Amy Schmitter

Hume dubbed his _Treatise_ account of the passions “new and extraordinary” — an assessment echoed by many contemporary scholars, who find his analysis of the social operation of the emotions particularly innovative. But Hume's explanation of how passions and sentiments are transferred, shared, reflected, and reverberate among persons through the mechanisms of sympathy, has several important precursors, including both Shaftesbury and Hutcheson. Even more strikingly, Malebranche describes mechanisms for the communication of passions remarkably similar to Hume's “sympathy” and “comparison”. Many of the roles that Hume assigns our socially generated and transmitted passions in generating social cohesion and shared standards of rationality may also be anticipated by Hobbes (and Spinoza). What remains most distinctive of Hume's account is his view that both social cohesion and epistemic authority can be founded on, and forwarded by, a genuine division of affective labor.

Thomas Hobbes claims that the sovereign of a commonwealth provides a “common measure,” determining what counts as right reason for its subjects. As a form of public reason, this is often taken to be a purely political notion. I maintain that Hobbes holds that the public reason of the sovereign also provides a number of epistemic benefits both to the commonwealth and to individuals. Some are a matter of providing conditions that allow for the social growth of knowledge (particularly what Hobbes calls “science”). But I argue that by considering the mechanics of processes of reckoning, we can see that the public reason of the sovereign serves important epistemic functions in the practical reason even of private individuals.

Although taxonomy is often a dull and dusty business, it thrived among seventeenth-century writers on the passions. Most authors followed earlier taxonomies found in Aristotle, the Stoics and Aquinas. But a few adventurous souls such as Descartes and Hobbes produced genuinely innovative enumerations, which differed from what had gone before by identifying different lists and numbers of passions, positing novel principles of divisions, and redrawing ‘family’ groupings. A particularly telling innovation is their identification of distinctive focal passions: wonder for Descartes, and glory for Hobbes. This chapter analyses a few features of these novel enumerations in order to show the important role the leading passions played in developing both their accounts of mind and their distinctive approaches to philosophical explanation as a whole. It also indulges in some meta-historical speculations about the possibility and significance of finding truly divergent conceptions of human affective states in our history.

This volume of Hume Studies is a special double-issue devoted to discussions of four recent books on Hume: Hume: an Intellectual Biography, by James Harris; Imagined Causes: Hume's Conception of Objects, by Stefanie Rocknak; Hume's True Scepticism, by Donald Ainslie; and Reflecting Subjects: Passion, Sympathy, and Society in Hume's Philosophy, by Jacqueline Taylor. The latter three discussions began as Author-Meets-Critics sessions at the 43rd International Hume Conference in Sydney, Australia, and the present volume keeps the AMC format: each discussion starts with a short précis of the book from the author, followed by comments from three respondents, and concludes with the author's reply. The selection of books...

The new editorial team, Ann Levey, Karl Schafer and Amy Schmitter, are very pleased to present this special double-issue of Hume Studies. It contains a wide variety of articles on subjects old and new, as well as an assortment of book reviews, commissioned by the new book review editor, David Landy of San Francisco State University. We are grateful to the many people who have helped us get this volume and our tenure as editors underway, including the preceding editors-in-chief, Angela Coventry and Peter Kail, and preceding book review editor, Annemarie Butler, as well as the previous editors-in-chief Corliss Swain and Saul Traiger, who offered invaluable advice about procedures, practices, and technological issues....

Many contemporary social epistemologists take themselves to be combatting an individualist approach to knowledge typified by Descartes. Although I agree that Descartes presents an individualist picture of scientific knowledge, he does allow some practical roles for reliance on the testimony and beliefs of others. More importantly, however, his reasons for committing to individualism raise important issues for social epistemology, particularly about how reliance on mere testimony can propagate prejudices and inhibit genuine understanding. The implications of his views are worked out more fully by some of his immediate successors; I examine how François Poulain de la Barre, and (briefly) Mary Astell analyze the social conditions for epistemic agency in a Cartesian vein.

