Hume's Enlightenment Tract : The Unity and Purpose of An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding

Hume's Enlightenment Tract is the first full study for forty years of David Hume's Enquiry concerning Human Understanding. The Enquiry has, contrary to its author's expressed wishes, long lived in the shadow of its predecessor, A Treatise of Human Nature. Stephen Buckle presents the Enquiry in a fresh light, and aims to raise it to its rightful position in Hume's work and in the history of philosophy. - ;Hume's Enlightenment Tract is the first full study for forty years of David Hume's Enquiry concerning Human Understanding. The Enquiry has, contrary to its author's expressed wishes, long lived in the shadow of its predecessor, A Treatise of Human Nature. Stephen Buckle presents the Enquiry in a fresh light, and aims to raise it to its rightful position in Hume's work and in the history of philosophy. He argues that the Enquiry is not, as so often assumed, a mere collection of watered-down extracts from the earlier work. It is, rather, a coherent work with a unified argument; and, when this argument is grasped as a whole, the Enquiry shows itself to be the best introduction to the lineaments of its author's general philosophy. Buckle offers a careful guide through the argument and structure of the work. He shows how the central sections of the Enquiry offer a critique of the dogmatic empiricisms of the ancient world (Stoicism, Epicureanism, and Aristotelianism), and set in place an alternative conception of human powers based on the sceptical principles of habit and probability. These principles are then put to work, to rule out philosophy's metaphysical ambitions and their consequences: religious systems and their attendant conception of human beings as semi-divine rational animals. Hume's scepticism, experimentalism, and naturalism are thus shown to be different aspects of the one unified philosophy - a sceptical version of the Enlightenment vision. - ;... a pleasure to read. Buckle's commentary on the Enquiry is compelling, and the manner in which he situates the Enquiry in its historical and intellectual context is likewise engaging. This book clearly presents the roles of philosophical thought in the various phenomena constituting the Englightenment, and so will be of value to scholars and students of Hume, and will be of special value to people who are teaching the Enquiry for the first time and desire to understand how it all "hangs together". - Eighteenth-Century Thought;Buckle's work represents a stimulating and timely addition to the new scholarship on the first Enquriry ... He succeeds in the important task of establishing the Enquiry as an independently significant philosophical work, central to the interpretation of Hume's thinking as a whole, and his book should help ensure that the work remains at the forefront of a new critical thinking about Hume's epistemology. - Journal of Scottish Philosophy;Stephen Buckle's new work represents the first full study of the first Enquiry by a single author since Anthony Flew's Hume's Philosophy of Belief appeared more than 40 years ago ... Buckle's work is undoubtedly an important addition to the recent growth in scholarly writing on the Enquiry ... the only single-author work to offer both a critical overview of the Enquiry, a systematic general interpretation, and a section-by-section commentary on its contents. - Journal of Scottish Philosophy;Buckle makes out a fascinating and extremely scholarly case for concluding that Hume's first Enquiry was indeed originally intended to show how Hume's ideas were all related to and provided support for those of what came to be called the Enlightenment ... this is one of those books a copy of which ought to be held in the Philosophy section of every university library. - British Journal for the History of Philosophy;Stephen Buckle's new study of the first Enquiry and its relation to Book I of the Treatise will be welcomed as a potentially important addition to the Hume literature ... genuine food for thought. - Mind;This astonishingly learned and wonderfully stimulating study ... Buckle's great achievement is to present the Enquiry as a unified and constructive work, a current (rather than a counter-current) in the stream of the Enlightenment. His book is full of insight ... and its clear, measured and stately prose makes it accessible even to readers encountering Hume for the first time ... We are lucky to have a splendid new book that sheds so much light on [Hume]. - Kenneth P. Winkler, Times Literary Supplement