Abstract

Most of Terence Penelhum’s essays collected in his Themes in Hume are already recognized as classics in Hume scholarship. Bringing them together only reinforces their strengths: clarity and sensitivity in exposition combined with charity and acuity in criticism. Penelhum wrote them over a course of almost fifty years, and we can see in them the evolution in his attitude towards Hume. In the earliest essay — the 1955 ‘Hume on Personal Identity’ — Penelhum offers a quick and local diagnosis of Hume’s errors: he has mistakenly assumed that an object must be unchanging for it to be identical through time. But in the later essays, especially the three new ones, Penelhum recognizes that his earlier local insights must be balanced by a wider reading of Hume. After all, he does not, for example, talk about the self only to say that it is a bundle of perceptions; it is also crucial to his treatment of the passions, especially the indirect, person-oriented passions, and is an essential component in his explanation of sympathy, the ultimate source of our moral judgments. Moreover, as Penelhum notes, seeing the self as constituted out of its perceptions, rather than standing over them so as to judge their legitimacy as guides to action or knowledge, is what allows Hume to attempt a ‘science of man’ — a quasi-Newtonian project of discovering the principles governing the perceptions in the mind-bundle.