Journal of the History of Philosophy

BOOK REVIEWS 131 what premiss? One common answer, the principle of the uniformity of nature, Hume will not allow because we could know this principle to be true only by means of an argument from experience. Appeal to this principle would beg the question. Expanding Hume's discussion, Flew observes that in any case, supposing it were established, the principle of uniformity is not strong enough to help since what is really required is the stronger principle: "For all values of X the class of all known X's always constitutes a representative sample of the class of all X's" (p. 74). And this principle is clearly false. Nor will it help to consider the conclusion , All X's are r as merely probable. For, in words Flew quotes from Hume, "all probable arguments are built on the supposition that there is... [a] conformity betwixt the future and the past, and therefore can never prove it" (p. 75). Confronted by these difficulties, Hume decides that experiential reasons are not really reasons. And the ground for this decision, as Flew shrewdly explains, is the adoption of a deductive standard of rationality, or of reasons. (Actually this is not quite accurate. Concentrating on the Inquiry, Flew fails to notice that Hume employs more than one standard of rationality. This is most clearly evident in the Treatise, Book I, Part IV, Section I, where the scepticism extends to all arguments, both those from experience and those demonstrative. Hume's standard of rationality is Cartesian, since the demand is for the certainty--as Hume saw it--of a present datum of awareness.) Thus, in effect what Hums does is to represent arguments from experience as "failed deductions" (p. 80), for the missing premiss justifying inductive generalization can never be confirmed. Flew's answer to Hums is to propose a different standard of rationality, a rule, to be called the principle of induction, which shall be: "Where and so long as all known X's are r to presume that all X's are r until and unless some positive reason is found to revise this . . . presumption" (p. 81). Since this principle is a rule, a convention, there can be no question of its truth or falsity; hence the objections made against such principles as that of uniformity do not apply to this rule. Either as a study for those well-acquainted with Hume or as a guide for beginners, Hume's Philosophy of Belief will be useful reading. Some inaccuracies, however, will misinform the latter. It is not the case that there is any species of logical empiricism that can be described as "the doctrine that the meaning of any word or symbol which we can understand must be explicable in terms of our experience" (p. 29). Unless "experience" includes the whole of our conscious life, many words, such as particles, do not come within this program of explication (or better, program of clarification). And then there are some dubious, though certainly orthodox, simplifications of Hume's relation to Locke. Flew declares that Locke, like Hume, was committed to denying "the objective reality of secondary qualities" (p. 254) (whereas actually Locke defines "quality" as "power," so that for Locke any quality, primary, secondary , or tertiary, must be objective); that Locke, like Hume, tended to construe "ideas" as "members of an introspectively elusive species of mental picture" (p. 259); and that "Humean impressions and ideas are but the twin species of the genus Lockean idea" (p. 47). These textbook simplifications may not be without some truth, but they come so short of adequately representing the richness of Locke's relevant views and consequently of Hume's relation to this predecessor as to constitute misinformation. But much about the British philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries remains to be understood, and we should be grateful for Flew's contribution toward this understanding. DOUGLASGREENLEE University of Colorado Rousseaus Freiheitslehrs. By Otto Vossler. (GSttingen: Vanderhoeck und Ruprecht [1963]. Pages 39411]. DM 18.) Professor Vossler, whose field is modern history, sees in Rousseau the most revolutionary political thinker since the Christianization of Europe, a "heretic of reason" who broke the deadlock of political theory in his time...