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Hume's Reception of Grotius

Hume's Reception of Grotius 64 Hume's Reception of Grotius a history of historization* PAULINE WESTERMAN* * Quentin Skinner once remarked that whenever a historian of ideas sets out to describe the 'influence' of author A upon author B he usually does so in order to understand the unknown by relating it to something familiar. In doing so he tends to obliterate fundamental shifts in the development of ideas. In Skinner's polemic words: "This whole repertoir of einfluss-studies in the history of ideas is based on nothing better than the capacity of the observer to foreshorten the past by filling it with his own reminiscences" . ? 1 In this respect tracing influences serves the same aim as the use of metaphors in scientific theories. Both tend to clarify things by simplifying them, both tend to reduce the unknown to that which is already known. This may account for the fact that an inquiry into the relationship between Grotius and Hume is almost exclusively an affair of Hume-specialists. Students of Grotius have little to gain by linking Grotius to the Scottish Englightenment: Scottish moral philosophy is not only generally less known, it is also more complex and more ambiguous than the logical deductive http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Grotiana Brill

Hume's Reception of Grotius

Grotiana , Volume 9 (1): 64 – Jan 1, 1988

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Publisher
Brill
Copyright
© 1988 Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands
ISSN
0167-3831
eISSN
1876-0759
DOI
10.1163/187607588X00037
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

64 Hume's Reception of Grotius a history of historization* PAULINE WESTERMAN* * Quentin Skinner once remarked that whenever a historian of ideas sets out to describe the 'influence' of author A upon author B he usually does so in order to understand the unknown by relating it to something familiar. In doing so he tends to obliterate fundamental shifts in the development of ideas. In Skinner's polemic words: "This whole repertoir of einfluss-studies in the history of ideas is based on nothing better than the capacity of the observer to foreshorten the past by filling it with his own reminiscences" . ? 1 In this respect tracing influences serves the same aim as the use of metaphors in scientific theories. Both tend to clarify things by simplifying them, both tend to reduce the unknown to that which is already known. This may account for the fact that an inquiry into the relationship between Grotius and Hume is almost exclusively an affair of Hume-specialists. Students of Grotius have little to gain by linking Grotius to the Scottish Englightenment: Scottish moral philosophy is not only generally less known, it is also more complex and more ambiguous than the logical deductive

Journal

GrotianaBrill

Published: Jan 1, 1988

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