Hume as Moralist: a Social Historian's Perspective
Hume as Moralist: a Social Historian's Perspective
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作为道德家的休谟：社会史学家的视角
DOI：
10.1017/s0080443600002624
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发表时间：
1978
期刊：
影响因子：
--
通讯作者：
N. Phillipson
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
N. Phillipson
在本文中，我想讨论大卫·休谟关于道德、政治和公民的观点，以及哲学家和哲学思考在现代公民社会中的作用——我将称之为他的公民道德理论。这是一个被哲学家忽视的主题，大概是因为它的哲学兴趣有限。但是，对于想要了解休谟作为哲学家的发展、将他的思想置于特定的苏格兰语境中并了解他与开明的爱丁堡的文学和社会世界令人惊讶的密切和亲切关系的历史学家来说，这是相当感兴趣的。这些都是很大的主张，我不能指望在一篇简短的论文中充分证实它们。我的目的首先是要表明，从历史的角度来看，休谟对公民道德的关注是他作为哲学家的核心利益，而不是次要利益，这有助于解释他做出的令人费解的决定，即放弃以霍布斯和洛克的方式系统地进行哲学思考，转而以艾迪生和斯蒂尔的方式进行礼貌的论文写作。我的第二个目的是表明，休谟对公民道德的兴趣，他对公民道德的新艾迪生主义（或者我应该说，新西塞罗主义）的哲学思考模式，以及他对现代政治、公民和哲学思考的理解的本质，与他对宗教的思考不同，休谟对他的苏格兰同时代人的一些最重要的意识形态关注做出了回应和一致。我怀疑，正是这种共同的兴趣有助于遏制休谟臭名昭著的宗教怀疑论给他的同时代人带来的一些焦虑。没有它，他不可能成为苏格兰启蒙运动时代爱丁堡知识生活的领袖之一。
In this paper I want to discuss David Hume's views about morals, politics and citizenship and the role of philosophers and philosophizing in modern civil society - what I shall call his theory of civic morality. This is a subject which has been neglected by philosophers, presumably because it is of limited philosophical interest. But it is of considerable interest to the historian who wants to understand Hume's development as a philosopher, to locate his thought within a specific, Scottish context and to arrive at some understanding of his surprisingly close and cordial relations with the literary and social world of enlightened Edinburgh. These are large claims and I cannot hope to substantiate them fully in a short paper. My purpose is first, to show that, historically speaking, Hume's preoccupation with civic morality was of central rather than peripheral interest to him as a philosopher and that it helps to explain his otherwise rather puzzling decision to give up philosophizing systematically in the manner of Hobbes and Locke, in favour of polite essay-writing in the manner of Addison and Steele. My second purpose is to suggest that Hume's interest in civic morality, his neo-Addisonian (or perhaps I should say, neo-Ciceronian) mode of philosophizing about it and the nature of his understanding of politics, citizenship and philosophizing in a modern age was, unlike his thought about religion, responsive to and consonant with some of the most important ideological preoccupations of his Scottish contemporaries. It was, I suspect, a shared interest which helped to contain some of the anxieties Hume's notorious religious scepticism caused his contemporaries. Without it, he could not possibly have emerged as one of the leaders of Edinburgh's intellectual life in the age of the Scottish Enlightenment.