Hume – Buch gebraucht kaufen

9780521837255

(ISBN-10: 0521837251)

wie neu

15,88 x 4,45 x 22,86 cm

636

New York, USA

5th edition

Softvover

Englisch

Hume

This is the first intellectual biography of the British philosopher and historian David Hume, one of Britain''s greatest men of letters. Providing a comprehensive overview of Hume''s entire career, James Harris sets all of Hume''s works, from A Treatise of Human Nature to The History of England in biographical and historical context and brings to light the major influences on Hume''s intellectual development. Harris analyzes the differences between the wide variety of literary genres with which Hume experimented. Harris describes the major events in Hume''s life, but his main focus is on Hume''s intentions as a philosophical analyst of human nature, politics, commerce, English history, and religion. Careful attention is paid to Hume''s intellectual relations with his contemporaries. Harris reveals Hume as a man intensely concerned with the realization of an ideal of open-minded, objective, rigorous, dispassionate dialogue about all the principal questions of the Enlightenment.

This book will be read by all those interested in the life and writing of David Hume. This includes students (undergraduate and postgraduate) and academics work.

This is the first book to provide a comprehensive overview of the entire career of one of Britain''s greatest men of letters. It sets in biographical and historical context all of Hume''s works, from A Treatise of Human Nature to The History of England, bringing to light the major influences on the course of Hume''s intellectual development, and paying careful attention to the differences between the wide variety of literary genres with which Hume experimented. The major events in Hume''s life are fully described, but the main focus is on Hume''s intentions as a philosophical analyst of human nature, politics, commerce, English history, and religion. Careful attention is paid to Hume''s intellectual relations with his contemporaries. The goal is to reveal Hume as a man intensely concerned with the realization of an ideal of open-minded, objective, rigorous, dispassionate dialogue about all the principal questions faced by his age.

Titel der amerikanischen Originalausgabe: „The Six Pillars of Self-Estemm“

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About the author:

James A. Harris is Professor in the History of Philosophy at the University of St Andrews, Scotland. He is the author of Of Liberty and Necessity: The Free Will Debate in Eighteenth-Century British Philosophy (2005) and of articles on Hume, Hutcheson, Reid, Beattie, Priestley, and various themes in eighteenth-century British philosophy. He is the editor of The Oxford Handbook of British Philosophy in the Eighteenth Century (2013) and the coeditor with Aaron Garrett of Scottish Philosophy in the Eighteenth Century: Volume One (2015).

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Quotes by James A. Harris:

"There are things within our power, and there are things beyond our power. Within our power are our opinion, aim, desire, dislikes, and, in summary, whatever is our own. Beyond our power is property, reputation, duties, and, in summary, whatever is not ours." - James A. Harris


"Because when one exceeds their measure of fitness there is no boundary." - James A. Harris

"Remember how long you have been putting off things, and how often you have received an opportunity from the gods, and yet not use it. You must now at last perceive that you are part of the universe, and that the universe''s existence is an efflux, and that a limit of time is fixed for you, which if you do not use for clearing away the clouds from your mind, it will go and you will go, and it will never return." - James A. Harris

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Reviews by the press:

"Harris skillfully explores the background of Hume''s economic and other essays, and indeed all of his works, describing in some depth the debates to which they contributed and the influences of Hume''s own reading." - The New York Review of Books

"Harris himself writes well up to Hume''s own standard, and his analyses are always clearly expressed as well as thoroughly argued. For anyone with an interest in Hume, this is now probably the place to start if not with the great man''s work itself." - Hector MacQueen, Irish Legal News

"This is an excellent book. James Harris has explored not only David Hume''s well-known interlocutors but also a wide range of lesser-known influences. In addition to being carefully and thoroughly researched, it is also written in a clear and engaging style, making it a pleasure to read. … Harris''s book is a long-awaited addition to the literature that will not disappoint." - Donald C. Ainslie, Global Discourse

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Reviews by readers:

"Quite Good. Writing a proper biography of an intellectual subject presents the author of history with a difficult task. When your subject is a writer, or, worse yet, a philosopher, reflecting on the relationship between their thinking and their personal experiences in a way that is both entertaining and insightful can oftentimes be a challenge greater than the abilities of many, even very serious scholars.

