Young Hume vs Old Hume: The passions and more

Was there a difference between "young Hume" and "old Hume"? Namely, did he actually repudiate the Treatise, or close to that?

I side with Mossner and others among older Hume interpreters and say yes, above all on the issue of the passions, but also on the radicalness of his skepticism. Per the link, I've already talked about the latter, and why we can't call later Hume a Pyrrhonist.

Some trends in modern neuroscience side with young Hume.

GQ, in a good, and in-depth, interview with Lisa Feldman Barrett, touches on this. A key takeaway, from the first "half chapter" of her new book, is the hot new idea in neuroscience — that, contra "old Hume" and 90 percent of thinkers before 2000, the brain did not develop "for" either thinking or feeling or other things as much as it did for running a body budget.

I would disagree with stress being a "withdrawal" from the body budget. But, the general idea that emotions — including deeper passions, though not called such by here — control the body's budget is interesting. (I also think she's probably wrong on some of the details in her ideas of how a body's budgetary system works.)

So, the Hume of the Treatise could perhaps be called an "emotional Pyrrhonist," then? He was more right than wrong. And, in a sense, anticipated some 19th-century and beyond trends in philosophy. But, of course, this risked him being considered seriously.

But, it didn't have to be that way.

He had the Dialogues published posthumously. Why not turning back to at least some ideas in the Treatise?

As he did not, it means we must take his rejection of it seriously. And, must affirm there was a rejection, contra Harris and many other Hume scholars of today's generation. 

On the passions, if Hume had continued, even gone further, down the road of the Treatise, this essentially would have meant rejection of large chunks of Enlightenment ideas. And, that wasn't happening. I think Hume recognized this. So, along with simply wanting to avoid the bad press, he wanted to distance himself from most the ideas advanced there. Surely, as part of this, now that he had become "established," he recognized that letting the Treatise, or any ideas from its nose, back under the tent would have meant the disintegration of the idea of "le bon David" among men of letters in general, and more specifically, among the likes of the French philosophes. Quelle horreur, some of them might have wondered if some of his early thought was akin to that of Rousseau!

That's why he told Beattie and other Scottish common sense philosophers it was unfair to bring up the Treatise and hold it against him, because he had written it anonymously knowing it would be controversial even before it was launched.

With this, I have finished my series of pieces on Hume, as influenced by James Harris' semi-new bio of Hume. I began with a "prequel" piece on refuting the charge of presentism as a way to try to pretend away Hume's racism (and Aristotle's and others' sexism). That piece links the whole set of pieces on Hume.