Humes Aesthetics The Literature and Dire

Hume’s Aesthetics: The Literature and Directions for Research
Timothy M. Costelloe
Hume Studies Volume 30, Number 1, April (2004) 87-126.
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Hume Studies
Volume 30, Number 1, April 2004, pp. 87–126
Hume’s Aesthetics:
The Literature and Directions for
Research
TIMOTHY M. COSTELLOE
Introduction
While there is hardly an aspect of Hume’s work that has not produced contro
versy of one sort or another, deciphering and evaluating his views on aesthetics
involves overcoming interpretive barriers of a particular sort. In addition to what
is generally taken as the anachronistic attribution of “aesthetic theories” to any
thinker of the eighteenth century, Hume presents the added difficulty that unlike
the other founding-fathers of modern philosophical aesthetics, he produced no
systematic work on the subject, and certainly nothing comparable to his efforts
in epistemology, morals, politics, history, and religion.1 Even interpreting Hume’s
most definitive expression of his views on aesthetic questions—the famous essay
“Of the Standard of Taste”—is fraught with difficulties and, as the diversity of
views on the piece demonstrates, only the most confident reader would take it as
an unambiguous statement of Hume’s position.2
Some have also emphasized Hume’s relative neglect of phenomena to which
one would expect an aesthetician to be drawn. The Treatise, in Peter Kivy’s estima
tion, for instance, reveals an “almost total lack of interest . . . in works of art”—the
examples being confined to the beauty of nature and artifacts—and Peter Jones
writes that with the exception of literature, Hume’s “references to the arts . . .
are infrequent and fleeting. He almost never refers to music or to sculpture,
Timothy M. Costelloe is at the Department of Philosophy, The College of William and Mary,
PO Box 8795, Williamsburg, VA 23187-8795, USA.
e-mail: tmcost@wm.edu
88 Timothy M. Costelloe
his asides on painting are inconsequential, and architecture gains more than a
passing mention only in his letters from Europe in 1748; what little theoretical
or philosophical writing was available to him on these arts gets almost no men
tion.”3 Even the quality of Hume’s own critical acumen has been questioned.
Writing at the turn of the twentieth century, for example, George Saintsbury
could dismiss Hume’s “literary opinions” as “almost negligible” when separated
from his philosophical thought more generally; even if Hume had “worked them
into an elaborate treatise,” Saintsbury contends, “ . . . this would probably, if
remembered at all, be remembered as a kind of ‘awful example.’”4 Some three
decades later, one finds John Laird taking much the same view. While “It was
natural,” he says, “for [Hume] to regard literary criticism as one of the regions
in which his philosophy should be developed . . . , [p]osterity . . . has declined to
admit his eminence in this domain.” “Wordsworth,” Laird adds with seeming
approval, “called him ‘the worst critic that Scotland, a soil to which this sort of
weed seems natural, has produced.’” Although few contemporary commentators
would dismiss Hume’s views on literature and the arts in such stark terms, his
forays into criticism in the History of England do little to undermine John Stewart’s
blunt assessment that Hume’s “judgment of poets and playwrights was notably
bad.” At best, what Hume has to say is at odds with what one might expect from
a true judge in matters of literature.5
Hume’s success or failure as a critic, however, can and should be distinguished
from the form and content of any aesthetic theory his work suggests. The lack of
any systematic treatment notwithstanding, aesthetic questions clearly play a cen
tral role in Hume’s thinking and, as William Halberstadt writes, while his “major
philosophical works are not directly concerned with aesthetics,” a number of es
says explicitly address themes which now fall under that rubric, and, significantly,
“even in the major philosophical writings . . . there are numerous references to
it.”6 In the Advertisement to the Treatise, moreover, Hume declares his inten
tion to extend the investigations of the understanding and passions to include
an “examination of . . . criticism” (T 1.1; SBN xii). Although this task remained
unrealized, the importance he accorded aesthetic questions in his overall system
is evident in the inclusion of the same subject matter in his brief categorization
of “moral reasonings” at the end of the Enquiry concerning Human Understanding
(EHU 12.30, 33; SBN 165). Hume might never have treated the issues in a way he
apparently envisaged early in his career, but the language of eighteenth-century
aesthetics pervades his writings and is a resource on which he routinely draws.
Hume’s “interest in these issues was lifelong,” as Mary Mothersill puts it,7 and it
is not without reason that, although his views on beauty and taste are scattered
and unsystematic, they have been awarded a privileged place in the history of
aesthetics and have become, increasingly, a specific focus for students of his phi
losophy more generally.
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Hume’s Aesthetics 89
When the first book-length study of Hume’s aesthetics and its connections to
other parts of Hume’s philosophical system appeared in 1952, its author, Teddy
Brunius, could remark on how the subject had “not been investigated to any great
degree.” As the bibliography in Dabney Townsend’s recent (2001) monograph
devoted to similar issues demonstrates, the intervening half century has witnessed
a surge of interest in Hume’s approach to aesthetics.8 Although a disproportion-
ate part of the literature centers on “Of the Standard of Taste,” aestheticians and
Hume scholars alike have addressed a variety of issues raised by his work. In what
follows my aim is to provide a sense of these and to offer an overview of both the
debates that have ensued as well as the contributions different commentators
have made to understanding this part of Hume’s philosophy. The material is
organized thematically: I begin with the origins and influence of Hume’s aesthet
ics, before turning to the central doctrines of his approach and the commentary
inspired by “Of the Standard of Taste.” In the latter part of the paper I consider
the literature on Hume’s approach to tragedy and the various observations that
have been made concerning the parallel he draws between natural and artistic
beauty, on one side, and moral beauty, on the other. I conclude briefly with some
suggestions for areas where further research into Hume’s aesthetics might prove
both interesting and useful.
The Historical Context
Dubos, Locke, and Hutcheson

Although, as Townsend has recently reminded readers, Hume’s aesthetics cannot
be separated from the early modern preoccupation with issues of taste, beauty,
and sentiment more generally,9 three figures loom large in attempts to trace its
philosophical forbears, namely, the Abbé Jean-Baptiste Dubos, John Locke, and
Francis Hutcheson. The historical importance of Dubos’s Reflexions critiques sur
la poésie et sur la peinture is well established, and Hume’s references to it in the
“Early Memoranda” and some of the Essays (including “Of Tragedy”) is taken as
clear evidence that he had read it.10 Although the references are few and, as James
Noxon points out, Hume was equally sympathetic to Bernard de Fontenelle and
Edmund Burke,11 Jones has argued consistently that Dubos’s influence goes deeper
than one might at first suspect. This is true of Hume’s position in “Of the Rise and
Progress of the Arts and Sciences” and “Of the Standard of Taste,” which, Jones
contends, is “heavily indebted to him.”12 Jones’s case for the former connection
rests on the fact that of four points Hume makes in the essay “three of [them] occur
in Dubos”: that the arts and sciences only arise amongst a free people, that rival
states stimulate invention and check the territorial ambitions of their neighbors,
and that, once established, the arts and sciences can be transferred from a free
Volume 30, Number 1, April 2004

state, with the arts flourishing best in a civilized monarchy and the sciences in
a republic. The case for seeing Dubos as the inspiration behind “Of the Standard
of Taste,” on the other hand, is based largely on Hume’s appeal to “sentiment,”
his concept of judgment, and the “three traits mentioned by Dubos”—delicacy,
good sense, and freedom from prejudice—which characterize, in part, Hume’s
figure of the true judge.13 Jones’s thesis has been endorsed by Paul Guyer and,
most recently, supported by Townsend who, while detecting important differ
ences between the two philosophers, emphasizes how both Hume and Dubos are
of one voice in privileging “sentiment and experience over reason and inference
in judgments of taste.”14
While Jones, Guyer, and Townsend discover a significant source for Hume’s
aesthetics in Dubos, other commentators focus on what is perhaps the more
obvious, though no more straightforward, connections between Hume and the
philosophical legacy of Locke and Hutcheson. Although the specifics of Hume’s
debt to the latter have been a source of controversy,15 in the sphere of aesthetics, at
least, there is consensus that significant elements of the Inquiry into the Original of
our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue appear, albeit reformulated, in Hume’s approach to
beauty and taste. Harold Osborne, for example, places Hume squarely in the school
of “British eighteenth-century Empiricists [who] grounded aesthetic judgments on
felt pleasure and . . . who spoke of an ‘inner sense’ of beauty.”16 Others emphasize
Hume’s specific debt to Hutcheson’s view that “the word beauty is taken for the
idea raised in us, and a sense of beauty for our power of receiving this idea,” and,
like Katherine Everett Gilbert and Helmut Kuhn, many discern Locke’s “way of
ideas” between the lines of Hume’s writing.17
Hume’s close personal and philosophical relationship with Hutcheson is
well-documented, and, given the central role played by Lockean thought in
Hutcheson’s writing, one might expect elements of the former to exert some
influence on Hume’s aesthetics as well. The situation is complicated, however, by
the well-known scepticism with which he treats the “modern philosophy” in the
Treatise and first Enquiry. Hume focuses his criticism on the distinction between
primary and secondary qualities in particular, by means of which, “instead of
explaining the operations of external objects . . . , we utterly annihilate all these
objects, and reduce ourselves to the opinions of the most extravagant scepticism
concerning them” (T 1.4.4.6; SBN 227–8). At the same time, Hume himself cat
egorizes the “sense of beauty and deformity in action, composition, and external
objects” as a calm impression of reflection (T 2.1.1.3; SBN 276), and commenta
tors have gathered the fairly extensive textual evidence scattered throughout the
Treatise, Enquiries, and Essays to confirm the sentimentalist approach he takes to
both beauty and morals.
While the ambiguity in Hume’s position have led some, quite naturally, to
downplay his commitment to the distinction between primary and secondary
Hume Studies
qualities,18 writers on Hume’s aesthetics are more sanguine in recognizing its role
in his approach to beauty. Kivy expresses the view of many when he emphasizes
how Hume substitutes “sentiment” for the Lockean “idea,” and “like Hutcheson
. . . thinks that beauty is a ‘quality’ in objects which is the cause of our aesthetic
sentiments”; Hume “is not disinclined, at times,” Kivy adds, even “to refer to a
sense of beauty.”19 Jones offers a similar evaluation, emphasizing how “important
[it is] to remember that, properly speaking, beauty is the name of a sentiment,
although it is often extended by courtesy to apply to the quality of the object that
causes the sentiment.”20 For Hume, there are thus qualities in objects that account
for the sentiment of beauty or deformity, but the latter only arise because there is
a “fit”—a “match” or “natural aptness”21—between the object and a subject who
is capable of being affected in a certain manner. At the same time, however, many
are quick to emphasize that in his aesthetics, no less than in his epistemology,
Hume is unwilling to embrace the sceptical absurdities of idealism to which, in the
shape of Berkeley at least, Locke’s “way of ideas” leads. Indeed, Theodore Gracyk
argues that “Hume never commits himself to all of the premises of the sceptical
position,” and that “it is questionable whether he embraces an equation of beauty
and sentiment.”22 This assessment is perhaps difficult to square with Hume’s own
pronouncements to the contrary, but Gracyk does capture what Rochelle Gurst
ein has recently called the “very essence of taste,” namely, that “qualities such as
sweet and bitter, or beauty and deformity, are experienced as internal ‘sentiments.’
But at the same time they actually belong to the objects.”23 Hume’s apparent ac
ceptance of at least the logic of Lockean qualities has far-reaching consequences
for his position, and informs what many see as the central problem in “Of the
Standard of Taste,” namely, the attempt to reconcile subjective sentiments with
objective standards.
Yet, deciphering a debt to Locke and Hutcheson in Hume’s aesthetics does not
involve reducing his approach to the “way of ideas,” and the important concomitant
to recognizing the influence is to acknowledge the direction in which Hume takes
their doctrines. Kivy, for instance, argues forcefully that whereas Hutcheson moves
quite explicitly in the Inquiry “from the aesthetic to the moral . . . Hume moved in
just the opposite way—from the moral to the aesthetic.” This is significant because
it means that Hume’s view of aesthetics is colored by and extends his approach
to morals, and this, Kivy argues, gives it a decidedly “epistemic” flavor: for Hume,
that is, “we come to know, in a quite conscious and calculating way, that things are
useful, or have parts well-adapted to ends, as a necessary prologue to the arousal
of a sentiment of beauty.” Aesthetic perception then involves the “acquisition of
beliefs or knowledge,” and whereas Hutcheson’s principle of “uniformity amidst
variety” is at least a candidate analogue for a Lockean “quality” in the micro-struc
ture of matter, Kivy emphasizes, Hume’s concept of “utility” is never intended to
play such a role.24