The problem is very frequently a consequence of confusion about what counts as proper ''experience''. Hume, in many ways, lived a relatively boring life, at least externally speaking. He never seemed particularly interested in getting himself, or remaining ''fix''d'' in some stable way of life. He worked few jobs, held only a handful of secretarial posts, and often spent many years at a time sequestrated at his family estate in NineWells reading. This is not a life of swashbuckling adventure or political intrigue, it is the life of someone who spent most of their time reading, thinking or writing. Tempting as it though may be, the philosopher does not always present himself as the most promising candidate for psychoanalytical investigation, in fact, in the case of Hume, little of his personal correspondence or private writing survives from which to draw any singular conclusions regarding, say, the impact of childhood trauma on his development as a thinker.

The success of "Hume: An Intellectual Biography" probably derives from Harris'' relative disinterest in pursuing a purely psychological or biographically speculative account of his subject. He does not attempt to reconstruct Hume''s thought from the purely physical circumstances of his life, such as his upbringing, his education, his profession, or his personal experiences. Instead the majority of the present volume is devoted to an intellectual account, a life of the mind. He realizes that ones cannot count on the general reader to have a full background in all of the literature with which Hume would have been familiar with, if only by contemporary reputation. Thus he takes the time to discuss the works and ideas of the many of authors whom Hume preoccupied himself for much of his life. The contextualization this book''s biggest strength and greatest source of appeal.

Only in one or two pages at the beginning and end of each chapter does the author explicitly turn his attention to the immediate circumstances of Hume''s life. The bulk of each chapter then is taken up with a chronicling of what book''s Hume was reading, and furthermore, of which books were available to him or otherwise would have at least been known to him in some capacity. It is then the task of the author to sort out how Hume synthesized this material, and to explain why sometimes some ideas prevailed with him over others, usually by means of an appeal to contemporary party politics or their attendant prejudices.

Overall this is a very satisfying volume, it is at once very readable and very informative. It does not necessarily offer any great insight into Hume''s, but it does present a very enjoyable intellectual narrative in which the various influences, both positive and negative, on Hume are connected to one another in a continuous and persuasive chain of interpretations." - RogerMcguinn



"The intellectual development of David Hume. If you are familiar with the ideas of David Hume (or shaken by them as I was) and are interested in the background of his thinking, this book is ideal. Harris goes into extensive detail about the effect of earlier thinkers on Hume and it turns out that, like all creative ideas, seeds of Hume’s ideas were present in several people who preceded him, especially writers like Mandeville, Malebranche, Bayle and Locke. In philosophy classes there is often a fairly straight line drawn from Locke’s empiricism to Hume’s. This is not inaccurate and makes sense for a course syllabus but, as Harris shows, it leaves out critical influences that, if Harris is right, were more influential on Hume’s overall development than Locke was. Harris also details Hume’s response to his own work and his ambivalent (sometimes quite negative) response to the Treatise of Human Nature written when Hume was a young man. It is not that he abandoned most of the key ideas in the Treatise (like his radical critique of the traditional view of causality) but that he was disturbed by the reaction (or lack of it) to his writing. Hume very much wanted to be viewed as a “man of letters” so he revised not just the Treatise but all his major works (and revised them quite regularly) to be more readable and amenable to the educated public he hoped would be his audience. Harris gives excellent summaries of all Hume’s most significant works, shows where and what he revised, and clearly shows the development of Hume’s thought over his lifetime.

As Harris notes several times Hume claimed he was not out to destroy religion (or science) but to simply stand back and see how the human mind functioned in these critical areas of life. But in doing so Hume ended up attacking the fundamental religious ideas of his culture. Hume never called himself an atheist but ended up with a concept of “religion” that had no content. Harris lets the reader see how Hume got to that point and what he was trying to do but most of Hume’s contemporaries were not fans of Hume’s project and reacted as one might expect (and react now for that matter). Hume’s writings on religion show again the contrast between Hume the painfully honest philosopher of experience and Hume the “man of letters” who put off the publication of the Dialogues concerning Natural Religion until after he was dead.

The “radical” Hume of philosophy was counterbalanced in Hume’s life by his love of history and Harris goes into extensive detail about Hume the historian. The reader follows Hume in his research and again Harris shows the influence of both previous historians of England and the work of Hume’s contemporaries. To someone only familiar with Hume the philosopher this part of Hume’s intellectual life gives a much fuller dimension to the man.

This is an excellent book on the intellectual development of one of the most important people in the history of Western thought. The extensive work that went into the research and writing of this book is a gift to anyone interested in the thought of David Hume." - Daniel Putman

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