Journal of the History of Philosophy

BOOK REVIEWS 231 Jonathan Harrison. Hume's Moral Epistemology. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976. Pp. xi + 131. $9.75. Harrison attempts to analyze and criticize the text of Book 3, Part 1 of the Treatise, which ends with the "'is-ought paragraph," together with the "relevant" sections of An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals. The analysis is designed to treat Hume as a protagonist in the contemporary moral debate. The author engages in this task because he believes that "there is no accurate and detailed treatment of Hume's views on moral epistemology in the English language" (p. vi). Although he admits Hume to be the greatest of British philosophers (p. 125), Harrison finds that Hume is repeatedly inconsistent (pp. 25, 62, 85, 88-89, 103, etc., etc.). As a result, it is impossible to decide which of five theories Hume actually held: moral judgments are either (a) about the judger's feelings, or (b) about the feelings of mankind, or (c) a moral sense, or (d) a nonpropositional theory, or (e) judgments are a species of feeling. This is an embarrassingly bad book. First, the author is apparently totally unfamiliar with the great body of literature on Hume's moral epistemology produced in North America. Second, his analysis is vitiated by the failure to distinguish between when Hume is talking about moral judgment and when Hume is talking about moral sentiment (as has been made clear by Capaldi, Glossop, Hearn, King, and so on). This is the result of not understanding the historical context of Hume's writings, and this by the author's own admission is a consequence of being "more interested in the validity of Hume's arguments than in their historical setting" (back cover). It should go without saying that one must first identify the argument before one can assess it. Among the faux pas I note: Harrison claims that Hume asserted "that reason ought to be the slave of the passions" (p. 5)---thereby perpetuating the error of failing to quote the qualifying "only" (Glathe made this point about thirty years ago); Harrison subscribes to the now thoroughly discredited ritual of saying that Hume asserts that we cannot deduce an ought from an is; Harrison asserts that for Hume morality "consists not in any matter of fact..." (p. 61)---the glaring ellipsis baring the incomplete quote on which another myth about Hume founders. Finally, that Harrison completely fails to grasp what Hume is about is revealed in his stating that Hume's treatment of sympathy is "peripheral to an understanding of Hume's moral epistemology" (p. 105) while admitting that he finds Hume's theory of sympathy "'virtually incomprehensible" (p. 107). In this statement, Harrison has said it all. NICHOLASCAPALDI Queens College, CUNY Vernard Foley. The Social Physics of Adam Smith. West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 1976, Pp. xvii + 265. $12.00. This volume is an exposition of a "social physics" derived from the Greek philosophers by Adam Smith during his years at Oxford, where he was intent on learning to speak and write as an English man of letters. It suggests that these products of historical inquiry into "The Principles which lead and direct Philosophical Enquiries, Illustrated by the History of Astronomy," terminated in an enthusiastic devotion to Descartes's theory of the cosmic vortex. This seemed to Adam Smith to be the climax of centuries of efforts by the philosophical imagination "'to connect together the otherwise dissociated and discordant in nature" (p. 34). For reasons the author attempts to explain, Adam Smith tried to conceal this speculative system of "social physics" though it haunted him all his life. The fragments of the system crop out here and there in his economic science. Apparently Adam Smith intended to terminate his first essay (on the history of astronomy) with 232 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY a glowing appreciation of the completeness and imaginative beauty of Descartes's account of the Vortex, and he laid the text aside. But something happened in 1758 which forced him to change his mind. The return of Halley's comet in that year, as Sir Isaac Newton had predicted, forced him to add the following words to his essay: Even we...