In different ways, various commentators have emphasized other important

points of departure from Locke and Hutcheson. Halberstadt, for example, identi
fies “one area of significant change” between Hume and Hutcheson in the latter’s
principle of “uniformity amidst variety” and the fact that the “Hutchesonian in
ternal senses become internal sentiments or feeling in Hume’s treatment.” Carolyn
Korsmeyer stresses how, as distinct from Hutcheson, Hume refuses “to commit
himself to any surmise about the ‘real’ qualities in those objects are perceived
as beautiful,” and George Dickie focuses on the idea that unlike Hutcheson and
“other taste theorists” Hume makes no attempt to specify a “formula for the over-
all beauty of objects,” which leads him away from a Hutchesonian emphasis on
a “faculty.” “Hutcheson,” Dickie argues, “uses the consideration of simple cases
of uniformity to try to show that the sense of beauty is universal” while “Hume
restricts his parallel argument solely to drawing conclusions about characteristics
of experience rather than trying to infer an underlying faculty.” Thus, “Hume’s
version of the argument proves that uniformity and many other characteristics
are subjects of principles of taste.”25
Kant
Whereas questions about the origins of Hume’s aesthetics have been raised with
respect to Dubos, Locke, and Hutcheson, those concerned with its influence on
later aesthetic theories have taken up Hume’s relationship to aspects of Immanuel
Kant’s “Critique of Aesthetic Judgment” in the Kritik der Urteilskraft. Some have
emphasized Kant’s similar view that beauty is a feeling (Gefühl) in the subject and
not a property of the object; others see in Hume intimations of Kant’s distinction
between “dependent” and “free” beauty, and David Marshall emphasizes the “pos
sibility of common sense, in the sense of Kant’s idea of a ‘Gemeinsinn’” as Hume’s
focus in “Of the Standard of Taste.”26 Opinion is divided, however, upon how far
the influence extends. Some treat it as axiomatic. Dickie, for instance, claims that
the “German rationalists were, no doubt, the historical source of Kant’s conception
[of purpose],” but that his notion of beauty “has its antecedents in Hutcheson’s
view that ‘beauty’ refers to a feeling (pleasure) in us and Hume’s view that ‘beauty
is no quality in things themselves.’”27 E. F. Carritt goes even further, stressing that
“Kant’s philosophy of beauty owes nearly everything but its systematic form to
English writers . . . [while] his debt to Baumgarten, who had inaugurated German
aesthetics in 1750, is less,”28 and Jones goes further still, declaring unequivocally
that “Kant undoubtedly conceived the first part of his Critique of Judgment as a
response to Hume.”29
At the same time, there is no doubt some truth to the observation made by
Gilbert and Kuhn who, responding to Carritt explicitly, observe how “We can
. . . take piecemeal most of the topics treated by Kant and match his statements
Hume Studies
to earlier ones by . . . people [other than Hume].” Kant’s emphasis on the disin
terestedness of aesthetic pleasure, the non-intellectual character of judgments
of taste, and his distinction between pure and relative beauty, they claim, could
have come from almost any of the contemporary British writers.30 This possibility
is reflected in commentary that takes a more sceptical view of Hume’s presence in
the third Critique. As early as 1881 Gustav Zart provides a survey of British influ
ences on eighteenth-century German philosophy without mentioning Hume at
all, citing Hutcheson and primarily Burke as thinkers who most influenced Kant’s
approach to beauty.31 More recently, Gracyk has defended the thesis that “while
Kant borrows substantially from the British, his debt to Shaftesbury, Burke, and
Hume is exaggerated in standard readings.” The “primary influences on Kant, are
Addison, Hutcheson, Gerard, and Kames,” Gracyk argues, while “Hume and Burke
contribute to Kant’s mature aesthetics primarily as opponents.”32
Even those who decipher the prevalence of Humean doctrines in Kant are
quick to highlight fundamental differences in their approaches. Jones, for example,
emphasizes that the “moral and metaphysical implications of Kant’s aesthetic
judgments have no analogue in Hume,” and that Hume does not “make Kant’s
mistake of holding that individuating judgments of the form ‘This is beautiful’
are possible without concepts.”33 Guyer comments on how Hume’s “acceptance
of the purely natural and thus contingent existence of the standard of taste . . .
separates Hume . . . from Kant”; Gurstein points out how the Empiricists’ emphasis
on experience “set[s] them apart from Kant [who] . . . gave all emphasis to disin
terestedness and the autonomy of aesthetic delight, thereby making experience
irrelevant,” and Kulenkampff takes Hume to be amongst those British aestheti
cians whose failure to inquire into the validity of aesthetic judgment (welcher Art
von Geltungsanspruch eines Ästhetischen Urteils eigentlich ist) is what separates them
from Kant’s approach to taste in terms of an authoritative judgment (Kategorie des
Geschmacks als Urteilsinstanz). With such differences between the two thinkers in
view, one might concur with Anthony Savile’s evaluation that Hume and Kant
“are largely concerned with different issues . . . [and] we do better to see them as
complementing each other rather than competing.”34
Important differences notwithstanding, there is one area where many com
mentators have identified a decisive Humean presence in the third Critique, and
that is in the way Kant’s “Antinomy of Taste” appears to reformulate the argument
Hume develops in “Of the Standard of Taste.” Kant does not cite the essay explic
itly—although he does make reference to “The Sceptic” and parts of the History of
England35—and given Kant’s imperfect English, it is doubtful that he knew “Of the
Standard of Taste” in the original. However, a German translation by Johann Georg
Sulzer appeared in 1758 (only one year after its publication in English) under the
title “Von der Regel des Geschmacks,”36 and commentators generally assume that
Kant either owned a copy of the essay or had at least read it. Kulenkampff speaks for

many when he remarks that “Kant had in his library the german [sic] translation
of Hume’s essay,” and that “to read one text in light of the other seems plausible
. . . not only for reasons of interest in solving fundamental problems in aesthetics,
but also for uncovering links in the history of ideas.”37 Kivy seems to have been the
first to have brought attention explicitly to the possibility of understanding “Of
the Standard of Taste” in terms of a Kantian Antinomy. “Hume saw the problem
of taste as Kant was to see it some years later,” he writes, “as the resolution of a
dilemma which had, on one of its horns, the commonsensical notion that about
taste there is no disputing, and on the other the (to Hume) equally self-evident
precept that, as he put it, ‘where objects so disproportioned are compared together.
. . . The principle of the natural equality of tastes is then totally forgot.’”38 The point
has been underlined subsequently by a number of other writers. Commenting
on the Kritik der Urteilskraft §56, for example, Guyer observes how “Kant employs
two ‘commonplaces’ of taste to set up a dialectic of taste reminiscent of Hume’s
opening gambit in “The Standard of Taste,’” and Kulenkampff goes so far as to
say that the “Critique of Aesthetic Judgment can be read as an answer to Hume’s
essay.” Mothersill has also made this case forcefully, though she is inclined to see
the connection in the “subtext” of the essay rather than in the “official” version
defended by Hume. “Standards of taste are set by particular works of great and
lasting beauty,” she argues, and the verdicts of true judges “serve to recommend
the work judged to our attention.”39
Any comparison between the two works is clearly tempered by the potential
anachronism of rewriting an earlier argument in terms of a later one, as well
as by the aforementioned differences between Kant’s Critical philosophy and
Hume’s empiricism. When “Of the Standard of Taste” is understood in Kantian
terms, however, striking parallels between the respective arguments do emerge.40
Kant generates his Antinomy by juxtaposing two commonly held assumptions
or “commonplaces” (Gemeinorte) about taste: on one side, the assumption that
“everyone has his own taste” and, on the other, the view that “one can quarrel about
taste (though one cannot dispute about it).” The Antinomy then consists of a thesis
stating that an aesthetic judgment has subjective validity (not based on concepts)
and an antithesis that is has universal validity (that it is based on concepts) (KdU,
338). Kant solves the dilemma by showing that the contradictory maxims take
the same term in different but compatible ways. The conflict then arises because
the determinate and indeterminate senses of “concept” become confused in the
“commonplaces” about taste, and recognition of this fact transforms the contra-
diction into a dialectical illusion in which both principles “may both be true”
(KdU, 341). In a comparable way, Hume’s argument in “Of the Standard of Taste”
proceeds by juxtaposing two “species of common sense.” On the one hand, there
is a general assumption that in matters of taste there is no dispute (de gustibus non
est disputandum) and, on the other, recognition that there are in fact general stan-
Hume Studies
dards governing aesthetic judgments such that to claim the superiority of Ogilby
over Milton would be no less absurd than maintaining “a mole-hill to be as high
as TENERIFE or a pond as extensive as the ocean” (E 230–1). Hume, of course, does
not have the technical apparatus of Transcendental Idealism to draw upon, but he
proceeds to “solve” the contradiction by showing that, although beauty is a func
tion of an individual sentiment, there are also standards governing judgments of
taste. Although—as I detail below—precisely what Hume means by “standard” has
been a source of considerable disagreement, Hume and Kant are apparently of one
mind in recognizing the antithetical nature of human reason and the contradiction
it produces as a fundamental issue in philosophical aesthetics.
The Central Doctrines of Hume’s Aesthetics
As there is broad agreement concerning the sources of Hume’s aesthetics and that
it had at least some influence on Kant’s thinking, commentators also concur in
recognizing its central doctrines, and, further, that these constitute an applica
tion of principles familiar from his epistemology and moral philosophy. I have
already touched on some of these in the preceding discussion, but for the sake of
presentation, I want to specify two areas that have been taken as characteristic of
Hume’s theory.
Beauty as sentiment
First, as I indicated above, commentators are unanimous in emphasizing the sen
timentalism of Hume’s aesthetics and the concomitant view that there is a natural
“fit” between objects such that certain qualities cause affects in individuals capable
of being so affected. This is not to say that Hume takes “beauty” as a univocal cat
egory. Jones identifies three distinct kinds of beauty in Hume’s writings—beauty
of form, interest, and species—and emphasizes the role Hume gives to sympathy
and comparison in making aesthetic judgments, and Guyer details Hume’s distinc
tion between natural beauty involving an “immediate response” to qualities of an
object, and beauty as a “pleasurable sentiment which arises only when the percep
tion of the form of an object is supplemented by a concept or concepts brought to
bear on it by imagination or judgment.”41 All kinds of beauty, for Hume, however,
as Jones notes, “have in common the fact that they cause ‘a pleasure pretty much
the same.’” “Hume identifies beauty with pleasure, and pleasure with the main-
spring of our active existence,” as Gilbert and Kuhn express the same point, and
it “is clear in the main part of his writing,” they conclude, “that it is the natural,
emotional part of our animal frame which accounts for our taste.”42 The emphasis
Hume gives to “fit” and pleasure has led some to describe his theory as “causal,”
“the view,” as Jones characterizes it, that “certain objects cause normal percipients

under normal conditions to have an aesthetic sentiment, which itself causes them
to utter an aesthetic verdict or judgment.” Thus a “causal theory of taste . . . will
argue,” as Roger Shiner puts it, “that the nature of taste, and of judgments express
ing taste, are best understood as essentially parts of a causal process linking the
artwork(s) or other object of taste and the critic or appreciator.”43
Recognition that Hume holds such a view has not shielded him from criticism,
however. Mothersill points out that this focus on “fit” does not correspond to our
experience since people disagree over works of art rather than their sentiments;
individuals who disagree in their judgments are not interested about the state of
one another’s “organs and faculties,” but are curious to know what it is about a
work that produces the approbation or disapprobation in question. Hume, Moth
ersill suggests, comes close to capturing this fact in his comment that the “same
Homer who please at Athens and Rome two thousand years ago, is still admired at
Paris and London”; particular works, that is, rather than any sentiment raised in
individuals, set the standard for greatness in different genres.44 Shiner also criticizes
the causal theory—and by extension Hume—for its tendency to confuse genuine
causal explanation with simple description (what Shiner refers to as “criterial jus
tification”), and Noël Carroll argues that since for Hume “there are intellectual or
cognitive pleasures to be had from artworks,” this makes it “less persuasive to think
that the process of aesthetic response is essentially a causal one.” Finally, Gilbert and
Kuhn even accuse Hume of some metaphysical sleight of hand, contending that
the notion of “fit” involves a “sympathetic magic.” “Even for the sceptic Hume,”
they remark polemically, “the standard of taste is fixed by God who arranged the
several orders and classes of existence and gave to each its peculiar nature.”45
Reason and education

Although Hume takes beauty to be a sentiment of pleasure in the observer rather
than a quality in the object, he also recognizes that not all judgments of taste
are on the same footing. It is not enough to have a sentiment, one must have the
correct sentiment, and, as Kivy points out, “there are bounds of rationality to be
trespassed” so that “someone who finds Rembrandt garish or Van Gogh subdued
is slightly ‘off the rails,’ not merely of a different opinion.”46 This part of Hume’s
approach has led some to accuse him of elitism and to criticize what they see as
an unacknowledged prejudice in favor of the tastes of a middle-class eighteenth-
century gentleman; the same has also inspired praise for Hume’s apparently
democratic view that the capacity to be affected by a given object—and thus the
potential to become a person of good taste—is common to the species as a whole.
Of course, even to speak of “good” and “bad” taste immediately raises the ques
tion of standards or criteria in terms of which such judgments can be made. On
the face of it this poses a problem for Hume: he cannot have recourse to sentiment
Hume Studies
as a way of settling differences in value because “Sentiments in themselves,” as

Cohen and others emphasize, “are not right or wrong, true or false”;47 at the same
time, however, his apparently Lockean epistemology rules out any appeal to real
correlates in objects, which would commit him to a species of speculative meta
physics he at the same time rejects.
Articulating and responding to this problem occupies much of Hume’s at
tention in “Of the Standard of Taste” (which I consider below), but there are also
two aspects of his aesthetics more generally that go some way to overcoming the
difficulty. First, as Kivy’s point about “bounds of rationality” indicates, Hume puts
great emphasis on the role of reason and reflection in making aesthetic judgments.
This is not only a matter of there being standards which rule some judgments out
as absurd, but also, as Jones characterizes it, that Hume recognizes the need for a
“rationally justified viewpoint”—including public language, public criteria, and
debate—from which one’s judgment can be evaluated, criticized, and, if neces
sary, corrected. Jones lists exactness of perception, freedom from prejudice, and
good sense as the main characteristics of this general point of view.48 Other com
mentators have recognized the same strain in Hume’s thought. Steven Sverdlik,
for instance, focuses on what he takes to be Hume’s claim that “disagreements can
be rationally settled,” and Bennett Helm emphasizes that only “in light of ‘steady
and general points of view’ . . . [can] we can make sense of . . . a standard of taste
and so of the reasonable degree of certainty that the conclusions of our probable
reasonings have.” Claude MacMillan has even drawn comparisons between what
he calls Hume’s “point-of-view-principle” and the “aesthetic attitude” developed
by Edward Bullough and others. Ultimately, as Gurstein points out, practices which
involve such impartiality and lack of prejudice will include some obligation to
defer to the “most practiced judges,” and it is not surprising that, in the form of
the true judge, the aesthetic version of a general point of view plays such a central
role in “Of the Standard of Taste.”49
Second, and a corollary to the claims about reason and reflection, a number
of commentators have emphasized the place Hume assigns to educating the senti
ments or, as Sugg puts it, “cultivating taste, of broadening sympathy.” Individuals
have the potential for good taste, but, as Gilbert and Kuhn point out, the “as
sistance of our intellectual faculties” is always required to “’pave the way’ for the
right sentiment.” Or in Jones’s words, “since prejudice perverts both one’s natural
sentiments and one’s intellectual operations [sic] conscious reasoning is needed to
check for prejudice” and other factors that interfere with the natural fit between the
individual and the world.50 The “capacities of mind,” as Guyer expresses Hume’s
view, “ . . . are not just natural gifts. Rather, they must be cultivated,” especially
through practice and comparison. There are always “discrepancies,” as Osborne
puts it, which can intervene to disrupt the fit between world and individual, such
that, in James Shelley’s words, it is “only by the grace of education that the true

judge manages to transcend ‘his natural position.’” There might be “defects in

the individual constitution,” or some reason why on a particular day somebody
is not functioning at their best. There might well be “limits,” as Gurstein observes,
“in the sense that some people are simply born with a more sensitive eye, ear, or
palate,” but all aesthetic appreciation requires a “kind of worldliness [which is]
. . . both the proving ground and end result of practiced taste.”51
“Of the Standard of Taste”
Reactions to the essay

