Abstract

It is a challenge to write a book on a topic that has received extensive treatment in philosophical discourse—especially when said treatment has been varied in purpose, angle, and aim. Hume’s work on the relationship between passion and action is one such topic. Scholarship on this theme has ranged from historically situated interpretive work, to theoretical work that assumes a Kantian foil, to the robust discourse of contemporary Humean views. In her book, Hume, Passion, and Action, Elizabeth Radcliffe has taken on the complex task of writing on motivation in Hume with many of these perspectives in her sights, and it has resulted in a book...