Dario Perinetti

This volume ventures into the largely unexplored territory of Claude Buffier’s philosophical contributions to early modern thought, unlocking the complexity of his ideas while situating him within the broader context of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophy. Instead of arguing that the foundation of all knowledge is grounded in either rational speculation or empirical observation, Buffier proposes a “third way”: his appeal to common sense seeks to show that, when we have exhausted all the justifications for our claims to knowledge, the bedrock where our spades are turned is the irreducible social and emotional dimension of our epistemic practices. The book focuses on three key aspects of Buffier’s writings. Part I explores central tenets of Buffier’s philosophy of common sense. Part II reflects on his metaphysics of the self, identity, and duration. Part III examines Buffier’s thought on social life, with chapters on his conceptions of freedom, social order, and the equality of the sexes. While focusing on arguments and claims central to Buffier’s thought, all chapters seek to place him in his intellectual context by tracing the positions which he responded to and those he built on.

This chapter reconstructs Hume’s answer to moral relativism. I argue that Hume sees cultural and historical differences and conflict of values, not as an obstacle, but, rather, as a condition of possibility for reaching a universal standard of morals. This reconstruction provides a new and original way of understanding his moral sense theory. I argue that moral responses are not, for Hume, natural, in the sense of instinctive, but are the artificial product of, and shaped by, the historical and social experience of value conflict. Thus, Hume’s universalism in ethics is made possible by, and fully compatible with, conflicts of equally commendable ethical ends; a feature that turns him into a moral pluralist.

This chapter provides an introduction to Buffier’s philosophy of common sense. It situates Buffier in his philosophical context and discusses central principles of his account of first truths and commitment to a sentiment-based theory of knowledge that is grounded in an essentially social epistemic disposition. Studying Buffier’s philosophy, this chapter argues, contributes to widening our understanding of the main philosophical issues in the early modern period and sheds valuable new light on how alternatives to Cartesianism and Locke’s philosophy could develop.

As part of recent endeavours to show Buffier’s significant influence on key philosophical debates, this chapter examines the relation between Buffier and Hume by focusing on their discussions of the identity of objects and selves. It will first be argued that Buffier’s views are the specific target of Hume’s famous sceptical argument in the first paragraphs of his section “Of Personal Identity” in A Treatise of Human Nature. Secondly, we will demonstrate that Hume shares Buffier’s view that we have an intimate experience of our own self, but differs radically from the Jesuit philosopher in interpreting that sentiment intime. Finally, we will claim that Hume used Buffier’s arguments regarding the confusion involved in our ascriptions of identity to objects in order to show, contra Buffier, that the same confusion is in play in our ascriptions of personal identity.

This chapter examines the different answers that British moralists gave to the question ‘what does virtue consist in?’ Rather than as a royal road to present-day views in ethics, their answers are best understood when considered against the background of early modern natural law theories and their projected metaphysics of morals. The emerging ‘science of morality’ dealt with the metaphysical problem of determining what sort of thing virtue is. Considered from this vantage point, the British moralists struggled with the problem of deciding whether moral concepts signify laws of nature, rational drives in human beings, irrational drives in human beings, volitions of a legislator, or social institutions. British moral philosophies in the eighteenth century can be divided up according to whether they defended the thesis that moral qualities are artificial, the thesis that they are part of nature, or the thesis that they are the product of historical experience.

This thesis sets out to show that a philosophical reflection on history is, in the strongest possible way, an essential feature of Hume's project of a science of human nature: a philosophical investigation of human nature, for Hume, cannot be successful independently of an understanding of the relation of human beings to their history. Hume intended to criticize traditional metaphysics by referring all knowledge to experience. But it is almost always assumed that Hume means by "experience" the result of an individual's past sense perception or personal observation. Accordingly, Hume's criticism of traditional metaphysics is taken to lead to an individualistic conception of knowledge and human nature. In this thesis I claim that this picture of Hume's "empiricism" is simply wrong. He is not a philosopher who reduces "experience" to the merely private happenings within a personal psychology. On the contrary, Hume has a wider notion of experience, one that includes not only personal observation and memory, but, fundamentally, one that includes implicit knowledge of human history. Experience, so understood, brings about what I term a historical point of view, namely, the point of view of someone who seeks to extend his experience as far as it is possible in order to acquire the capacity to produce more nuanced and impartial judgments in any given practice. It is precisely this historical point of view that enables us to depart from the individualistic perspective that we would otherwise be bound to adopt not only in epistemology but, most significantly, in politics, in social life, in religion, etc. ;Chapter 1 presents the historical background against which Hume elaborates his views of history's role in philosophy. Chapter 2 discusses and criticizes the individualist reading of Hume by showing that he had a satisfactory account of beliefs formed via human testimony. Chapter 3 presents a view of Hume on explanation that underscores his interest in practical and informal explanations as those of history. Chapter 4 provides a discussion of Hume's notion of historical experience in relation both to his theory of perception and to his project of a "science of man."