The single and singular work which, for good reason, has attracted by far the
most attention in the literature on Hume’s aesthetics, and to which I have had
occasion to refer a number of times already, is “Of the Standard of Taste,” an essay
which along with writings of Joseph Addison, Hutcheson, Burke, and Kant, has
become a founding text of modern philosophical aesthetics. The work is also of
particular importance for understanding Hume’s own approach to questions of
taste and beauty since it represents, as Mothersill puts it, his “final and indeed his
only attempt to deal with questions in critical theory . . . [such that] we may take
it as definitive of Hume’s position.”52 That the piece has become so significant is
not without irony given that it occupies only some 20 pages of Hume’s extensive
corpus and that, as Hume himself makes clear in a letter to his publisher William
Strahan, it was not composed as a position piece to express his views on aesthetics,
but was born of the need to compose “a new Essay on the Standard of Taste” to
replace two controversial essays—”On Suicide” and “On the Immortality of the
Soul”—judiciously withdrawn after their first publication. If not for these peculiar
circumstances the piece might never have been written at all.53
Hume begins “Of the Standard of Taste” with the observation that ordinary
language implies a general standard, and the philosophical mind naturally seeks
this standard out (E 228–9). Since “beauty is not a quality in things themselves,”
Hume then reasons, it must exist “merely in the mind which contemplates them.”
From this observation he draws the relativist’s conclusion that “each mind per
ceives a different beauty” (E 230), a philosophical prejudice Hume confounds by
suggesting that there are “general rules” (E 235) governing aesthetic judgments.
These rules, he says, are to be met with most clearly in the person of the critic or
true judge (E 241). Hume then raises a number of “embarrassing” questions that
threaten to throw the whole endeavor “back into the same uncertainty, from
which, during the course of the essay, we have endeavoured to extricate ourselves”
(E 241). Hume responds to this threat by acknowledging the co-existence of both
“peculiarities of manners” and uniformity of sentiments, an impossible juxtaposi
tion, which is clarified as the essay draws to a close (E 242ff.).
Hume Studies
While there is broad consensus that the essay and the argument it contains
are important milestones in the history of aesthetics, there is widespread disagree
ment on precisely how to evaluate and interpret it. Even the essay’s structure and
coherence have been a matter of dispute. Many regard it as a self-contained argu
ment and a first-rate piece of philosophy, and it has been variously described as
Hume’s “mature masterpiece,” “a philosophical classic,” “superb,” “subtle and
highly complex,” “a marvelous piece of literature,” and, according to Jonathan
Friday’s recent estimation, “generally agreed . . . [to be] the most valuable of the
large number of works on what we now call aesthetics to emerge from the intel
lectual and cultural flowering of the Scottish Enlightenment.”54 Some have also
commented on what they see as the well-crafted dialectic by means of which Hume
develops his argument.55 Other commentators, by contrast, are highly critical of
the essay’s construction and emphasize what they see as its internal incoherence.
Guyer reminds his readers that “Of the Standard of Taste” is “just an essay and far
from systematic”; R. F. Atkinson calls it a “not unsubtle . . . but relatively popular
work, and not as a whole very tightly argued,” and Dickie, though full of praise
for the superiority of Hume’s approach over those of his contemporaries, says the
essay is “exceedingly brief and gives the impression of having been put together
hastily.”56 Others go even further. Christopher MacLachlan says how he is “struck
by . . . [the essay’s] structural weaknesses . . . inconsistencies . . . [and] contradic
tions,” and even suggests that Hume’s use of irony “raises the question of just how
seriously we are to take some of the more conventional views contained in [it].”
In addition, Mothersill claims that a “careful reading [of the essay] discovers odd
continuities and inconsequences in Hume’s presentation—as if paragraphs, even
whole pages, had simply been omitted.” She goes on to argue that “something more
interesting is going on,” but only reconstructing the essay along different lines can
rectify Hume’s otherwise “gross . . . mistakes” and “want of coherence”; she takes
the essay as it stands to be “a conscious but not altogether candid failure.”57
Others have identified circular reasoning as part of Hume’s downfall. The
criticism seems to originate with S.G. Brown who claims to identify a number
of steps “which appear to involve either implicit or explicit contradictions,” and
finally reduce to an “elementary logical fallacy” of circularity where “Hume has
assumed what was to be proved in order to establish a corollary to the main argu
ment.”58 Others repeat the charge, although, unlike Brown, mostly they find ways
to extract Hume from a dilemma apparently of his own making. Noxon accuses
Hume of defining good art in terms of the good critic and the good critic in terms
of good art, but sees the circularity as part of the phenomenon under investiga
tion rather than as a weakness of Hume’s reasoning. The circle “circumscribes the
historical truth,” Noxon remarks. “Perhaps Hume’s logic here is better in reality
than in appearance.” Korsmeyer also comments on the same problem, although
she thinks that the “suspicion of circularity” can be cleared away “by grounding a

factor of the standard of taste in the art object itself,” and Kivy argues that although
Hume’s definition of beauty is “circular in some instances, [it] is not so in all.” The
circle can be “broken,” he argues, by focusing on delicacy, lack of prejudice, and
good sense, qualities of the true judge that are “all identifiable by marks other
than the critics’ approval of good art.” Thus, “having defined good art in terms
of good critics, Hume need not . . . ultimately define good critics in terms of good
art.” According to Kivy, however, breaking the circle does not save Hume from an
“infinite regress” involved in reducing aesthetic sentiment to matters of fact.59
Carroll argues against Brown, Korsmeyer, and Kivy that Hume’s argument suffers
from neither circularity nor infinite regress, suggesting instead that the issue of
the figure of the critic is “redundant”: for “if the five qualities [which characterize
the true judge] are understood as applying to anyone,” he asks, “then what need
do we have for the ideal critics? If I can cultivate the five qualities on my own,
then what reason would I have to consult [them]?” Finally, Jones takes the whole
discussion to be based on a misunderstanding of the argument. “This is not Hume’s
position,” Jones maintains. “He holds that when learning social practices, and the
conventions that govern them, we learn at the same time who currently counts
as the experts, and what are accepted as the best examples.”60
Those who emphasize the intractable incoherence of the essay, however,
generally trace Hume’s difficulties to the conventions of neoclassical criticism
from which, they argue, he is unable to distance himself. (Others, it should be
noted, view the essay as a significant break with the very same conventions.)61
This line of criticism has a long history, going back at least as far as Saintsbury
who berates Hume for denying that rules of composition can be fixed by reason
ings a priori while at once repeating the “orthodox cavils at Ariosto.”62 Brown
attributes Hume’s apparent logical woes to “an unconscious incompatibility of
assumptions”—adherence to a “subjective aesthetics” while assuming “an objec
tive standard of evaluation”—which he explains by Hume’s unacknowledged
allegiance to the “whole convention of neo-classic theory . . . [which] is insepa
rable from the principles of rules and invention.”63 A similar assessment is made
by Gilbert and Kuhn who charge Hume, along with the rest of the “eighteenth
century school,” of producing a merely “conventional” aesthetics. “One is forced
to admit,” they write, “that the kinship of taste [the school] found in inner
sense, sentiment, passion, or intuition is more with Boileau’s neo-classical rules
than with Ogier’s relativity of time and place. These writers worked with a new
mechanism—the frame of human nature—they turn out a product that differs
surprisingly little from the one that fits Descartes’ rationalism.”64 The same criti
cism is made by John Stewart who emphasizes “the anomaly of Hume’s teachings
which reinforce and encourage the tendency to search for subjective effects but
which, at the same time, insist upon a formal and objective unifying quality in
literature,”65 and by Mothersill who blames what she sees as the essay’s “series
Hume Studies
of bad arguments, non-sequiturs, and inconsistencies” on Hume’s misguided

adherence to the “official doctrine” of neoclassicism.66
As I already noted while discussing the place of reason and reflection in Hume’s
theory, another source of dissatisfaction with “Of the Standard of Taste” is what
some see as an insidious capitulation on Hume’s part to the social prejudices of
eighteenth-century society. Richard Shusterman takes the essay to reveal a “social
and class-hierarchical foundation of aesthetic judgment” that contradicts the “idea
of a natural uniformity of feeling and response” on which Hume otherwise bases
his aesthetics. This foundation lurks in the subtexts of Hume’s theory, Shuster
man argues, and although it is hidden under “some vague notions of foundational
universality,” Hume cannot “get on without appealing to social privilege.” Hume
identifies a universal basis in the “common sentiments of human nature” and the
idea of natural fit, but this is a “scandal of taste,” Shusterman maintains, because it
generalizes particular “historically privileged subjective preferences” into a “neces
sary standard for all subjects all times.”67 Charges of a similar sort are brought by
Savile, who thinks Hume is open to the “charge of foreign (or subcultural) chauvin
ism or parochialism”; Korsmeyer, who traces the essay’s “anomalies” to “Hume’s
uncritical reaffirmation of established standards of taste,” and Osborne, who argues
that Hume was unable to transcend the parochialism of his own century. “We have
more extensive knowledge than ever before of historical fluctuations of taste,”
Osborne contends, “and the self-evident aesthetic preferences of the eighteenth
century now seem to us complacently parochial prejudices.”68
Needless to say, not everybody finds this direction of criticism either appropri
ate or enlightening, and nobody has expressed their disquiet more polemically
than Cohen. “The certainty [of such critics],” he writes, “is philosophically as
obnoxious as the certainty they identify in Hume that there is no such standard
. . . this carping against Hume in the name of our superior awareness of economic,
political, and social influences is itself only one more dogma.”69 Shelley has re
sponded to Shusterman specifically, by arguing that, since, on Hume’s view, there is
nothing special or “natural” about the taste of the true judge, there are no grounds
for the charges Shusterman brings against him. Of course, people routinely fail to
perceive certain qualities that account for the beauty of an object, but this does
not undermine Hume’s claim that “the human mind is so structured that the per
ception of certain qualities in objects naturally gives it pleasure and displeasure.”
What separates the true judge from everybody else, Shelley emphasizes, is percep
tual acuity, and “while everyone’s taste is not equal . . . everyone’s taste is equally
natural, in the sense that no one ever feels an inappropriate sentiment based on
the qualities perceived.”70 Understood in this way, Hume’s theory is “not elitist in
our contemporary political sense,” as Gurstein writes, because its practice does not
exclude anyone “arbitrarily.” On the contrary, “anyone who gives him or herself
over to the rigors of the practice is welcome to join and dispute with the public

whose judgments do carry weight.” In fact, what makes true judges admirable is
that they have achieved excellence in a particular field, and this is the reason why
the joint verdict of true judges is binding. As Shelley puts it, the verdicts “express
nothing but our own tastes: they are, in essence, nothing but the verdicts of our
perceptually better selves.” If one emphasizes this strain of Hume’s thinking, then
far from being elitist, Hume produces “a theory,” in Wieand’s words, “which makes
the standard of taste an expression of the best potentialities of human nature.”71
The search for a standard

As my discussion of the literature so far should indicate, the various aspects of
Hume’s approach to questions of beauty and taste converge, albeit from different
directions, on a single fundamental question for philosophical aesthetics, namely,
how to understand the apparent contradiction between the subjective character
of aesthetic judgments, on the one hand, and, on the other, the fact that they are
governed by general standards or criteria to which any reasonable person should
assent. The paradox can be traced to various sources—Hume’s adherence to neo
classicism as Mothersill et al. argue, or, as S. K. Wertz proposes, to Hume’s view
that rules can both create prejudice and correct it.72 Most commentators, however,
take the central problem of Hume’s essay to be a philosophical consequence of
the sentimentalist epistemology he takes from Locke and Hutcheson, and it is also
raised, as I indicated above, by the emphasis on reason and education attached
to the causal theory of taste. Further, as Hume makes clear at the outset of the es
say, the issue of sentiment and standards has its source outside of philosophy as
well. For even “the most careless enquirer,” he remarks, cannot but recognize the
“great variety of Taste, as well as of opinion, which prevails in the world” and the
tendency to dismiss as “barbarous whatever departs widely from our own taste and
apprehension” (E 226–7). At the same time, Hume is as unwilling to accept the
“extravagant scepticism” which follows from the logic of “the modern philosophy”
as he is to deny common experience which teaches that certain things have been
“universally found to please in all countries and in all ages” (E 231). Seen in this
way, rather than committing an “elementary logical fallacy,” Hume is emphasizing
that aesthetic judgments involve a contradiction, and articulating a fundamental
philosophical puzzle and attempting to find its solution. “It is natural to seek out
a Standard of Taste,” as he says in a much quoted passage, “a rule, by which the
various sentiments of men may be reconciled; at least, a decision, afforded, con-
firming one sentiment, and condemning another” (E 229).
Many commentators follow this train of thinking and understand the essay
as Hume’s attempt to defeat the sceptic’s challenge by showing how general stan
dards govern the aesthetic judgments that individuals make. Mothersill recognizes
this challenge as the motivation behind the essay, as does Carroll; Guyer sees
Hume Studies
Hume’s aim as ruling out the sceptic’s claim on the grounds that it is “not in fact
genuine common sense”; Gracyk emphasizes how “Hume consistently grounds
taste in sentiment . . . [while] at the same time [he] . . . consistently worries that
this cornerstone is a stumbling block for the objectivity of standards of taste,” and
Wieand writes how “Hume agrees with the sceptic that beauty is not a property of
objects,” but at the same time “does not agree that there is no standard of taste.”
The “chief problem of his essay,” Wieand concludes, “is to reconcile the existence
of a standard with the subjective character of aesthetic objects.” Savile also sees
Hume to be searching for a “manner of resolving differences about taste that avoid
the extremes of a scientistic conception of aesthetic reality and of radical subjectiv
ism”; Kulenkampff writes that “It is the very aim of his essay to reveal the nature of
such a standard of taste, and to show how it works, thereby assuring the objectivity
of aesthetic judgments,”73 and Friday emphasizes how “’Of the Standard of Taste’
discusses what support philosophy can give to the common-sense view that there
is a right and wrong or a better and worse taste.”74
Having accepted that the aim of the essay is to reconcile the opposition be-
tween sentiments and standards, the difficulty lies in understanding exactly how
this reconciliation is achieved and exactly what Hume means when he speaks
of a “standard of taste.” As Cohen writes, “It is clear that this essay is meant to
be support for Hume’s assertion that there is what he calls ‘a standard of taste,’
[but] [n]othing else is clear, not even what a standard of taste is, or would be.”75
Cohen’s sense of bewilderment is hardly unwarranted given that Hume initially
characterizes his search for a standard in terms of a “rule” or “rules of art,” but
then seems to discover it in the rare character of the true judge: “Strong sense,
united to delicate sentiment, improved by practice, perfected by comparison, and
cleared of all prejudice, can alone entitle critics to this valuable character; and the
joint verdict of such, wherever they are to be found, is the true standard of taste
and beauty” (E 241). Not surprisingly, much of the literature attempts, in various
ways, to reconcile or at least explain what Wieand has aptly referred to as Hume’s
“two standards of taste.”76
Wieand himself addresses the issue by finding a way to preserve the intelligibil
ity of both definitions. He takes the first to be a claim about the causal relationship
between the properties of an object and the observer, and the second as a “guide to
what the rule is.” Thus a “standard of taste consists in rules of art linking proper-
ties and sentiments of beauty and deformity,” and when nothing intervenes to
disrupt the fit between object and judge “certain properties of objects will cause
us to have feelings of aesthetic pleasure and displeasure according to the rules, and
such rules constitute the standard of taste.” Of course, various factors usually do
intervene and one consequence of this is the possibility that true judges—even
in joint verdicts—will be mistaken. Thus, Wieand reasons, the joint verdict of
such judges cannot itself constitute the standard of taste although it can serve as