1996 marks the 400th anniversary of Descartes' birth, and it seems only appropriate that it should bring a reevaluation of Descartes' thought and his place in the history of philosophy. Dennis Sepper's new book on the role of the imagination offers such a rethinking, proposing that--contrary to popular rumor--Descartes' entire corpus was centrally concerned with the proper uses of imagination, a concern initially informed by medieval doctrines of the internal senses and imagination. Sepper argues that Descartes' earliest work, especially the Cogitatione Privatae, places enormous confidence in the power and scope of imagination, a confidence based on a view of the cosmos as a network of resemblances and analogous relations, providing an unproblematic fit between mind and world. The role of imagination here is not to construct objects wholesale, but to allow understanding through figures, figures that stand in analogical and symbolic relations to the objects of conception so that they can be grasped under a particular aspect. Sepper calls this a "biplanar" model of understanding, whereby an object present to cognition is imaginatively configured in another "plane," allowing us both to focus and shift attention.

In David Lodge's novel Changing Places, the protagonist Morris Zapp recalls his plan for a series of commentaries examining Jane Austen's novels under every possible rubric, from the historical to the structuralist, the mythical to the Marxist--all in order so to monopolize interpretation as to exhaust it altogether. I take it that Michael Krausz would find Zapp's ambition both unpalatable and impracticable, although he does not actually rule it out of court. Krausz's topic is interpretive ideals, and his target is the "singularist" who holds that any object of interpretation is in principle open to only one "right" interpretation. To this view, Krausz opposes his own "multiplism," which claims that "the range of ideally admissible interpretations in some practices should be multiple".

The 17th century author François Poulain de la Barre was an important contributor to a pivotal moment in the history of feminist thought. Poulain borrows from many of Descartes’s doctrines, including his dualism, distrust of epistemic authority, accounts of imagination, and passion, and at least some aspects of his doxastic voluntarism; here I examine how he uses a Cartesian notion of prejudice for an anti-essentializing philosophy of women’s education and the formation of the tastes, talents and interests of individuals. ‘Prejudice’ remains Descartes’s notion of an entrenched, yet self-imposed doxastic commitment, but also takes on the sense of social-political group bias, founded on custom, transmitted through education, serving interests, and forming social expectations. Poulain also expands on the Cartesian notion and themes by emphasizing widespread, yet unjustified social opinions in favor of the status quo in both epistemic practices and epistemic authorities, while considering how biased beliefs about sexual difference and gender identity can be internalized even by those who suffer most from them. At the same time, he shows how powerful Cartesian concepts can be for feminist methodology, even though they might also be put to problematic uses (as Malebranche did).

This paper argues that Descartes conceives of theoretical reason in terms derived from practical reason, particularly in the role he gives to the passions. That the passions serve — under normal circumstances — to preserve the union of mind and body is a well-known feature of Descartes's defense of our native make-up. But they are equally important in our more purely theoretical endeavors. Some passions, most notably wonder, provide a crucial source of motivation in the search after truth, and also serve to reinforce memory. Our cognitive successes and failure scan also be tracked by passions and trains of passions.

While Descartes's status as a "representationalist" is often a subject of vehement debate, what exactly he means by "representation" is not. I look to Descartes's early work to show that he first conceives of representation through signification, in which the sign and the signified are isomorphic; on this view, relations of representation can be arbitrary and are to be distinguished from relations of resemblance. I then examine images to show the possibility of an image constructing a relation to its viewer, or "subject-position," in which that subject-position fails to display the attributes of extended things. Such a construction might be applied to the "I" of the Meditations--distinct from all extended substances, it nonetheless has direct access to them through its non-objectified sense-ideas. On this basis, I propose a "model" of representation for ideas: an idea represents its object O to a subject-position S through a vehicle of representation X under some relation R. I argue that this model can explain the uses Descartes makes of "represent," particularly for ideas. But it must be understood properly: Descartes comes to conceive of the vehicle of representation simply as the form taken by the direct interaction of the mind and the things objectively present to it--but a form that can take on a life of its own, giving rise to the possibilities of clarity and distinctness or of confusion in ideas. But what is truly novel about Descartes's conception is the mind's ability to form higher-order representations that represent the conditions of representation itself, thereby achieving certainty for some mental representations without starting from any incorrigible, immediate perceptions. This possibility is realized most clearly in the understanding of my nature as a thinking and representing being, where I can represent myself as the subject-position distinct from all extended things, but also can represent myself as joyfully and representatively united with a body all my own

This chapter examines the views of seventeenth-century British philosophers on passions and affections. It explains that about 8,000 books published during this period mentioned passion and that it started with Thomas Wright's Passions of the Mind in General. The chapter also explores the intellectual basis of the writers who wrote about passion – which includes Augustinianism, Aristotelianism, stoicism, Epicureanism, and medicine – and furthermore, analyzes the relevant works of Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, Henry More, and Lord Shaftesbury.