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:David Hume: Reason in HistoryDario PerinettiClaudia M. Schmidt. David Hume: Reason in History. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003. Pp. xiii + 473. Cloth, $85.00Not the least interesting feature of this fine piece on Hume's philosophy is its intriguing Hegelian title, and particularly if one recalls that Hume claimed that reason is the slave of the passions and that "Mankind are so much the same, in all times and places, that history informs us of nothing new or strange in this particular" (EHU 8.7). Schmidt conclusively shows that a reader acquainted with the totality of Hume's works should not find her title puzzling. Thus the book is a contribution to recent efforts to read Hume as a philosopher who gives a much more important role to reason than is usually acknowledged, and who places reflection on history at the core of his philosophical enterprise.Instead of seeking to reverse accepted views of Hume as an ahistorical naturalist by discussing the role of reason and history in Hume's writings, Schmidt argues that this reversal will occur naturally for someone who sees the unity of Hume's entire philosophical project. In this sense Schmidt sets for herself the ambitious task of meeting the challenge set out long ago by Norman Kemp Smith: that Hume scholarship will acquire a due perspective on his work only after the unity of his activities as historian, economist, philosopher, political theorist, and man of letters is appropriately appreciated.Schmidt skillfully goes about her task by reviewing Hume's writings in an order that is reminiscent of the one Hume had in mind when he published the first two books of the Treatise. Hume wished to go on, after dealing with the understanding and the passions, to an "examination of Morals, Politics and Criticism." We know that he fulfilled this task only in part with volume three, "Of Morals." His views on criticism and politics were, though, later [End Page 212] presented less systematically in his essays and in the History of England. Schmidt reviews Hume's work by dealing first (chapters 1-5) with the topics proper to book 1 of the Treatise and the first Enquiry, then with the passions (chapter 6) and Hume's philosophies of action (chapter 7), and of morals (chapter 8). Chapters 9-18 treat, in order, political theory, economics, aesthetics, religion, and history.The general view of Hume that Schmidt presents makes it essential to establish that he has a more nuanced view of concepts than a long tradition of interpretation has acknowledged. Schmidt claims that Hume's way of ideas is by no means guilty of the charge of accounting only for private items in the mind at the expense of the public and historical dimensions of concept use. Schmidt argues that Hume gives a central role to the social and historical dimension of acquiring and mastering conceptual rules. It is not surprising, then, that Schmidt does not see Hume's distinction between ideas that are and are not copied from impressions as a philosophical razor for determining the limits of meaningfulness. She argues, rather, that Hume's first principle is intended to foster a better understanding of philosophical terms by tracing their genealogy either to sensation or to the imagination. The core of Schmidt's reading lies in showing how Hume can account for the stability and objectivity of the use of concepts like identity, cause, time, and external world, which are "merely" the product of the imagination. Hume's "deduction" of these concepts is to be found in his explanation of general rules, fictions and standards. Thus, in chapters 2 and 3,Schmidt maintains that Hume's discussion of causality is to be viewed as part of a more general discussion of knowledge and probability in which causal beliefs are seen as paradigmatic cases of natural beliefs justified and/or corrected by general rules. Once we see the role that general rules have in correcting and justifying beliefs we can also see how unfounded are the common charges that Hume fails to account for the normativity of belief, that he is a sceptic about induction, and that he...

There are basically two views about Hume on explanation. One is that Hume was the first methodological monist, that is, the first to believe that subsuming events under covering laws was the proper method for every scientific or simply rigorous empirical enquiry. A second view has it that Hume adopted two approaches to explanation. On the one hand, he is said to apply the covering-law approach in the context of natural philosophy and, on the other hand, he is said to defend a Verstehen or quasi hermeneutical method in moral philosophy.

In "My Own Life," Hume writes:1 During my retreat in France, first at Reims, but chiefly at La Fleche, in Anjou, I composed my Treatise of Human Nature. After passing three years very agreeably in that country, I came over to London in 1737. In the end of 1738, I published my Treatise, and immediately went down to my mother and my brother, who lived at his country house, and was employing himself very judiciously and successfully in the improvement of his fortune. It is thus "chiefly" at La Flèche that Hume wrote one of the masterpieces of early modern philosophy. Hume's stay in France extended from July 1734 to August 1737. He spent a few weeks in Paris in the summer of 1734, hosted by Chevalier...