a “practical standard of taste” indicating what the rule, albeit unrealized, amounts
to. As such, there is a “sense,” Wieand concludes, in which the standard of taste
is both a rule and a joint verdict.77
In partial response to Wieand’s argument, Shelley has also attempted to
preserve the integrity of what he calls Hume’s “double standard of taste” while
explaining why Hume should move so ambiguously from one to the other.78
According to the first definition, Shelley maintains, rules of art “constitute a
standard by which we can determine whether any particular work of art merits
our approval”; the appeal to critics specifies the criteria individuals must possess
such that their joint verdict would be taken as the de facto standard. The impor
tant difference between the two, however, is that “whereas in the first Hume seeks
to provide a standard for judging works of art, in the second he seeks to provide
a standard for judging critics who provide a standard for judging works of art.”
Shelley suggests that Hume actually prefers the “more powerful” appeal to rules
since that would settle disputes by reconciling different sentiments. Since rules
of this sort are difficult to specify (Hume, Shelley observes, does not provide any
himself) he resorts to the weaker, but more reliable option: a joint verdict merely
confirms or condemns, but at least the qualities required for such judgments (the
five criteria marking the true judge) can be specified with relative ease.79
With the exception of Shelley and Wieand, interpreters of the essay take
Hume’s two standards as different expressions of a single definition, and attempt
to reconcile them by favoring either one expression or the other. On the one
hand, there are commentators who side with Hume’s emphasis on the critic, and
are willing to identify the standard with the joint verdict of true judges. On this
view, “The standard of taste,” as Kivy writes, “ . . . is set by those qualified to give
judgment on the basis of sentiment. And thus the question What is good art? is
easily answered. Good art is the art which good critics—those who are fit to judge
by sentiment—approve.”80 “For Hume . . . there is no other standard than the joint
verdict of the most practiced critics over time,” as Gurstein puts the same point,
so that taste is “best understood as akin to practical wisdom . . . in judgments of
quality.” Shiner makes a similar claim, identifying the standard of taste with the
five criteria of the true judge, as does Korsmeyer as part of her explanation for
“Hume’s uncritical reaffirmation of established standards of taste,” and Sugg, who
endorses Hume’s claim that the “standard of taste is precisely ‘the joint verdict of
such [judges], wherever they are to be found.’”81 The same emphasis is to be found
in Osborne’s criticism of Hume’s putative parochialism, in Nick Zangwill’s claim
that Hume’s “underlying idea” is that correct judgment is to be found in sound
sensibility of the good critic, and in Christopher Perricone’s consideration of
the body in aesthetic judgments. The latter identifies the standard of taste with
the joint verdict of true judges, but with the added suggestion that the standard
is always compromised by physical and physiological conditions, especially the
Hume Studies
age of the critic in question. Finally, Malcolm Budd takes a similar view of the true
judge, describing him as the “litmus paper of aesthetic value.” Budd goes on to
criticizes Hume for his “blithe optimism” that there will be uniformity amongst
true judges, and the unwarranted assumption that “human sentimental nature
. . . [is] uniform within and across cultures and unchanging over time.”82
While these commentators focus on the figure of the true judge in order to
clarify Hume’s aim in the essay, others, in various ways, emphasize his character
ization of the standard as a rule or principle for settling disputes; the rule is then
generally seen as manifest in the joint verdict of true judges rather than being con
stituted by it. Jones emphasizes this as the way to understand Hume’s standard, as
does Mothersill, who takes Hume to accept (mistakenly in her view) that there are
“laws of taste”; she sees the verdict of true judges doing no more than confirming
one’s judgment. If it were more than this, she insists, for “then without having ever
read or appreciated any poetry at all, I could know which poems are beautiful and
which not, and that is absurd.” Only Hume’s allegiance to the “official doctrine”
of neoclassicism, Mothersill argues, forces him to seek common qualities which,
being impossible to discern, compels him to the “fall-back position” of requiring
an expert—the “true judge”—who is capable of discerning them.83 MacLachlan
is inclined to the view that “the good critic bases his judgments on general rules
of taste,” and Steven Sverdlik argues that Hume’s theory “rests upon the idea that
there are rules or principles of taste, and that aesthetic rationality consists in dis
covering and applying them.” The “correct position” is then “identified with the
evaluation that an ideal critic would make under ideal conditions.” In this sense,
to have a standard, as Helm puts it, “is to have a general rule that is endorsed” or, as
Sugg emphasizes, a constant judgment open to correction.84 Noxon takes a similar
view, saying that the “Standard is to be formulated in terms of the features of the
works which give . . . human satisfaction,” where “satisfaction” is to be measured
in “what a succession of connoisseurs has chosen to preserve”; aesthetic standards
cannot be reduced to the judgments of the critic, he argues, but they can be derived
from them.85 Finally, Guyer argues for the view that the standard of taste plays both
a “regulative “ and “constitutive” role—it specifies a “common canon of admired
objects” for an individual’s pursuit of aesthetic pleasure, and functions in “not
merely redirecting an individual’s pursuit of aesthetic pleasure but actually figur
ing in the origination of his pleasure or in related matters.”86
Other commentators have combined this emphasis on rules with the causal
aspects of Hume’s approach. Cohen, for example, argues that there is a “causal law
. . . linking certain properties of the object . . . with certain feelings, sentiments
that occur in the observer. The form of such a rule would be just this: Property P
causes feeling F.” These sorts of rules are “already there,” Cohen argues, and become
correctly applied and thus manifest in the characteristics and joint verdict of true
judges.87 Townsend also emphasizes that rules arise from the causal relationship

between object and observer, but argues further that they “are not themselves the
standard . . . because the rules . . . are determined independently of the judges.”
Rules, however, can be cited “to identify the qualities in question.”88 The strongest
version of this interpretation is offered by Kulenkampff who locates the standard
in aesthetic qualities that are “really in the object” and thus form “reliable indi
cators of objective matters of fact.” Rules discovered in this way “constitute an
objective standard of taste,” Kulenkampff maintains, and true judges function as
the “best epistemic instruments” for detecting the aesthetic qualities in question.89
This sort of view is difficult to maintain in the face of Hume’s refusal to accept the
consequences of the primary/secondary distinction, and others would find it more
accurate to say with Savile that “conformity to [rules and principles] supposedly
evokes the sentiments of good judges, and not the qualities themselves for which
sound judges are claimed to serve as the standard.”90
Another possibility suggested by some commentators is that although there
are rules of art, they are not intended to resolve aesthetic disputes whether in terms
of qualities or sentiments. Or, as Peter Railton characterizes it, the “‘joint verdict’
of expert opinion is offered . . . as a solution to the problem of finding a standard
of taste, not as a way of saying what constitutes aesthetic value.”91 On this view,
Hume’s standard of taste might be termed “sceptical,” as Friday has recently argued,
because rules hold out only the possibility of agreement. This imposes “a more
modest restraint upon the scope of the sceptic’s argument,” Friday maintains, and
commits Hume to no more than providing descriptions about certain phenomena,
rather than attempting a normative reconciliation of divergent tastes.92 Dickie takes
a similar view. He understands Hume’s standard as a “way of making a decision
that is sufficient for settling disputes” rather than a means for discovering criteria
to distinguish between good and bad art. The standard consists of positive and
negative principles (Dickie uncovers nineteen in all), and the joint verdict of judges
then represents the “particular merits or demerits in works of art” based on these
criteria. In Dickie’s view, Hume does not attempt an “overall evaluation” of a work
of art or provide a way of distinguishing good critics, but is interested primarily “in
giving us a general way of discovering the principles of taste, the method of expe
riencing or envisioning a candidate’s merit or defect singly and in high degree—a
method available to everyone.”93 In a similar way, Gracyk also rejects the idea that
the standard is intended as a straight forward way of settling disputes. Hume’s em
phasis, he argues, is on the fact that “Because there is uniform sentiment that one
taste among the diversity of tastes is superior, that taste is indeed superior.” Even
those lacking delicate taste can reflect upon the fact that there is a minority who
do possess it, Gracyk argues, and this realization “yields sympathetic pleasure and
thus approbation.” So Hume’s standard does not provide a rule for settling disputes
at all, but characterizes a process for “evaluating pleasures”: the standard involves
“a comparison of tastes in which sentiments becomes the object of sentiment.”94
Hume Studies
“Of Tragedy”
In addition to “Of the Standard of Taste,” the other essay that has generated interest
and debate is “Of Tragedy,” Hume’s contribution to the long-standing question
as to why, in a well-written tragedy, otherwise painful emotions are a source of
pleasure. The essay’s appeal is due, in part, to its perennial theme, but also to the
originality of Hume’s solution—his “Principle of Conversion” or “Conversion
Hypothesis”95—which, as Brunius emphasizes, represents a break with a tradition
still dominated in the eighteenth century by Aristotle’s Poetics.96 For the “impulse or
vehemence, arising from sorrow, compassion, indignation,” as Hume expresses his
central thesis, “receives a new direction from the sentiments of beauty. The latter,
being the predominant emotion, seize the whole mind, and convert the former into
themselves, at least tincture them so strongly as totally to alter their nature. And
the soul, being, at the same time, rouzed by passion, and charmed by eloquence,
feels on the whole a strong movement, which is altogether delightful” (E 220).
There seems to be general and long-standing agreement concerning the
outlines of this solution, that, as Walter J. Hipple, Jr. characterizes it, in a tragedy
the “pleasures of art exceed the pain of the melancholy passions suggested by the
subjects . . . , and by this predominance ‘convert’ the excitement of the distressful
emotions to their own aggrandizement.” It is thus the “talents and faculties” of the
artist and the beauty of language that “change a passion into another, even an op
posite, passion under the influence of a predominating emotion.”97 Margaret Paton
expresses a similar view, though, criticizing Hipple explicitly, she takes Hume’s
focus to be on tragedy as the object of a spectator’s emotions rather than its cause.
Hume’s main principle, she writes, is that “if two passions are experienced simul
taneously the predominant will absorb the subordinate and receive additional
force from it, even although [sic] the passions are of a contrary nature. Thus the
aesthetic emotion, the sentiment of beauty, being the predominant passion in the
spectator’s experience, ‘seize[s] the whole mind’ and converting the subordinate
passions of sorrow, terror, anxiety, etc. is strengthened by them.”98 Thus, as Alex
Neill puts it succinctly, Hume’s conversion theory rests on the thought that “the
positive and negative elements in our experience of tragedy . . . have different
sources. Our negative emotional responses result from our attention to what is
depicted . . . [while] our pleasure, by contrast, is initially and primarily due to our
awareness of the manner of depiction.”99
While there is general agreement that Hume’s solution to the problem of
tragedy involves a distinction between the pain of emotion and the pleasure of
aesthetic depiction, however, opinion is divided over precisely what he means
by “conversion.” Susan Feagin even criticizes him for failing to clarify “how the
‘dominance’ of imagination and expression is to be achieved,” thus leaving the
precise “mechanics of conversion” entirely unexplained.100 Brunius, on the other

hand, identifies this mechanism in the “mutual intercourse” of the passions, and
Flint Schier finds it in the conversion of the emotion itself—“painful sorrow”
becomes “pleasant terror.”101 Robert Yanal, by contrast, denies that Hume even
holds a conversion theory at all “if such a theory,” he writes, “implies that the
pain of ‘melancholy passions’ is converted into pleasure.” Sorrow itself is not made
pleasant, Yanal emphasizes, but the “beauty and eloquence in the depiction of the
tragic events cause pleasure sufficient to ‘overpower’ any other unpleasantness.”
The tragedy as a whole will be a source of pleasure even while painful emotions
remain the source of pain.102 Yet, as Neill points out in responding to Yanal, there
is no reason to assume that this is the only way to understand the notion of con-
version: conversion need not imply “eradication of one passion by another,” but
might involve a process whereby passions “mingle and unite.”103
Other commentators seem less worried about the “mechanics” of conversion
than the general adequacy of Hume’s proposal for solving the paradox that the
essay takes as its central theme. Eric Hill, for one, points out that Hume explains
neither why the calm passions predominate (when it is more plausible that sorrow,
terror, and anxiety should win out) nor why subordinate passions convert rather
than simply strengthen the predominant ones. Moreover, the various examples
Hume provides in the essay (E 221–4), Hill charges, hardly corroborate the Principle
of Conversion, and there is difficulty even in postulating that a subordinate move
ment is converted into a predominant one.104 In addition, Mark Packer points out
that if Hume’s account of tragedy were correct “then the viewer would depart from
the theater feeling only pleasure and no pain” when the “truth of the matter is that
the two effects, the positive and the negative, are often felt simultaneously rather
than one replacing or absorbing the other.” This, Packer argues, is precisely what
needs to be explained, and by leaving this unanswered Hume does not produce a
“solution . . . , but a subterfuge.”105
Budd goes further, faulting Hume for the general implausibility of the as
sociationist principle upon which his solution relies. Hume’s main focus, Budd
argues, lies in explaining a pleasure which “retains all the features and outward
symptoms of distress and sorry,” but without any of the unpleasantness involved
when such emotions are “aroused by real, rather than artistically represented,
tragic incidents.” Thus “he must explain how a negative emotion is transformed
into a positive emotion, rather than merely add a specified pleasure to the nega
tive emotion.”106 According to Budd, then, there is no reason to think that the
experience of a well-written tragedy involves a process of transformation at all.
For “it is certainly possible,” he writes, “to experience two emotions concurrently
(admiration and envy, say), one positive and the other negative, one stronger than
the other, the ‘predominant’ emotion not effacing, overpowering and converting
the weaker emotion: it is not a sufficient condition for the Humean transformation
of concurrent emotions that one is stronger than the other.”107
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In a similar vein, Schier focuses on the “associationist principle of hedonic

