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at all? But as we have seen, Hume has not in fact shown that in theistic convictions or monkish virtues sympathetic understanding comes up against its limits. No a priori dismissal is legitimate; the historian’s first task, in each particular instance, remains that of seeking sympathetic understanding.

      NOTES

      1. For various explorations of this theme, see the special issue “Religion and History,” ed. David Gary Shaw, History and Theory (December 2006), especially the essays by Shaw, C. T. MacIntyre, Catherine Bell, and Mark Cladis, as well as Seeing Things Their Way: Intellectual History and the Return of Religion, ed. Alister Chapman, John Coffey, and Brad S. Gregory (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009).

      2. Most influentially, R. G. Collingwood insisted that Hume had deserted philosophy for history: see The Idea of History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1946), 73. Similar judgments from the period include those of John Laird, Hume’s Philosophy of Human Nature (New York: Dutton, 1932), 266; John B. Stewart, The Moral and Political Philosophy of David Hume (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963), 289; and Haskell Fain, Between Philosophy and History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), 9.

      3. David Fate Norton, “History and Philosophy in Hume’s Thought,” in David Hume: Philosophical Historian, ed. David Fate Norton and Richard Popkin (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965), xxxiii.

      4. Ibid., xxxix.

      5. Ibid., xliv.

      6. Ibid., xlviii.

      7. Donald W. Livingston, Hume’s Philosophy of Common Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 3. This argument is further extended in Livingston’s Philosophical Melancholy and Delirium: Hume’s Pathology of Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).

      8. Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988), 295.

      9. Livingston counters that Collingwood’s accusation “is simply false.” “Hume’s doctrine of moral causes is, in fact,” he states, “the earliest statement of the modern doctrine of verstehen or what Collingwood calls the reenactment of past thoughts,” Hume’s Philosophy of Common Life, 235. Livingston’s analysis is indebted in part to James Farr’s “Hume, Hermeneutics, and History: A ‘Sympathetic’ Account,” History and Theory 17 (1978): 285–310; it was Farr who first invoked the term verstehen in connection with Hume’s thought. A similar analysis is developed by S. K. Wertz in “Hume, History, and Human Nature,” Journal of the History of Ideas 36 (1975): 481–96; republished in Between Hume’s Philosophy and History: Historical Theory and Practice (Lanham: University Press of America, 2000).

      10. I have given a fuller account of sympathetic understanding, its compatibility with moral judgment, and its purported limits, in Jennifer A. Herdt, Religion and Faction in Hume’s Moral Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), chaps. 4–5.

      11. For a critique of descriptivism, see Lee C. McIntyre, “Reduction, Supervenience, and the Autonomy of Social Scientific Laws,” Theory and Decision 48, no. 2 (2000): 101–22. McIntyre’s essay also helpfully elucidates the context-dependent character of explanation and defends the possibility of autonomous social scientific laws even given a naturalist ontology.

      12. These are what Livingston terms “moral causal explanations,” Hume’s Philosophy of Common Life, 191.

      13. I have elsewhere placed this aspiration within the context of other contemporary thinkers who shared Hume’s concern with cultivating resources for coping with moral diversity and make no attempt to replicate that discussion here. See Religion and Faction in Hume’s Moral Philosophy, chaps. 1–2. See also Daniel Carey’s Locke, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson: Contesting Diversity in the Enlightenment and Beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), chaps. 4–5, which depicts these thinkers as likewise “focused on the problem of diversity and the question of whether any moral consistence could be located in mankind,” 1.

      14. In fact, though, Hume’s account of theism is perhaps most persuasive as an account of certain very particular forms of religious life, notably the one in which he grew up, a strict form of Scottish Calvinism. Even here, it can be argued that Hume’s account is simply blind to the theological nuances that render the stance internally coherent—although he might counter that most uneducated Scots would not themselves have grasped the nuances.

      15. Ernest Nagel, The Structure of Science (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1961), 340.

      16. See also his account of Cardinal Pole (H 3:430).

      17. For a fuller discussion of the place of the History of England in Hume’s account of the limits of sympathetic understanding, see Religion and Faction in Hume’s Moral Philosophy, chap. 5.

      18. Livingston, Hume’s Philosophy of Common Life, 240. Livingston is also concerned with the topic of barbarism in Philosophical Melancholy and Delirium, but here his focus is on how civilizations can fall back into a kind of “barbarism of refinement,” 217–19.

      19. Livingston, Hume’s Philosophy of Common Life, 245–46.

      20. Popkin, “Skepticism and the Study of History,” in David Hume: Philosophical Historian, ed. David Fate Norton and Richard Popkin (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965), xxx–xxxi.

      21. Livingston, Hume’s Philosophy of Common Life, 193. According to Livingston, Hume’s critique leaves room for a form of philosophical theism, essentially amounting to a regulative belief about nature as an ordered whole that serves to guide inquiry, Philosophical Melancholy and Delirium, 63–66. This is a suggestive interpretation, but one that requires a strong reading of Hume’s texts; I do not engage with it here.

      22. Livingston, Hume’s Philosophy of Common Life, 234.

      23. Ibid., 234.

      24. Ibid., 234–35.

      25. Ibid., 235.

      26. Ibid., 300.

      27. Ibid., 143.

      28. Ibid., 301.

      29. Ibid., 301.

      30. Ibid., 301.

      31. On early modern European society (including, e.g., Calvinist ideals of the advancement of the kingdom of God) as dominated not by an idea of progress but by the notion of a return to a golden age in the past, see J. H. Elliott, Spain and Its World, 1500–1700 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 98–101.

      32. See George Marsden’s account of Jonathan Edwards’s “millennial optimism,” in contrast with opposing contemporary views, in Jonathan Edwards: A Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 333–40.

      33. Ernst Breisach, Historiography: Ancient, Medieval, Modern (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 215.

      34. Noel Jackson, “Historiography: Britain,” in Encyclopedia of the Romantic Era, 1760–1850, vol. 1, ed. Christopher John Murray (London: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2004), 504.

      35. This is apparent in Livingston’s characterization of Hume’s true philosophical theism: “this metaphysical belief about the world as a whole, that it is ordered by ‘some consistent plan’ and reveals ‘one single purpose or intention, however inexplicable and incomprehensible,’ in turn guides scientific activity in its research within the world,” Philosophical Melancholy, 66.

      36. Livingston, Hume’s Philosophy of Common Life, 285.

      37. Ibid., 286, 291.

      38. Ibid., 288.

      39. Ibid., 234.

      40. The reasons for this have been given classic formulation by Donald Davidson in “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Association 47 (1973–74): 5–20.

      41.

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