A PHILOSOPHER'S MIND

New Zealand Listener, Volume 28, Issue 721, 8 May 1953, Page 12

A PHILOSOPHER'S MIND

| HUME’S INTENTIONS, by J. A. Passmore; sagt University Press. English price, ) \V HEN Professor Passmore’s Ralph Cudworth appeared, after his ap- | pointment to the Chair of Philosophy in ' the University of Otago, it became clear | that this country had acquired a historian of philosophy of considerable distinction. That book has effected something of a revolution in our understanding of Cudworth; and now Professor Passmore has given us this new one on Hume. ; Hume’s Intentions is not an easy book; and indeed there would be little justification today for writing an easy book on

Hume, so many having already been written. What Professor Passmore has attempted is to find the strand in Hume’s mental make-up that is as_ it were the key to all the rest, and he finds it in his desire to put our knowledge of human nature on a thoroughly scientific footing, with an associated conviction that all other knowledge must rest upon this. This conviction, in Professor Passmore’s view, was a mistakethere is no one part of knowledge which can thus be taken as a foundation for all the rest; and Hume’s error here prevented him from being in fact the scientific psychologist that he wished to be and thought of himself as being. Professor Passmore examines various comparatively well-known features of Hume’s thought, and attempts to show how they all bear out this contention. For example, Hume’s reduction of our belief that X is the cause of Y to a mere irrational habit of expecting Y whenever we encounter X, induced in us by past associations, reflects his tendency to regard "the heart of the matter" as something psychological, whatever "the matter" might be; but his detailed psychological explanation of the genesis of this supposed habit is shown to be extremely lame. Professor Passmore makes out his case very persuasively; but he himself has taught some of us to be very sceptical of claims to explain historical processes by a single "key idea," and I suspect that one could present an equally convincing picture of a rather different Hume from this one. Indeed, precisely that was done not long ago by Professor Kemp-Smith of Edinburgh, who makes the driving force behind Hume’s philosophy a moral one-the provision of an appropriate intellectual background for an urbane and tolerant attitude to life. It is significant that Hume’s ethical writings, which for’ Professor Kemp-Smith are all-import-ant, are not touched upon in Hume’s Intentions at all, But it is good to have Professor Passmore’s Hume, too, and pleasant to reflect that so much of him was concocted in Dunedin.

A. N.

Prior