charge transfer which Hume relies on” to explain “the metamorphosis of painful
terror into pleasant terror.” On Hume’s account, Schier argues, either the violent
emotions like pity and fear “change their hedonic value”—a view he considers im
plausible for the reasons laid out by Budd—or there is a “transfer of vivacity” where
the liveliness of a subordinate emotion “is transferred to the dominant emotion.”
Both alternatives, Schier charges, are “highly dubious operations” because while the
tragic situation might be “painful and rare,” it is not impossible that two emotions of
distinct charge or degree of liveliness—love and hate, for example—might co-exist
rather than being “fused” in the way Hume supposes.108 Indeed, as Schier expresses
his view elsewhere, Hume simply “got the explanandum wrong. It seems just wrong,”
he continues, “to suggest that our reactions to fictive terrors do not retain their pain
ful or disturbing character. . . . It is not just that he [Hume] is wrong to suppose that
terror and anxiety don’t retain their painfulness in the theatre. He is even wrong to
suppose that we always enjoy or find delight in the experience of tragedies.”109
As Neill points out, however, such charges are damning only if Budd and Schier
have correctly characterized Hume’s position, and this they have failed to do, he
maintains, since Hume has “something completely different in mind.”110 In fact,
according to Neill, Hume takes unpleasantness to be intrinsic to some passions, and
rather than conceiving of a “hedonic charge” which leads us to experience normally
unpleasant passions as pleasurable, for Hume “what is converted or given ‘a new di
rection’ . . . is not the passion itself but rather the ‘emotion’ or ‘spirit’ which ‘attends
a passion.’” Thus “On this picture,” Neill concludes, “our experience of tragedy has
two main affective components: aesthetic delight, generated in us by the display of
artistry in a well-written tragedy, and the ‘uneasiness’ of ‘the melancholy passions’
which are generated by our sympathy with the characters.”111 This is not to say that
Neill himself finds Hume’s account to be adequate: as he remarks elsewhere, Hume
seems to have missed the “phenomenology of (at least much of) our experience of
tragedy” since we take “real pleasure” in works where “real distress” remains uncon-
verted.112 Indeed, Neill’s own criticism of the essay is directed less at the vagueness of
“conversion” or Hume’s reliance on a “discredited” Cartesian picture of the passions
and the mind, than at the “more fundamental problem” that it “is not grounded
in any sustained thought about tragedy” at all, representing instead Hume’s inter
est in the “general psychological mechanisms . . . that ‘account for’ and make this
phenomenon possible.”113 There are a wide variety of works which involve the same
paradox as tragedy, Neill points out, and Hume is unable to explain why tragedy in
particular—whether “well-written” or not—involves the paradox of pleasure from
pain. The problem, again, lies in Hume’s apparent failure to appreciate our complex
and subtle experience of tragedy; how different works produce different kinds of
pleasure, and that, in addition to being “happy or enjoyable or delightful,” tragedy
can also be “overwhelmingly harrowing and disturbing.”114

Beauty and Morals
Perhaps one of the more intriguing aspects of Hume’s aesthetics, and still one of the
more unexplored, is the comparison he routinely draws between beauty in nature
and art, and moral beauty. Hume does not develop the comparison in any system
atic way, but his scattered remarks are highly suggestive, and they have inspired
some to highlight ways in which Hume’s aesthetics and moral theory might be
compared and contrasted. There are three areas where the parallel is noteworthy.
First, commentators have focused on how Hume takes aesthetic and moral
judgments to be similar in kind. Both kinds of judgment are made “without regard
to our own desires,” as Brunius emphasizes, and the only difference between them,
as Mothersill puts it, “is that virtue pleases ‘after one particular manner’ and beauty
after another”; there is an “elision of morality and taste,” as she writes elsewhere,
so that “the good poem, the fine house, the good deed, the virtuous man [sic] are
all under the umbrella of being pleased by acquaintance.” Or “moral beauty and
deformity have the same basis as their aesthetic cousins . . . [in] sentiment,” as
Townsend writes, and “both depend on pleasure and pain.”115 Jones points out more
specifically how Hume’s causal theory underlies both phenomena. “Moral and
aesthetic judgments are caused by sentiments of certain sorts,” he writes, “which
are themselves caused by objects of certain sorts when perused by minds of a certain
constitution.”116 Halberstadt draws the comparison precisely, and attempts to show
the direct parallel between the origin of both moral and aesthetic sentiments in
agreeableness and utility. In “Hume’s moral philosophy,” he contends, “the appro
bation of the moral sentiment is excited by mental qualities useful or immediately
agreeable to ourselves or others. There are numerous passages in Hume to suggest
that he intended a similar analysis in aesthetics.” Halberstadt does not claim that
Hume presents the two cases in this way, but, he argues, the logic is clearly the
same: “the external qualities of objects which excite the approbation of taste are
those qualities which give pleasure to a percipient because they are immediately
agreeable to the objects themselves (if the objects are animate ones) or to others,
or useful to the objects themselves (again, if animate) or others.”117
The second point of comparison which, as I noted above, forms a natural
corollary of Hume’s sentimentalism, is his claim that both aesthetic and moral
taste presuppose general standards and the capacity of individuals to reflect upon
and if necessary correct erroneous judgments. It is then only a short step to see in
Hume’s moral philosophy a figure comparable to the true judge in “Of the Stan
dard of Taste.” Atkinson, for instance, speculates on whether Hume considered
the possibility of a true judge in the case of morals, especially as he takes Hume’s
aesthetics to yield “something not certainly provided in morality, namely, a nor
mative standard. Hume might have tried to develop the notion of a competent
‘critic’ in morality too,” Atkinson says, “but, apart from the odd reference . . . to
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a man of temper and judgment, he did not do so. Whether this was a considered
omission is hard to say.”118 Geoffrey Sayre-McCord expresses greater confidence in
the comparison, remarking that “the general point of view, as it describes a stan
dard in morals, parallels to an extraordinary degree the point of view of a qualified
critic.” Both involve taking a standpoint beyond our own situation, he emphasizes,
and depend upon a gift of nature, freedom from prejudice, and judging whether
something is “well-suited to the serving of certain purposes.”119 Cohen draws the
same comparison by suggesting that Hume’s aesthetic and moral philosophy
involve a version of an “ideal creature” theory in which “although it is true that
the object pleases some of us and not others, it remains to determine whose feeling
is fit to count as a standard.” In the moral philosophy, this question is answered
in the figure of the “impartial spectator,” while in “Of the Standard of Taste,” the
same role is played by the true judge. So, “in his moral theory Hume explains the
difference between virtue and vice in terms of the feelings of an ‘impartial spec
tator,’” Cohen concludes, and “[i]n this regard, his moral theory is formally the
same as his theory of taste.”120
A third aspect that some commentators have noted is how Hume takes
aesthetic judgment to be a significant factor in educating the moral sentiments.
Gurstein makes the general point that in the eighteenth century taste “was as
much a moral attribute of the self as it was a faculty of judgment about the world,”
and that “by attaining a delicacy of taste, one became a certain kind of person.”
Thus for Hume, as M. A. Box emphasizes, a “fine taste’ for the sciences and liberal
arts helps in two ways: in the collateral cultivation of judgment and good sense
. . . and in channeling the passions from ‘rougher and more boisterous emotions’
toward the ‘tender and agreeable.’” This is a point also emphasized by Sugg who
connects a refined taste with autonomy and the capacity for critical thought.
“Hume’s aesthetics issues in a method of practical criticism and verification,” he
writes, “valuable as a moral conditioner and productive of provisional but care
ful judgments.”121 Dickie, on the other hand, sees Hume making a connection
between morality and works of art themselves. In “Of the Standard of Taste,” he
argues, Hume “goes to considerable length to try to show that the representation
of immorality without the appropriate moral point of view is blamable and a defect
in a work of art.” So on Hume’s view, art can be morally as well as aesthetically
defective, and though the former does not contribute to the ugliness or beauty of
a work of art, it will certainly reduce its value.122
At the same time as they make these connections between aesthetic and moral
beauty, however, commentators are careful not to press the analogy too far, and
some have indicated differences between the two cases. Townsend, for example,
writes that “beauty falls more on the side of immediate sense; moral judgment
more on the side of intellectual discrimination,” and emphasizes that, unlike their
aesthetic counterparts, moral sentiments influence action that redounds to the

character of a person. Cohen also tempers his claim about Hume’s “ideal creature”
theory with the observation that “in the moral theory [Hume] refers to the feel
ings of only an individual person, one impartial spectator; while in the theory of
taste he says that the standard of taste is the joint verdict of true judges, thereby
requiring more than one.” Anybody can be an impartial spectator, Cohen suggests,
but being a true judge in the arts and the sciences is not open to everyone in the
same way. Similarly, Atkinson’s speculation on the lack of a true judge in moral
theory leads him to conjecture that Hume recognized a “difference between the
objectives of morality and criticism.” For “the authority belonging to critics,”
Atkinson contends, “derives from their enhanced powers of discrimination, their
capacity to point the way to the pleasures we go to art and literature to seek and
can . . . recognize when we find them.” Unlike morality, where normative agree
ment cannot be reached, “there is a real possibility of finding a standard in the
consensus of competent critics through time.” “The objectives of morality,” by
contrast, Atkinson emphasizes, “might very well be thought to be different from
that of criticism, if the latter is so conceived, but whether this is the sort of point
Hume had in mind must remain conjectural.”123
Michelle Mason, on the other hand, takes Hume’s position on this issue to be
less inscrutable, and questions the assumption that the true judge in aesthetics
and morals can be compared unproblematically in the way that some have sug
gested. Mason urges that, unlike his counterpart in morals, the aesthetic judge
does not adopt a view “from nowhere,” but takes on the “point of view of the
work’s intended audience.” Thus, in aesthetics, a critic who satisfies the “freedom-
from-prejudice requirement” is “less an impartial observer than he is a cultural
chameleon.” As Mason goes on to argue, this understanding of “Of the Standard
of Taste” puts Hume’s true judge in a tricky “moral prejudice dilemma”: when
faced with works that prescribe moral sentiments that conflict with standards
they know to be correct, critics will be forced either to overlook their moral con
victions or abandon the freedom-from-prejudice requirement that constitutes
in part their special status. According to Mason, this tension can be traced to
Hume’s elision of the “first person interpretation” position, required of the true
judge in the arts, with the “third person interpretation” characteristic of specifi
cally moral evaluation. The latter perspective requires only that one consider the
effects of a work on an audience, while the former demands that critics imagine
“themselves possessed of the audience’s particular prejudices” so that they can
come “to feel what the intended audience would feel in response to the work.”
In aesthetics, then, abandoning the point of view of the audience in evaluating
any given work threatens to pervert the true judge by robbing him of his first
person perspective; taking this perspective in the case of morals, by contrast, is
to be avoided since it would involve taking pleasure in practices (such as slavery)
that are morally repugnant.124
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Directions for Future Research
As I pointed out in my introductory remarks, and as I hope my discussion has con-

firmed, the wealth of literature on Hume’s aesthetics ranges across a wide variety of
areas and touches on issues that go to the very heart of his philosophy. Given the
degree of difference that marks much of the debate, it would take a brave person to
predict areas where sentiments might be reconciled, or to imagine evidence that
would confirm one interpretive sentiment and condemn another. Philosophy is
an endless task, and one cannot rule out that even “Of the Standard of Taste” will
inspire new interpretations or corrections of old ones. On the other hand, there
are aspects of Hume’s approach to questions in aesthetics that call for further
elaboration, both for the value of doing so in its own right, and for the promise
it holds of elucidating or clarifying other parts of Hume’s philosophy. There are
certainly self-contained areas where this is true—Hume’s efforts as a critic in the
Essays and History of England, for example, have received little attention since the
rather en passant remarks of Saintsbury and Laird, and Hume’s relationship to
Hutcheson and especially Locke is hardly exhausted. The attempts by Helm and
J. J. A. Mooij to understand causality and the Is-Ought distinction, respectively,
through “Of a Standard of Taste,” also demonstrate how specific areas of Hume’s
system can be understood by way of his aesthetics.
The overview I have offered here, however, suggests two particular areas where
interesting work remains to be done. The first concerns the connections with Kant.
As I have indicated, many commentators have been intrigued by what they see
as striking parallels between aspects of Hume’s aesthetics and the third Critique,
and though the historical record remains obscure, there are certainly questions
that can be addressed by investigations of a philosophical sort. Perhaps because
the parallels are so striking, with the exception of Kulenkampff, Shusterman, and
my own very recent attempt to detail Hume’s antinomical reasoning in “Of the
Standard of Taste,” the comparative work is largely confined to comments made
in the course of discussing other matters. The aforementioned issue of Hume’s
“antinomy of taste” deserves further attention, and there is clearly room for a
systematic treatment of the way in which he approaches inter alia the nature of
aesthetic judgment, free and dependent beauty, and the relationship between
aesthetics and morals.
This latter issue, in particular, points to the second area of Hume’s aesthet
ics worth pursuing. As the literature considered above makes clear, there have
already been enlightening attempts to document some of the ways in which
Hume’s approach to beauty and deformity in art and nature can be compared to
the treatment of virtue and vice in his moral philosophy. Some of the literature in
this area stands out—the contributions by Halberstadt, Kivy, Jones, Shusterman,
Townsend, and Mason—but, as with the relationship between Hume and Kant,

