Kant, Hume, and the Interruption of Dogmatic Slumber by Abraham Anderson

Abstract

Reviewed by: Kant, Hume, and the Interruption of Dogmatic Slumber by Abraham Anderson David Landy Abraham Anderson. Kant, Hume, and the Interruption of Dogmatic Slumber. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. Pp. xxii + 180. Cloth, $74.00. Abraham Anderson’s Kant, Hume, and the Interruption of Dogmatic Slumbers is a book with an ambitious, although well-circumscribed, goal—to settle once and for all what precisely it is in Hume that awoke Kant from his dogmatic slumbers—and an audacious conclusion—that both Hume and Kant are concerned primarily, if not exclusively, with rational theology. Unfortunately, at least to my mind, the methods that Anderson chooses to pursue this end and establish this conclusion prevent him from achieving either. Most strikingly, despite much of the book being dedicated to defending his interpretation of Hume, Anderson does very little to engage with Hume scholarship, especially that which opposes his interpretation, and his engagement with Kant scholarship is similarly selective. He does include a preface that canvasses the extant literature on his main topic, but his engaging with that literature all at once makes his treatment of individual questions too brief to be satisfying. Anderson’s articulation of his own heterodox interpretation of these two philosophers is admirably clear, so the omission of a robust engagement with other scholars is all the more disappointing. That said, Anderson’s focus is more on working out the details of his own interpretation than it is on convincing his reader of its truth, so a merely curious reader should find the exercise valuable nonetheless. The crux of Anderson’s view is that “Hume interrupted Kant’s dogmatic slumber by challenging not the causal principle governing experience—the principle that every event has a cause—but the causal principle extending beyond experience, which was supposed to be known by reason” (xi). Anderson holds that Hume and Kant agree that every event has a cause but also share the conviction that this principle can only be applied legitimately to experience. Anderson takes little note of the fact that whether Hume accepts any such principle, and what he means by it if he does, is a matter of controversy among Hume scholars, or that even if he does accept it, he almost certainly means something different by it than does Kant. Furthermore, Anderson also attributes to Hume Kant’s claim that to apply the causal principle beyond experience would require reasoning via concepts alone, which is an illegitimate use of such concepts (xiv). Finally, Anderson argues that establishing this conclusion, and thereby undermining the possibility of rational theology, is the primary aim of both Hume’s and Kant’s philosophical work (for Hume, see 134; for Kant, see 70). Anderson admits that neither philosopher was explicit that this is their primary aim but finds speculative evidence lurking for this interpretation nonetheless: “To defend a reading of the sort I have proposed, I must insist that Hume had his reasons for not being absolutely explicit about his aims. To attack theology openly was to invite a harsh response, as the ‘Specimen’ shows” (134); “Kant is not fully explicit about the antitheological implications of Hume’s question, perhaps because he wishes to avoid supporting the theological attack on Hume mounted by Priestley and the Scots” (83). [End Page 167] Perhaps Hume and Kant are not explicit about the main aims of their philosophical systems for these reasons, but perhaps these are simply not the main aims of those systems at all. Many of Anderson’s most important claims are similarly speculative, supported by a selective presentation of texts and an even more selective consideration of secondary literature. (E.g. Anderson makes extensive use of Kemp Smith as a foil, despite the advancements in scholarship on Hume and Kant in the near century since Kemp Smith’s books were first published.) There are also significant exegetical omissions. For example, although many scholars do expect to find Kant’s response to Hume in the Second Analogy, which Anderson does discuss, Kant is explicit that his answer to Hume generalizes from just the concept of cause to all pure a priori concepts. He thus also points to the Transcendental Deduction as the place...