Valuing Practices in Hume

Abstract

In spite of my long study of eighteenth-century British writing and my exposure to the many objections in that writing to extensive reliance on puns, I am going to organize this inquiry by three dif ferent meanings of my tide, Valuing Practices in Hume: (1) What sort of practices, according to Hume, are at work in exercising judgments of taste? (2) Why, according to Hume, do people value these valuing practices? (3) Why might we value some of Hume's practices? I will anticipate the final item by summarizing the course of my description: We will be following in Hume resourceful, even relentless, exposure of social and historical processes. I have in other venues described him as a founding figure of cultural studies. My main text will be the essay Of the Standard of Taste, but I will not confine myself to it. There are advantages to reading Hume as a systematic philosopher, even though he abandoned the systematic method of the Treatise of Human Nature before he reached the projected section on taste. It is very difficult to relate argument to argument from work to work, since Hume was elaborately strategic when he segmented his philosophy. He was clever in directing his address, in pacing and arranging his arguments, suggestive in his use of examples. But at the very least he encourages us to see his arguments about morals and his arguments about taste as casting light on each other.