the commentary tends to be suggestive rather than systematic, and there remains
much to say about the way Hume draws the comparison and the similarities and
differences between the two areas. Further, Hume’s own limited treatment of the
comparison need not preclude developing an independent philosophical theory
that is Humean in spirit if not exactly Humean in substance.125 One of the most
interesting directions for research into Hume’s own thinking is to consider how
his approach to aesthetics can shed light on his moral philosophy, rather than
the other way around. His sentimentalist approach in aesthetics; the search for
a standard; the question of prejudice, reflection, and the general point of view;
the figure of the true judge; and the concept of taste, can all serve to illuminate
questions that have been raised in Hume’s approach to morals: his purported re
alism; the idea of moral standards; the issue of relativism; the normative force of
his theory; the general point of view; and the role he assigns to moral character.
These latter areas have been the subject of discussion in their own right, and the
debates can only be enriched and deepened by drawing parallels with Hume’s
approach to issues of taste and beauty. Stepping back even further, one can see
how this might open up questions about the place of Hume’s aesthetics in his
philosophy more generally. Townsend’s ambitious project of finding an “implicit
aesthetic embedded in Hume’s major philosophical works” is clearly an important
step in this direction,126 but the interpretive road is long and there is surely much
ground still to cover.
As with the work of any major philosophical figure, certain issues will likely
never be resolved, an observation apt in the case of Hume who stresses famously
how the “ultimate springs of principle” are beyond the “narrow boundaries and
slender acquisitions” of human reason. There might well be a true judge in mat
ters of taste, but it is doubtful that there is a comparable figure with the qualities
requisite to navigate definitively “those immense depths of philosophy” of which
Hume’s own thought now forms a part. Sometimes the best argument does win the
day, but more often than not some passion or prejudice, however slight, intervenes
to corrupt even the most honest inquirer. As Hume observes, all philosophers are
touched by the tendency to “confine too much their principles” (E 159), and it
is in the nature of the pursuit to seek final answers where none are to be found.
If true, this will prevent agreement and reconciliation, but it will also guarantee
further additions to the already rich and varied literature on the form and content
of Hume’s aesthetics.
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NOTES
I am grateful to Alan Goldman, Adam Potkay, James Shelley, and the editors of Hume
Studies, for comments on earlier drafts of this paper. Research for the paper was sup-
ported by an Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung Visiting Research Fellowship at Ludwig
Maximilians-Universität München in the summer and fall of 2003, and by a 2003
Summer Research Grant from The College of William and Mary. I would like to thank
both the Humboldt-Stiftung and William and Mary for their support.
1 See, for example, Peter Jones, Hume’s Sentiments: Their Ciceronian and French Con-
text (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1982), 93, who writes that Hume’s work
contains “no explicit theories of beauty, art, criticism or language to examine, because
Hume never published his promised treatise on ‘criticism.’ . . . A reader who wishes to
construct even a tentative theory can do so only on the basis of usually passing com
ments, and his understanding of Hume’s general aims and tenets.” See also Paul Guyer,
“The Standard of Taste and the ‘Most Ardent Desire of Society,’” in Pursuits of Reason:
Essays in Honor of Stanley Cavell, ed. Ted Cohen, Paul Guyer, and Hilary Putnam (Lub
bock, Tex.: Texas Tech University Press, 1993), 43, and Martin Kallich, The Association
of Ideas and Critical Theory in Eighteenth-Century England (The Hague: Mouton, 1970),
74–5. For some assessment of Hume’s place in the history of aesthetics, see S. G. Brown,
“Observations on Hume’s Theory of Taste,” English Studies 20 (1938): 93–8; Jerome Stol
nitz, “On the Origins of ‘Aesthetic Disinterestedness,’” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art
Criticism 20 (1961): 131–44, 143, and Peter Kivy, The Seventh Sense: Francis Hutcheson and
Eighteenth-Century British Aesthetics, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003 [1976]).
2 References to Hume’s works are given according to the following editions and abbre
viations: A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. David Fate Norton and Mary Norton (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2000) (T); Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Tom
Beauchamp (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999) (EHU); Essays: Moral, Political, and
Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller (Ind., Indiana: Liberty Classics, 1985) (E); The History of
England, From the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution in 1688, with the author’s last
corrections and improvements, 6 vols. (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1983) (H). For T
and EHU, page references are also provided to the texts edited by L. A. Selby-Bigge and
revised by P. H. Nidditch (SBN): A Treatise of Human Nature, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1978), and Enquiries concerning Human Understanding and concerning the Principles
of Morals, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975).
3 Peter Kivy, “Hume’s Neighbour’s Wife: An Essay on the Evolution of Hume’s Aesthet
ics,” The British Journal of Aesthetics 23 (1983): 195–208, 201, and Peter Jones, “Hume’s
Literary and Aesthetic Theory,” in The Cambridge Companion to Hume, ed. David Fate
Norton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 256. For a more generous
evaluation of Hume’s interest in the arts, see John Laird, Hume’s Philosophy of Human
Nature (London: Methuen & Co., 1932), 276–7, and James Noxon, “Hume’s Opinion
of Critics,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 20 (1961): 157–62, 157 and 161.
4 George Saintsbury, A History of Criticism and Literary Taste in Europe from the Earliest
Texts to the Present Day, 3 vols., 4th. ed. (London and Edinburgh: William Blackwood
& Sons, 1922 [1900–1904]), 2: 160. Saintsbury adds that Hume’s “taste in literature was
in no sense spontaneous, original, or energetic” (162).

5 Laird, Hume’s Philosophy of Human Nature, 273, and John B. Stewart, The Moral and
Political Philosophy of David Hume (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963), 263.
For Hume’s judgments on literature and the arts under the Tudors and Stuarts, see H
IV, 381–6; V, 149–55; and VI, 150–4 and 540–5. See also Jones, “Hume’s Literary and
Aesthetic Theory,” 260, who says that “Hume’s own artistic preferences and critical
observations on particular works are entirely orthodox for the age, and . . . rather
uninteresting.” For a sympathetic overview of Hume’s views and their relation to the
criticism of his day, see Teddy Brunius, David Hume on Criticism, Figura 2, Studies Edited
by the Institute of Art History, University of Uppsala (Stockholm: Almquist & Wiksell,
1952), chap. 6. Brunius concludes that “Hume’s taste mirrors both the tendencies, the
classical looking back to the past, and the romantic looking forward, which side by side
made themselves felt during the eighteenth century” (117).
6 William H. Halberstadt, “A Problem in Hume’s Aesthetics,” The Journal of Aesthetics
and Art Criticism 30 (1971): 209–14, 210.
7 Mary Mothersill, “Hume and the Paradox of Taste,” in Aesthetics: A Critical Anthol
ogy, ed. George Dickie, Richard Scalfani, and Ronald Roblin, 2nd ed. (New York: St.
Martin’s Press, 1989 [1977]), 269–70. See also Stewart, The Moral and Political Philosophy
of David Hume, 13ff., who speculates on Hume’s original plans to complete “a kind of
encyclopedia of all the sciences” of which criticism would have formed one part.
8 Brunius, David Hume on Criticism, and Dabney Townsend, Hume’s Aesthetic Theory:
Taste and Sentiment (New York: Routledge, 2001).
9 Townsend, Hume’s Aesthetic Theory, 12–4. Townsend himself is inclined to make a
connection between Hume and Shaftesbury’s Characteristicks.
10 See “Hume’s Early Memoranda, 1729–1740: The Complete Text,” ed. E. C. Mossner,
Journal of the History of Ideas 9 (1948): 492–518, and E 217, 314, 448–9, and 457. See Peter
Jones, “Hume and the Origins of Modern Aesthetics,” in The “Science of Man” in the
Scottish Enlightenment: Hume, Reid, and their Contemporaries, ed. Peter Jones (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 1989), 57, and his “Hume’s Literary and Aesthetic Theory,”
265; Walter J. Hipple, Jr., “The Logic of Hume’s Essay ‘Of Tragedy,’” The Philosophical
Quarterly 6 (1956): 43–52, 45–6; Eric Hill, “The Delightful Tragedy Problem,” Philosophy
57 (1992): 319–26, 319–20, and Alex Neill, “’An Unaccountable Pleasure’: Hume on
Tragedy and the Passions,” Hume Studies 24 (1998), 335–54, 336. See also Laird, Hume’s
Philosophy of Human Nature, 277, who characterizes “On Tragedy” as an attempt to
“improve upon the theories of the Abbé Dubos and Fontenelle.” For the place of Du
bos in the history of eighteenth-century aesthetics, see Katherine Everett Gilbert and
Helmut Kuhn, A History of Esthetics, 2nd ed. (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Publishers,
1972 [1939]), 274ff., and Kivy, The Seventh Sense, 186 and 198–9. Neither of these latter
studies mentions Hume as owing a particular debt to Dubos.
11 See Noxon, “Hume’s Opinion of Critics,” 158: “Hume’s sympathetic comments
on the work of L’Abbé Dubos and Fontenelle encouraged an interest in French aesthet
ics amongst readers of the English speaking world, and he continued to welcome and
commend treatises such as Burke’s A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the
Sublime and Beautiful even after he had stopped writing on such subjects himself.”
12 Jones, Hume’s Sentiments, 101.
Hume Studies
13 Jones, Hume’s Sentiments, 101ff. and 109ff. See also Peter Jones, “‘Art’ and ‘Modera
tion’ in Hume’s Essays,” McGill Hume Studies, ed. David Fate Norton, Nicholas Capaldi,
and Wade L. Robison (San Diego: Austin Hill Press, 1979), 164ff.; “Hume’s Literary and
Aesthetic Theory,” 259–60, 266–7, and 269, and “Hume and the Beginnings of Modern
Aesthetics.” Cf. Jules Lubbock, The Tyranny of Taste: The Politics of Architecture and Design
in Britain 1550–1960 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995), 117.
14 Guyer, “The Standard of Taste and the ‘Most Ardent Desire of Society,’” 41 and
65n5, and Townsend, Hume’s Aesthetic Theory, 76ff.
15 See, for example, David Fate Norton, David Hume: Common-Sense Moralist, Sceptical
Metaphysician (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1982), and “Hutcheson’s
Moral Realism,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 23 (1985): 397–418. For a response
to Norton, see Kenneth Winkler, “Hutcheson’s Alleged Realism,” Journal of the History
of Philosophy 23 (1985): 179–94.
16 Harold Osborne, “Some Theories of Aesthetic Judgment,” The Journal of Aesthetics
and Art Criticism 38 (1979): 135–44, 135.
17 See Francis Hutcheson, Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue
(London, 1738, 4th ed., corrected), I, 9, and Gilbert and Kuhn, A History of Esthetics,
241ff. For the influence of Locke on the development of seventeenth and eighteenth
century aesthetics generally, see Dabney Townsend, “Lockean Aesthetics,” The Journal
of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 49 (1991): 349–61 (Townsend does not mention Hume in
this connection), and Kivy, The Seventh Sense, chaps. 3–4 passim.
18 For the view that Hume did not take Locke’s doctrine seriously, see Simon Blackburn,
“Hume on the Mezzanine Level,” Hume Studies 19 (1993): 273–88, and for a response,
Kenneth P. Winkler, “Hutcheson and Hume on the Color of Virtue,” Hume Studies 22
(1996): 3–22. See also Jones, “‘Art’ and ‘Moderation’ in Hume’s Essays,” 174.
19 Kivy, “Hume’s Neighbour’s Wife,” 199. See also Halberstadt, “A Problem in Hume’s
Aesthetics,” 209–11, and George Dickie, The Century of Taste: The Philosophical Odyssey
of Taste in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 123–4. The
same point is also emphasized by Mary Carman Rose, “The Importance of Hume in
the History of Western Aesthetics,” The British Journal of Aesthetics 16 (1976): 218–29,
221 and 223.
20 Jones, “Hume’s Aesthetics Reassessed,” 57. See also “Hume’s Literary and Aes
thetic Theory,” 261; Osborne, “Hume’s Standard and the Diversity of Aesthetic Taste,”
The British Journal of Aesthetics 7 (1967): 50–6, 52–3, and Brunius, David Hume on
Criticism, 37.
21 See Peter Railton, “Aesthetic Value, Moral Value, and Naturalism,” in Aesthetics and
Ethics: Essays at the Intersection, ed. Jerrold Levinson (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1998), 67 and 93, and Nick Zangwill, “Hume, Taste, and Teleology,” Philosophi
cal Papers 23 (1994): 1–18, 9. Zangwill also sees in Hume’s idea that “certain things are
somehow apt by nature for pleasurable contemplation,” grounds for ascribing to him
a “teleological account of aesthetics. Just as legs are for walking and eyes are for seeing
and the heart is for pumping blood,” Zangwill continues, “so our sensibility is for
responding with pleasure to flowers and to Homer.”

