Completion of an intellectual biography of David Hume

我正在写的这本书是第一本全面描述休谟智力发展的书。当然，这不是休谟的第一本传记。但这是对休谟整个职业生涯的第一次全面研究，从他最早的文学实验到早期的哲学杰作《人性论》（1739- 1740），再到一系列关于政治和政治经济学的杰出论文，再到六卷本的《英国史》（1754- 1762）。以任何标准衡量，休谟的成就都是非凡的。即使是他的许多批评者，也承认他是那个时代最重要的英国哲学家和历史学家。我的书将休谟置于英国知识分子生活的复杂世界的背景中，当时英国正在将自己定义为一个帝国主义大国，同时也提出了一个问题：为什么在18世纪中期的所有文学人物中，休谟似乎与今天的许多人特别相关。不同的哲学家需要不同类型的知识分子传记，这取决于要描述的哲学生涯的性质，也取决于可用证据的数量和种类。在休谟的作品中，几乎没有手稿材料：没有学生的课堂笔记，几乎没有笔记本，也很少有相关的信件。我们所能做的就是看出版的作品。但这些已出版的作品本身对知识分子传记作家构成了真正的挑战，因为它们在主题上彼此明显不同。休谟所写的书如今已成为世界各地学院和大学哲学课程的核心部分；他写过关于18世纪40年代英国政党政治争论的文章；他对发展中的政治经济学做出了开创性的贡献；他对宗教信仰的基础进行了尖锐而富有煽动性的论述；他写了一部从罗马入侵到1688年的英格兰史。问题是，是否有一个统一的叙事可以构建，足以理解这些不同的文学努力作为一个单一的智力项目的一部分。很长一段时间以来，人们都认为这个问题的答案是否定的。也就是说，人们认为休谟早年的抱负在于哲学；由于休谟的第一本书《人性论》（Treatise of Human Nature）不成功，他的雄心壮志受挫；在《人性论》之后，休谟从哲学转向了更流行的写作方式（包括以更容易被接受和平静的形式呈现他的哲学思想）。这种对休谟职业生涯的看法已经被成功地挑战了，他后期作品的学术严肃性也得到了公正的对待，但人们仍然认为，在他的“哲学”和他的其他文本之间存在着明显的区别。我认为这种信念是错误的。我认为，它的根源在于现代哲学对自身的认识相对狭隘。无论如何，对于休谟来说，“哲学”与其说是一个主题或一门学科，不如说是一种特殊的思维方式，一种分析方法，一种参与模式，可以应用于政治、经济、宗教和历史问题，就像它可以应用于认识论和伦理学问题一样。我的书是对这一哲学概念的最初发展、后来的完善和全面扩展的叙述。

The book I am writing is the first comprehensive account of Hume's intellectual development. It is, of course, not the first biography of Hume. But it is the first study of the entirety of Hume's career, from his earliest literary experiments to the early philosophical masterpiece A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40), and on through a brilliant series of essays on politics and political economy to the six-volume History of England (1754-62). Hume's achievement was, by any standard, extraordinary. Even his detractors, of whom there were many, recognised him as the most important British philosopher and historian of his age. My book sets him in the context of the complex world of British intellectual life at the time when Britain was defining itself into an imperial power, while at the same time keeping open the question of why it is that, of all the literary figures of the mid-eighteenth century, Hume seems to many particularly relevant today. Different philosophers require different sorts of intellectual biographies, according to the nature of the philosophical career to be described, and according also to the amount and kind of evidence that is available. In Hume's case, there is very little in the way of manuscript material: no student lecture notes, almost no notebooks, and very few relevant letters. What one has to go on are the published works. But those published works themselves present a real challenge to the intellectual biographer, just because they are so apparently different from each other in their subject matter. Hume wrote books that are today a central part of the philosophy curriculum at colleges and universities around the world; he wrote essays on the party political disputes of Britain in the 1740s; he wrote groundbreaking contributions to the developing science of political economy; he wrote sharply and provocatively about the basis of religious belief; he wrote a history of England from the Roman invasion to 1688. The question is whether there is a unitary narrative to be constructed, sufficient to make sense of these various literary endeavours as part of a single intellectual project. For a long time it was assumed that the answer to this question is No. It was assumed, that is to say, that in early life Hume's ambitions lay in philosophy; that those ambitions were thwarted by the lack of success of Hume's first book, the Treatise of Human Nature; and that after the Treatise Hume turned away from philosophy to more popular kinds of writing (including the presentation of his philosophical ideas in more acceptable and anodyne form). This view of Hume's career has been successfully challenged, and justice has been done to the intellectual seriousness of his later writings, but it continues to be assumed that there is a sharp distinction to be drawn between his 'philosophy' and his other texts. I believe that this belief is false. It has its origin, I think, in the relative narrowness of present-day philosophy's conception of itself. For Hume, at any rate, 'philosophy' was not so much a subject-matter or a discipline as a particular style of thinking, a method of analysis, a mode of engagement, such as could be applied to political, economic, religious, and historical problems just as it could be applied to issues in epistemology and ethics. My book is an account of the initial development, subsequent refinement, and full extension this conception of philosophy.