The review of volume 3 of Hume’s Treatise, a review that appeared in the Bibliothèque raisonnée in the spring of 1741, was the first published responseto Hume’s ethical theory. This review is also of interest because of questions that have arisen about its authorship and that of the earlier review of volume 1 of the Treatise in the same journal. In Part 1 of this paper we attribute to Pierre Des Maizeaux the notice of vols. 1 and 2 of the Treatise published in the spring 1739 issue of the Bibliothèque raisonnée. We then focus on the question of the authorship of the review of vol. 3. In Part 2 of our paper we provide a transcription of the French text of this review. Part 3 is a new English translation of the review. Part 4 provides comparisons between passages from the textof the Treatise, the French translations of these passages in the Bibliothèque raisonnée review, and our back-translations of these same passages. We alsoprovide brief comparisons between our translation of passages from this review and an earlier translation of these passages.

Reflecting Subjects offers a bold and original reading of Book 2 of the Treatise, and presents a problem that has been little explored by Hume scholarship. Jacqueline Taylor's book argues that we can reconstruct what she calls a "social theory" out of Book 2 of the Treatise. Based on a detailed account of the passions that constitute social selves, the social theory of the Treatise offers, according to Taylor, rich and fine-grained explanations of the causes of difference and inequality among human beings, based on understanding the characters of individuals, their social statuses, and their differences in power. However—and this is one of the central problems that Reflecting Subjects seeks to tackle—in Book 3 of...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Experience, Embodiment, and History: Remarks on Waldow’s Experience EmbodiedDario Perinetti (bio)Anik Waldow’s Experience Embodied delves into what she calls the “early modern debate on the concept of experience.”1 In her rich and wide-ranging account, she shows how a group of key early modern philosophers dealt with a puzzle regarding the connection between the subjective and objective aspects of experience. The puzzle stems from the fact that experience reveals as much about the experiencing subject as it does about the experienced world. Waldow believes that a one-sided focus on the role of “the way of ideas” in shaping the subjective aspect of experience has distorted our understanding of early modern views on experience.According to the traditional reading, the puzzle presents an intractable challenge to early modern philosophers. For if we experience the world through ideas, and ideas are internal mental states, it becomes difficult to reconcile the explanations required for the psychology of our mental states with those needed for the natural sciences dealing with objective states of affairs. But, so Waldow claims, the challenge can be successfully faced once we understand experience as embodied: “We have to think of experience as embodied to do justice to both explanatory requirements, because it is the body that connects the experiencing mind and its subjectivity with the factual realm of the world.”2Waldow disputes the commonly held view that early modern philosophers saw experience as an interaction between mind and world. She contends, instead, that most early modern philosophers understood experience as embodied. The thesis is presented through a series of “case studies” or “snapshots.” These snapshots focus on the way Descartes, Locke, Hume, Rousseau, Herder, and Kant accounted for the [End Page 319] embodied dimension of experience. The case studies are noteworthy because they succeed in revealing the significance of embodied experience for the authors in question. Waldow manages to expose the significance of embodied experience by focusing on the connection between the authors’ central philosophical views and their views on topics like education, the psychology of emotions, and history, which are often considered of lesser interest by contemporary philosophers.For example, in chapter 1, Waldow argues that connecting Descartes’s mind-body dualism with his understanding of reason as a tool for human self-determination and agency, makes it possible to see how, contrary to commonly held assumptions, Descartes’s dualism aligns well with an understanding of experience as embodied. This weakens the view that Descartes defended a conception of reason as disembodied, and instead, allows for a reading of Cartesian philosophy as aligned with a more naturalistic picture of human nature. In her chapters on Hume and Herder, Waldow sheds light on the way these philosophers perceived reason and experience as deeply rooted in bodily sensibility, as well as in historically shaped moral attitudes and social norms. This focus on embodied experience is central for highlighting how, in different ways, these philosophers endorsed the naturalistic project of understanding the human place in nature. Building on these results, Waldow approaches the problem of the relationship between naturalism and the methodology proper to philosophy from a different and original angle. Her final chapters on Herder and Kant present two ways of understanding the connection between philosophy and the empirical sciences. In her view, Herder advocates for a naturalistic methodology as a way to provide answers to deep metaphysical questions, as well as to empirical questions related to human nature and its connection to culture, society, and history. Unlike Herder, Kant appears as promoting a form of methodological dualism that distinguishes conceptual questions regarding the structure of experience from empirical questions regarding the experience of concrete, embodied human beings. Waldow succeeds in highlighting this contrast between two methodological approaches, thanks to a journey that takes us through the canonical texts of these two thinkers, as well as through less frequented texts such as Herder’s work on the origins of language and Kant’s writings on anthropology, geography, natural history, and history. As can be seen, Waldow’s book not only provides a valuable insight into the significance of embodied experience in early modern philosophy, but also offers refreshing and unexpected readings of the...