project of producing improved editions has since been realized by Stewart, Beauchamp, and the Nortons in the following manner. Beauchamp published in 1998 an Oxford Philosophical Text (hereafter "OPT") edition of Hume's second Enquiry—the Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals (originally 1751)—together with Volume 4 of the Clarendon Hume, Beauchamp's Clarendon edition of that work. This new Clarendon EPM, of course, succeeds Selby-Bigge and Nidditch's 1975 Clarendon edition. Beauchamp's two editions of the EPM, like the two series of which they are a part, differ principally with regard to audience. The OPT editions—in their introductions, their annotations, and so on—are designed primarily to serve students, while the Clarendon editions Peter S. Fosl is Professor of Philosophy, Department of Philosophy, Transylvania University, 300 North Broadway, Lexington, KY 40508, USA. Website: www.peterfosl.us. E-mail: pfosl@ transy.edu. 290 PeterS.Fosl aim primarily to serve more advanced scholars. So, the Clarendon edition of the EPM, like Clarendon's other critical editions, includes elements proper to critical, but not to student editions. In addition to the critical texts themselves, then, the Clarendon critical editions include histories of each text, complete records of the emendations made by the editors, and accounts of variant readings, as well as a selection of copy texts used in the production of the new editions.3 In 1999, the year following the appearance of Beauchamp's editions of the EPM, his OPT edition of the Enquiry concerning Human Understanding (originally 1748), Hume's first Enquiry, was published. A short while later, in 2000, Clarendon released Beauchamp's critical edition of the EHU (which is numbered Volume 3 of the Clarendon Hume), offering a replacement for Clarendon's 1975 Selby-Bigge/ Nidditch edition. Beauchamp's Clarendon edition oÃ- A Dissertation on the Passions and The Natural History of Religion (originally 1757), Volume 5 in the new edition, was released with a 2007 copyright. Volumes 6 and 7 will comprise Hume's Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary, replacing in all likelihood Eugene Miller's Liberty Classics 1985 edition as the standard. Volume 8, when it appears, is to contain the Dialogues concerning Natural Religion (1779) together with other posthumous materials; it will almost certainly supplant as the scholarly benchmark Norman Kemp Smith's 1935 Clarendon publication. The year 2000 also saw the release of David and Mary Norton's OPT edition of A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-1740), four years after their David Hume Library.4 Like Beauchamp's OPT editions, the Nortons' 744-page volume begins with introductory material comprising 93 pages aimed at a target audience of students, with 179 pages of annotations following along similar lines. The Nortons ' OPT Treatise includes the Abstract of a Book lately Published, which Hume issued in 1740 as a pamphlet to promote his Treatise, as well as the "Appendix" Hume attached to the third Book of the Treatise. In 2007 the Nortons published what is the subject of this essay—the Clarendon critical edition of A Treatise of Human Nature, an edition that will supplant Selby-Bigge/Nidditch's 1978 Clarendon edition. What then characterizes this new edition of the Treatise, and what distinguishes it? II. The Contents of the Volumes The Clarendon edition of the Treatise is divided into two volumes. Volume 1 (447 pages) contains the critical text of the Treatise itself, as well as of the 1740 Abstract. The Clarendon edition...