22 Theodore A. Gracyk, “Rethinking Hume’s Standard of Taste,” The Journal of Aesthet

ics and Art Criticism 52 (1994): 169–82, 169. Gracyk also argues that Hume modifies the
Lockean view so that “beauty” comes to denote “both the sentiment and the object’s
‘power’ to produce it” (172).
23 Rochelle Gurstein, “Taste and the ‘Conversible World,’ in the Eighteenth Century,”
Journal of the History of Ideas 61 (2000): 203–21, 209.
24 Kivy, “Hume’s Neighbour’s Wife,” 195, 197 and 200.
25 Halberstadt, “A Problem in Hume’s Aesthetics,” 211; Carolyn W. Korsmeyer, “Hume

and the Foundations of Taste,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 35 (1976):
201–15, 202, and Dickie, The Century of Taste, 124 and 145.
26 David Marshall, “Arguing by Analogy: Hume’s Standard of Taste,” Eighteenth
Century Studies 28 (1995): 323–43, 333. See also Osborne, “Some Theories of Aesthetic
Judgment,” 137; Jens Kulenkampff, “The Objectivity of Taste: Kant and Hume,” Noûs
24 (1990): 93–110, 93; Jones, “Hume’s Aesthetics Reassessed,” 49–50, and Guyer, “The
Standard of Taste and the ‘Most Ardent Desire of Society,’” 44. For Kant’s references to
Hume, see Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, in Kants gesammelte Schriften (KGS),
herausgegeben von der Deutschen (formerly Königlich Preussischen) Akademie der Wissen
schaften (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter [and predecessors], 1902–), Bd. 5, §16, 229–31, and
§20–2, 237–40. On the influence of Hume on later aesthetic theories, see Rose, “The
Importance of Hume in the History of Western Aesthetics,” 223–4 and 228.
27 Dickie, The Century of Taste, 85 and 104. See also 149–51 where Dickie argues
for the superiority of Hume’s aesthetics over those of Kant, and Gilbert and Kuhn,
A History of Esthetics, 323, who remark that, the origins of the “Critique of Aesthetic
Judgment” notwithstanding, the “important thing in Kant is not his debts, but his
originality.”
28 E. F. Carritt, “The Sources and Effects in England of Kant’s Philosophy of Beauty,”
The Monist 35 (1925): 315–28, 315.
29 Jones, “Hume’s Literary and Aesthetic Theory,” 277.
30 Gilbert and Kuhn, A History of Esthetics, 322.
31 Gustav Zart, Einfluss der englischen Philosophen seit Bacon auf die deutsche Philosophie
des 18ten Jahrhunderts (Berlin: Dümmler, 1881), 215ff.
32 Theodore A. Gracyk, “Kant’s Shifting Debt to British Aesthetics,” The British Journal
of Aesthetics 26 (1986): 204–17, 204 and 215, emphasis added.
33 Jones, “Hume’s Aesthetics Reassessed,” 49 and 52.
34 Guyer, “The Standard of Taste and the ‘Most Ardent Desire of Society,’” 39; Gur
stein, “Taste and ‘the Conversible World,’” 208; Jens Kulenkampff, Kants Logik des
Ästhetischen Urteils (Frankfurt-am-Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1978), 165–6 n12, and
Anthony Savile, Kantian Aesthetics Pursued (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
1993), 64. See also Steven Sverdlik, “Hume’s Key and Aesthetic Rationality,” The Journal
of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 45 (1986): 69–76, 74–5, and Malcolm Budd, Values of Art:
Pictures, Poetry and Music (London: Penguin Books, 1995), 16 and 176n17.
Hume Studies
35 Kritik der Urteilskraft, 285 and 320 n55. See also Kant’s scattered references to Hume’s
Essays in Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht (KGS 7), 173, 260, 309, and 311.
36 See Günter Gawlick and Lothar Kreimandahl, Hume in der deutschen Aufklärung: Um
risse einer Rezeptionsgeschichte (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: frommann-holzboog, 1987).
37 Kulenkampff, “The Objectivity of Taste,” 109n1. See also Peter Kivy, “Hume’s
Standard of Taste: Breaking the Circle,” The British Journal of Aesthetics 7 (1967): 57–66,
58, and “Hume’s Neighbour’s Wife,” 203, and Mary Mothersill, Beauty Restored (Ox-
ford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 178; Eva Schaper, “Taste, Sublimity, and Genius: The
Aesthetics of Nature and Art,” in The Cambridge Companion to Kant, ed. Paul Guyer
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 380; Francis X. J. Coleman, The
Harmony of Reason: A Study in Kant’s Aesthetics (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh
Press, 1974), 135, and Werner S. Pluhar, “Translator’s Introduction” in Immanuel Kant,
Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett Publishing
Co., 1987), li–lii.
38 Kivy, “Hume’s Neighbour’s Wife,” 203. See also Kivy’s “Hume’s Standard of Taste,”
58, “Aesthetics and Rationality,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 34 (1975): 51–7,
52, and The Seventh Sense, chap.7. For the view that Kant’s emphasis on antinomical
reasoning is also to be found elsewhere in Hume’s work, see Manfred Kuehn, “Hume’s
Antinomies,” Hume Studies 9 (1983): 25–45, and Dorothy P. Coleman, “Hume’s Dialec
tic,” Hume Studies 10 (1984): 139–55.
39 Paul Guyer, Kant and the Claims of Taste, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1997), 296; Kulenkampff, “The Objectivity of Taste,” 95. See also Mothersill,
“Hume and the Paradox of Taste,” 271 and 280ff.; Dabney Townsend, Aesthetic Objects
and Works of Art (Wolfeboro: Longwood Academic, 1989), 38, and Schaper, “Taste,
Sublimity, and Genius,” 380. For an enthusiastic endorsement of Mothersill’s view,
see Jerrold Levinson, “Hume’s Standard of Taste: The Real Problem,” The Journal of
Aesthetics and Art Criticism 60 (2002): 227–38.
40 I have recently attempted to work out the details of the comparison. See Timothy
M. Costelloe, “Hume, Kant, and the ‘Antinomy of Taste,’” Journal of the History of Phi
losophy 41 (2003): 165–85.
41 Jones, “Hume’s Aesthetics Reassessed,” 49–50, and Guyer, “The Standard of Taste
and the ‘Most Ardent Desire of Society,” 43–4. Guyer goes on to enumerate three ways
in which the imagination works to supplement the immediate pleasure of natural
beauty (44ff.). See also Jones, “Hume’s Literary and Aesthetic Theory,” 261.
42 Jones, “Hume’s Aesthetics Reassessed,” 49, and Gilbert and Kuhn, A History of Esthet
ics, 245. The same point is emphasized by inter alia Redding S. Sugg, Jr., “Hume’s Search for
the Key with the Leather Thong,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 16, 1 (September
1957): 96–102, 97; Korsmeyer, “Hume and the Foundations of Taste,” 201; Ted Cohen,
“Partial Enchantments of the Quixote Story in Hume’s Essay on Taste,” in Institutions of
Art: Reconsiderations of George Dickie’s Philosophy, ed. Robert J. Yanal (University Park, PA:
The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), 148, and Noël Carroll, “Hume’s Standard
of Taste,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 43 (1984): 181–94, 182.
43 Jones, “Hume’s Aesthetics Reassessed,” 58, and Roger A. Shiner, “Hume and the
Causal Theory of Taste,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 54 (1996): 237–49,

238. See also Jones, “Hume and the Beginnings of Modern Aesthetics,” 56–7, and Jef
frey Wieand, “Hume’s Two Standards of Taste,” The Philosophical Quarterly 34 (1984):
129–42, 131ff.
44 Mothersill, “Hume and the Paradox of Taste,” 283–4. See also Mothersill’s “In
Defense of Hume and the Causal Theory of Taste,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art
Criticism 55 (1997): 312–6, 315–6. The same point is made by Budd, Values of Art, 19.
Cf. Christopher MacLachlan, “Hume and the Standard of Taste,” Hume Studies 12
(1986), 18–38, who concludes with the remark that “it is not the art works but the
critics who create standards of taste, by imposing order on them, and thus the crucial
point is not the nature of the art-work but the nature of the critic and the society he
reflects” (38).
45 Shiner, “Hume and the Causal Theory of Taste,” 239; Carroll, “Hume’s Standard of
Taste,” 186, and Gilbert and Kuhn, A History of Esthetics, 253 and 246, respectively. Cf.
Mothersill’s response to Shiner, “In Defense of Hume and the Causal Theory of Taste,”
and Sugg, “Hume’s Search for the Key with the Leather Thong,” 98, who responds to
Gilbert and Kuhn with the remark that what sounds like “sympathetic magic . . . refers
pretty clearly to the existence of qualities in the object perceivable by the critic.”
46 Kivy, “Aesthetics and Rationality,” 52.
47 Cohen, “Partial Enchantments,” 148.
48 Jones, “Hume’s Aesthetics Reassessed,” 48 and 57–8. Jones remarks that “From the
psychological viewpoint Hume stresses the causal nature of aesthetic judgments; from
the viewpoint of man as a social being, and of art as a social institution, Hume stresses
the importance of public debate and assessment” (62). See also “Hume’s Literary and
Aesthetic Theory,” 267 and 270, and Brunius, David Hume on Criticism, 40–1.
49 Sverdlik, “Hume’s Key and Aesthetic Rationality, 70; Bennett W. Helm, “Why We
Believe in Induction: Standards of Taste and Hume’s Two Definitions of Causation,”
Hume Studies 19 (1993): 117–40, 132; Claude MacMillan, “Hume, Points of View and
Aesthetic Judgments,” Journal of Value Inquiry 20 (1986): 109–23, and Gurstein, “Taste
and the ‘Conversible World,’” 210 and 214.
50 Sugg, “Hume’s Search for the Key with the Leather Thong,” 99; Gilbert and Kuhn,
A History of Esthetics, 246, and Jones, “Hume’s Aesthetics Reassessed,” 59–60.
51 Guyer, “The Standard of Taste and the ‘Most Ardent Desire of Society,’” 41; Osborne,
“Some Theories of Aesthetic Judgment,” 135; James Shelley, “Hume and the Nature of
Taste,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 56 (1998): 29–38, 34, and Gurstein,
“Taste and the ‘Conversible World,’” 209. See also Osborne, “Hume’s Standard and
the Diversity of Taste,” 53.
52 Mothersill, “Hume and the Paradox of Taste,” 270, emphasis added. See also Jones,
“Hume’s Aesthetics Reassessed,” 322, who describes it as Hume’s “most sustained and
subtle essay on aesthetics,” and Gracyk, “Rethinking Hume’s Standard of Taste,” 169,
who emphasizes that “The essay on taste is his [Hume’s] only direct defense of an aes
thetic standard.” Cf. S. K. Wertz, “Hume and the Paradox of Taste Again,” Southwest
Philosophical Review 7 (1991): 141–50, 144, who takes issue with Mothersill’s character
ization of the essay as “definitive.”
Hume Studies
53 See letter 465 in The Letters of David Hume, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1932), 2: 252–4. An account of the circumstances which produced the essay is
given in Mossner, The Life of David Hume, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1980 [1954]), chap. 24, 319–35. See also Jones, “Hume’s Aesthetics Reassessed,” 56,
and “Cause, Reason, and Objectivity in Hume’s Aesthetics,” in Hume: A Re-evaluation,
ed. Donald W. Livingston and James T. King (New York: Fordham University Press,
1976), 342 n8.
54 Gracyk, “Rethinking Hume’s Standard of Taste,” 169; Carroll, “Hume’s Standard
of Taste,” 181; Sverdlik, “Hume’s Key and Aesthetic Rationality,” 69; Jones, “Hume’s
Aesthetics Reassessed,” 56; Cohen, “Partial Enchantments,” 145, and Jonathan Friday,
“Hume’s Sceptical Standard of Taste,” Journal for the History of Philosophy 36 (1998):
545–66, 545.
55 See Guyer, “The Standard of Taste and the ‘Most Ardent Desire of Society,’” 38;
Noxon, “Hume’s Opinion of Critics,” 158–9; Cohen, “Partial Enchantments,” 155, and
Savile, Kantian Aesthetics Pursued, 65.
56 Guyer, “The Standard of Taste and the ‘Most Ardent Desire of Society,” 42; R. F.
Atkinson, “Hume on the Standard of Morals,” in David Hume: Many-sided Genius, ed.
Kenneth R. Merill and Robert Shahan (Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press,
1976), 42, and Dickie, The Century of Taste, 124. Dickie concludes that “Hume’s essay,
nevertheless, in comparison with other writings of the other taste theorists, is well
organized and well argued” (ibid.).
57 MacLachlan, “Hume and the Standard of Taste,” 18, and Mothersill, Beauty Restored,
180–1, and “Hume and the Paradox of Taste,” 285.
58 Brown, “Observations,” 194 and 196.
59 Noxon, “Hume’s Opinion of Critics,” 160–1; Korsmeyer, “Hume and the Founda
tions of Taste,” 205–6, and Kivy, “Hume’s Standard of Taste,” 61–4. See also Zangwill,
“Hume, Taste, and Teleology,” 15–16, who sees a circularity in Hume’s method: the at-
tempt to discover a normative standard of aesthetic judgment in the shape of the good
critic (Hume’s “underlying idea”) involves deciphering the “virtues” and “vices” that
constitute good and bad judgment, which presupposes in turn that some normative
standard has already been discovered.
60 Carroll, “Hume’s Standard of Taste,” 191, and Jones, “Hume’s Literary and Aesthetic
Theory,” 274. See also George Dickie, Evaluating Art (Philadelphia: Temple University
press, 1988), 144.
61 See, for example, Friday “Hume’s Sceptical Standard of Taste,” 551, who remarks
that “the position he [Hume] takes is decidedly opposed to the neo-classical concep
tion of the relation between rules and criticism.” See also MacLachlan, “Hume and the
Standard of Taste,” 34, and Sugg, “Hume’s Search for the Leather Key,” 97.
62 Saintsbury, A History of Criticism, 2: 161.
63 Brown, “Observations,” 196–7.
64 Gilbert and Kuhn, A History of Esthetics, 234.
65 Stewart, The Moral and Political Philosophy of David Hume, 93.

