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Critical Notice: James A Harris’ Hume: an intellectual biography, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Anders Kraal*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada

Abstract

James Harris’s new Hume biography offers, among other things, ‘a series of conjectures as to what Hume’s intentions were in writing in the particular ways that he did about human nature, politics, economics, history, and religion’. The biography is particularly novel with regard to Hume’s intentions when writing about religion, which, Harris argues (in opposition to recent developments in Hume scholarship), were rather benign. Harris fails to appreciate the full extent of the difficulties attaching to his series of conjectures, however.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Journal of Philosophy 2017

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