66 Mothersill, “Hume and the Paradox of Taste,” 270.
67 Richard Shusterman, “The Scandal of Taste: Social Privilege as Nature in the

Aesthetic Theories of Hume and Kant,” The Philosophical Forum 20 (1989): 211–29,
212–3.
68 Savile, Kantian Aesthetics Pursued, 76; Korsmeyer, “Hume and the Foundations of
Taste,” 202 and 212n2; and Osborne, “Hume’s Standard and the Diversity of Aesthetic
Taste,” 56. See also Claudia Schmidt, David Hume: Reason in History (University Park,
PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003), 316, and Osborne, “Some Theories of
Aesthetic Judgment,” 136, who concludes that “The failure of the Empiricists was not
in their logic but in the fact that over the years empirical research has not revealed the
level of uniformity which could reasonably be held to corroborate the assumption of
an ‘ideal’ affective constitution in this field.”
69 Cohen, “Partial Enchantments,” 155n4.
70 Shelley, “Hume and the Nature of Taste,” 31–3. Shelley also remarks how “Hume
attributes the collective sharpening of our perception simply to the tendency of
the superior perceptions of good critics to spread, over time, to the less critically
talented” (36).
71 Gurstein, “Taste and the ‘Conversible World,’” 219; Shelley, “Hume and the Nature
of Taste,” 35, and Wieand, “Hume’s Two Standards of Taste,” 137. See also Dickie, The
Century of Taste, 136.
72 Wertz, “Hume and the Paradox of Taste Again,” 148–9. Cf. Schmidt, David Hume,
337, who suggests that for Hume “the larger purpose of aesthetic criticism is not to
establish final judgments concerning the merits of particular works of art, but to help
the general public to discern, enjoy, and discuss the merits of artistic creations.”
73 Mothersill, “Hume and the Paradox of Taste,” 271 and 273; Carroll, “Hume’s
Standard of Taste,” 181; Guyer, “The Standard of Taste and the ‘Most Ardent Desire of
Society,’” 38ff.; Gracyk, “Rethinking Hume’s Standard of Taste,” 169 and 171; Savile,
Kantian Aesthetics Pursued, 65, and Kulenkampff, “The Objectivity of Taste,” 94.
74 Friday, “Hume’s Sceptical Standard of Taste,” 552. The same central problem is
also identified by Laird, Hume’s Philosophy of Human Nature, 275; Sugg, “Hume’s Search
for the Key with the Leather Thong,” 98–9; Noxon, “Hume’s Opinion of Critics,” 159,
Kivy, “Breaking the Circle,” 59; Korsmeyer, “Hume and the Foundations of Taste,” 201;
Cohen, “Partial Enchantments, 146–7; Christopher Perricone, “The Body and Hume’s
Standard of Taste,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 53 (1995): 371–7, 371, Dickie,
The Century of Taste, 125; Zangwill, “Hume, Taste, and Teleology,” 3–4, and Townsend,
Hume’s Aesthetic Theory, 180ff.
75 Cohen, “Partial Enchantments,” 147.
76 Cf. Levinson, “Hume’s Standard of Taste,” 230, who proposes that the “real prob
lem” of Hume’s solution is that it fails to show why “a person who is not an ideal critic
should rationally seek, so far as possible, to exchange the ensemble of artistic objects
that elicit his or her approval and enjoyment for some other ensemble that is approved
and enjoyed by the sort of person he or she is not.” Levinson’s solution is to emphasize
Hume Studies
that the judgments of ideal critics should be followed because such figures are “our best
barometers of the artistic value of works of art generally” (see 223–4).
77 Wieand, “Hume’s Two Standards of Taste,” 137ff.
78 See the subsequent exchange between Wieand and Shelley, The Journal of Aesthetics
and Art Criticism 53 (1995), 318–20.
79 James Shelley, “Hume’s Double Standard of Taste,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art
Criticism 52 (1994): 437–45, 440–1. See also Laird, Hume’s Philosophy of Human Nature,
275–6, who treats Hume’s two definitions as complimentary.
80 Kivy, “Hume’s Standard of Taste,” 59. See also “Hume’s Neigbour’s Wife,” 205–6.
81 Gurstein, “Taste and the ‘Conversible World,’” 215; Shiner, “Hume and the Causal
Theory of Taste,” 239–40; Korsmeyer, “Hume and the Foundations of Taste,” 204–5,
and Sugg, “Hume’s Search for the Key with the Leather Thong,” 101.
82 Osborne, “Hume’s Standard and the Diversity of Aesthetic Taste,” 55–6; Zangwill,
“Hume, Taste, and Teleology,” 4–5; Perricone, “The Body and Hume’s Standard of Taste,”
374ff., and Budd, Values of Art, 18–20. See also Guyer, “The Standard of Taste and the
‘Most Ardent Desire of Society,’” 37; Carroll, “Hume’s Standard of Taste,” 181 and 191–2;
Marshall, “Arguing by Analogy,” 324 and 325; J. J. A. Mooji, “Hume on Is-Ought and
the Standard of Taste,” Journal of Value Inquiry 14 (1980): 319–32, 325–6; Schmidt, David
Hume, 329ff., and Railton, “Aesthetic Value,” 68–9.
83 Mothersill, “Hume and the Paradox of Taste,” 279–80. Cf. Wertz, “Hume and the
Paradox of Taste Again,” who responds to Mothersill by detailing the various places
where Hume appeals to rules and principles.
84 MacLachlan, “Hume and the Standard of Taste,” 32; Sverdlik, “Hume’s Key and
Aesthetic Rationality,” 69; Helm, “Why We Believe in Induction,” 133, and Sugg,
“Hume’s Search for the Key with the Leather Thong,” 98.
85 Noxon, “Hume’s Opinion of Critics,” 160–1.
86 Guyer, “The Standard of Taste and the ‘Most Ardent Desire of Society,’” 52ff.
87 Cohen, “Partial Enchantments,” 148 and 150.
88 Townsend, Hume’s Aesthetic Theory, 206. Cf. Aesthetic Objects and Works of Art,
41, where Townsend writes that “There is no other standard than the joint verdict of
the ideal critics,” and that “Only agreement over time can validate either the critic
or his judgments.”
89 Kulenkampff, “The Objectivity of Taste,” 96–7.
90 Savile, Kantian Aesthetics Pursued, 77.
91 Railton, “Aesthetic Value,” 68.
92 Friday, “Hume’s Sceptical Standard of Taste, “ 550 and 564–6.
93 Dickie, The Century of Taste, 136 (for Dickie’s account of Hume’s standard more
generally, see 125ff.). See also Art and the Aesthetic: An Institutional Analysis (Ithaca:

Cornell University Press, 1974), 62–3, where Dickie emphasizes how, for Hume, judg
ments of taste are “empirical generalizations,” and Evaluating Art, 141ff.
94 Gracyk, “Rethinking Hume’s Standard of Taste,” 176–7.
95 Margaret Paton, “Hume on Tragedy,” The British Journal of Aesthetics 13 (1973):

121–32, 121, and Mark Packer, “Dissolving the Paradox of Tragedy,” The Journal of
Aesthetics and Art Criticism 47 (1989): 211–9, 212.
96 See Brunius, David Hume on Criticism, 57ff.
97 Hipple, “The Logic of Hume’s Essay ‘Of Tragedy,’” 48. Hipple also argues that both
the problem and the solution can be traced back to the “rules of logic” that Hume
discusses in Treatise 1.1.5 under the rubric of “Rules by Which to Judge Causes and
Effects.” See also Brunius, David Hume on Criticism, 52.
98 Paton, “Hume on Tragedy,” 127. Cf. Eric Hill, “Hume and the Delightful Tragedy
Problem,” Philosophy 57 (1982): 319–26, 324–6, who charges Paton with offering only
a “partial statement” of Hume’s aim. Although it would be strengthened by concen
trating on a “union” between the work and the audience, Hill argues, the superiority
of Hume’s view over the likes of Fontenelle and Dubos lies in its focus on the objective
features of the work of art rather than the response of the subject.
99 Alex Neill, “Hume’s Singular Phænomenon,” The British Journal of Aesthetics 39
(1999): 112–25, 113.
100 Susan L. Feagin, “The Pleasures of Tragedy,” American Philosophical Quarterly 20

(1983): 95–104, 95. See Packer, “Dissolving the Paradox of Tragedy,” 212–4, who criticizes
Feagin’s own solution to the problem.
101 Brunius, David Hume on Criticism, 56–7, and Flint Schier, “The Claims of Tragedy:
An Essay in Moral Psychology and Aesthetic Theory,” Philosophical Papers 18 (1989):
7–26, 15–7.
102 Robert J. Yanal, “Hume and Others on the Paradox of Tragedy,” The Journal of
Aesthetics and Art Criticism 49 (1991): 75–6, 76.
103 Alex Neill, “Yanal and Others on Hume and Tragedy,” The Journal of Aesthetics and
Art Criticism 50 (1992): 151–4, 154n2 and 153–4. Cf. Yanal’s response in “Still Uncon
verted: A Reply to Neill,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 50 (1992), 324–6.
104 Hill, “Hume and the Delightful Tragedy Problem,” 322–5.
105 Packer, “Dissolving the Paradox of Tragedy,” 212.
106 Malcolm Budd, “Hume’s Tragic Emotions,” Hume Studies 17 (1991): 93–106, 93.
107 Budd, “Hume’s Tragic Emotions,” 102.
108 Schier, “The Claims of Tragedy,” 15–17. Schier also thinks Hume’s account is
circular: “terror gets its value from its connection with our delight in the artistry of
the play, but this artistry would have no value, and hence would not provoke delight,
unless we had independent reasons for valuing the disturbing experience which the
acting and writing trigger in us. Unless we suppose nature has committed a sophistry,
we must reject Hume’s account” (19).
Hume Studies
109 Flint Schier, “Tragedy and the Community of Sentiment,” Philosophy and Fiction:
Essays in Literary Aesthetics, ed. Peter Lamarque (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press,
1983), 79.
110 Neill, “’An Unaccountable Pleasure,’” 345.
111 Neill, “’An Unaccountable Pleasure,’” 345 and 347.

112 Neill, “Yanal and Others on Hume and Tragedy,” 152.
113 Neill, “Hume’s Singular Phænomenon,” 115 and 117, emphasis added.
114 Neill, “Hume’s Singular Phænomenon,” 120. See also Neill, “Yanal and Others
on Tragedy,” 151.
115 Brunius, David Hume on Criticism, 36 and 41ff; Mothersill, Beauty Restored,
207, and “In Defense of Hume and the Causal Theory of Taste,” 313, respectively,
and Townsend, Hume’s Aesthetic Theory, 139 and 147–8. See also Cohen, “Partial
Enchantments,” 148.
116 Peter Jones, “Another Look at Hume’s Views of Aesthetic and Moral Judgments,”
The Philosophical Quarterly 20 (1970): 53–9, 56.
117 Halberstadt, “A Problem in Hume’s Aesthetics,” 211–2. See also Atkinson, “Hume
on the Standard of Morals,” 39 and 41, who refers to the “contrast” between moral
ity and aesthetics, and speaks of “external beauty . . . as a case intermediate between
morality/sympathy and sensation.” See also Railton, “Aesthetic Value,” 66, and 94–5.
Railton emphasizes, in particular, the parallel between what he calls the “vertical”
features (“what now pleases us”) and “horizontal” features (“what would please us and
others across time and place”) of both moral and aesthetic judgments.
118 Atkinson, “Hume on the Standard of Morals,” 42.
119 Geoffrey Sayre-McCord, “On Why Hume’s General Point of View Isn’t Ideal—And
Shouldn’t Be,” in Cultural Pluralism and Moral Knowledge, ed. Ellen Frankel Paul, Fred
D. Miller, Jr., and Jeffrey Paul (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 220–1.
120 Cohen, “Partial Enchantments,” 148 and 153. See also Railton, “Aesthetic Value,”
93–4.
121 Gurstein, “Taste and the ‘Conversible World,’” 215 and 217; M. A. Box, The Suasive
Art of David Hume (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1990), 134, and Sugg,
“Hume’s Search for the Key with the Leather Thong,” 101.
122 Dickie, The Century of Taste, 139–41.
123 Townsend, Hume’s Aesthetic Theory, 139, 141, and 144; Atkinson, “Hume on the
Standard of Morals,” 42–3; and Cohen, “Partial Enchantments,” 153–5.
124 Michelle Mason, “Moral Prejudice and Aesthetic Deformity: Rereading Hume’s
‘Of the Standard of Taste,’” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 59 (2001): 59–71,
59–61 and 66–7.
125 For contemporary approaches in aesthetics that takes Hume as their inspiration,
see Alan H. Goldman, Aesthetic Value (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995), and Dickie,
Evaluating Art, chap. 8, who sees in “Of the Standard of Taste” a basis for generating

“weak principles” for ranking aesthetic properties. For a response to Dickie’s use of
Hume, see James Shelley, “The Character and Role of Principles in the Evaluation of
Art,” British Journal of Aesthetics 42 (2002): 37–51. See also Simon Blackburn, Essays
in Quasi-Realism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 20, 78–9 passim, who
draws on Hume’s aesthetics, and “Of the Standard of Taste” in particular, to develop
his view.
126 See Townsend, Hume’s Aesthetic Theory, Introduction, 1–11. I have recently used
Hume’s approach to beauty as a way of understanding his approach to character. See
Timothy M. Costelloe, “Beauty, Morals, and Hume’s Conception of Character,” History
of Philosophy Quarterly 21 (2004): 171–85.
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Hume’s Aesthetics: The Literature and Directions for Research

Hume Studies Volume 30, Number 1, April (2004) 87-126.

STUDIES’ Terms and Conditions of Use, available at

The Literature and Directions for

PO Box 8795, Williamsburg, VA 23187-8795, USA.

The Historical Context

Dubos, Locke, and Hutcheson

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Volume 30, Number 1, April 2004

In different ways, various commentators have emphasized other important

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The Central Doctrines of Hume’s Aesthetics

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Reason and education

as a way of settling differences in value because “Sentiments in themselves,” as

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judge manages to transcend ‘his natural position.’” There might be “defects in

“Of the Standard of Taste”

Reactions to the essay

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of bad arguments, non-sequiturs, and inconsistencies” on Hume’s misguided

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The search for a standard

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Volume 30, Number 1, April 2004

Volume 30, Number 1, April 2004

In a similar vein, Schier focuses on the “associationist principle of hedonic­

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Beauty and Morals

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Directions for Future Research

As I pointed out in my introductory remarks, and as I hope my discussion has con-

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Volume 30, Number 1, April 2004

12 Jones, Hume’s Sentiments, 101.

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22 Theodore A. Gracyk, “Rethinking Hume’s Standard of Taste,” The Journal of Aesthet­

25 Halberstadt, “A Problem in Hume’s Aesthetics,” 211; Carolyn W. Korsmeyer, “Hume

30 Gilbert and Kuhn, A History of Esthetics, 322.

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47 Cohen, “Partial Enchantments,” 148.

58 Brown, “Observations,” 194 and 196.

63 Brown, “Observations,” 196–7.

64 Gilbert and Kuhn, A History of Esthetics, 234.

65 Stewart, The Moral and Political Philosophy of David Hume, 93.

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66 Mothersill, “Hume and the Paradox of Taste,” 270.

67 Richard Shusterman, “The Scandal of Taste: Social Privilege as Nature in the

85 Noxon, “Hume’s Opinion of Critics,” 160–1.

87 Cohen, “Partial Enchantments,” 148 and 150.

90 Savile, Kantian Aesthetics Pursued, 77.

91 Railton, “Aesthetic Value,” 68.

92 Friday, “Hume’s Sceptical Standard of Taste, “ 550 and 564–6.

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95 Margaret Paton, “Hume on Tragedy,” The British Journal of Aesthetics 13 (1973):

96 See Brunius, David Hume on Criticism, 57ff.

100 Susan L. Feagin, “The Pleasures of Tragedy,” American Philosophical Quarterly 20

104 Hill, “Hume and the Delightful Tragedy Problem,” 322–5.

In a similar vein, Schier focuses on the “associationist principle of hedonic

22 Theodore A. Gracyk, “Rethinking Hume’s Standard of Taste,” The Journal of Aesthet