Malcolm, Noel. "The Odd Couple." STANDPOINT MAGAZINE (May 2009).

Zaretsky, Robert, and John T. Scott. The Philosophers' Quarrel: Rousseau, Hume, and the Limits of Human Understanding. New Haven: Yale UP, 2009.

They made a very odd couple. The French philosopher (or rather, Swiss - he was born in Geneva) was a small, gesticulating man with animated features and a bizarre taste in clothes: wearing what he called an Armenian caftan, he sought (like Lawrence of Arabia in the Beyond the Fringe sketch) to pass unnoticed in the street. Hume was a large, portly figure with an amiable but bovine face and a strangely vacant stare. He dressed conventionally; indeed, convention was something in which he - unlike Rousseau - rather strongly believed. The intellectual differences went deeper than that. Rousseau idealised natural innocence and saw the socialisation of mankind as a process of corruption. Modern man was an alienated being, and radical changes were needed to remedy that. For Hume, the civilising process in human history involved a complex web of interactions, through which moral behaviour was learned and refined, and political institutions were settled and gradually improved. Yet these two very contrasting thinkers did have some common ground. While both were products of the "Age of Reason", neither believed that reason, as such, had any motive power: sentiment and sympathy were the generating forces of human behaviour. Both, too, had suffered from the disapproval of the ecclesiastical authorities (Calvinism being the doctrinal bedrock of Edinburgh as well as Geneva). On religious issues, indeed, Hume was the more radical of the two. While Rousseau preached his own portentous brand of "natural religion", Hume demolished all theological arguments, including "natural" ones. With such very different temperaments, and largely different beliefs, it is a miracle that the warm friendship between them lasted as long as it did - which is to say, six months on Hume's side and about three on Rousseau's. . . .

Read the rest here: http://www.standpointmag.co.uk/node/1158/full.

Grayling, A. C. "Sense and Sensibility." BARNES AND NOBLE REVIEW February 23, 2009.

Zaretsky, Robert, and John T. Scott. The Philosophers' Quarrel: Rousseau, Hume, and the Limits of Human Understanding. New Haven: Yale UP, 2009. It is a welcome turn -- one should more accurately say: return -- for our culture that philosophy is once again a possession of what David Hume called the "conversable" and not just the scholarly part of mankind. An increasing abundance of popular works both of and about philosophy (genuine philosophy, not just the upliftingly platitudinous sort published in pastel covers and odd shapes) is one part of the reason; this reprises the way philosophy was once read by all educated folk, for whom it was written in clear language. This was before the twentieth century revival of a jargon-rich scholasticism which shut out the general public and made a studious philosophical apprenticeship necessary before one could engage in it. Another part of the reason for the return is the appearance of an increasing number of satisfying biographies of philosophers, and even more satisfying books that take us into philosophical lives and thought by hooking themselves to notable moments in philosophy's history. The account by Robert Zaretsky and John T. Scott of the bitter falling-out between Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the man who had befriended and helped him, David Hume, falls into this category. As the latest in the happily growing line of such, its arrival at the bookstores is a welcome event. At first one might think that biographies of philosophers must be dull stuff, for what did they do of note but sit and think, and sometimes write? George Bernard Shaw would appear to sum up matters on their behalf: "I have had no heroic adventures," he said. "Things have not happened to me; on the contrary it is I who have happened to them; and all my happenings have taken the form of books. Read them, and you have my whole story; the rest is only breakfast, lunch and dinner." But to think this would be to miss much. Socrates perverted the youth of Athens and had to drink hemlock. Abelard suffered castration for his illicit romance with Heloise. Descartes was present both at the Battle of the White Mountain and the subsequent massacres of Bohemian Protestants and might have been a spy for the Jesuits. Locke had to flee into political exile. Bertrand Russell went to prison for opposition to the First World War, while his pupil and later nemesis Wittgenstein served in the Austrian army and wrote his Tractatus on the Eastern Front. Nietzsche and Althusser went mad; the latter strangled his wife, while the former's sister strangled his reputation. Sartre was a Communist, Heidegger a Nazi. Camus played football and died in a car crash. Not a few of them were preternaturally amorous. On the whole, many philosophers seem to have been more rather than less energetic, even though some (Berkeley, Kant) led meditative lives of exemplary quietness. . . . Read the whole review here: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/bn-review/note.asp?note=21102303&cds2Pid=22560.

"The Invention of Philosophy: Hume," Université Pierre Mendès France - Grenoble 2, March 13-15, 2008.

The interest raised by Hume’s way of practising philosophy is now very high amongst the scientific community; hence the place currently occupied by the Essays or the History of England: as well as the now widely spread references to a variety of Hume’s arguments in various areas of philosophical investigation. The Grenoble symposium, centred on the most out of context as possible issues of philosophical language, will be an opportunity to define what Hume has brought to the practice of philosophy after his time : thus, the issues around the philosophical vocabulary, the way to organise it, the relationship between philosophy and literature, philosophy and ‘common life ‘, philosophy of human or social sciences, are likely to be linked to the questions Hume asked to the philosophical tradition. We ought to review the problems he would have been the first one to express and the new methods he offers to the philosophers ‘community. By linking both questions : ‘How Hume does it ?’ and ‘How does Hume question us ?’, we could contribute to the better understanding of philosophy’s place and future in a new world, ours, and which he has been undoubtly one of the first ones to understand. The contributions now sought may/ should be about the new shapes Hume brings to philosophy (vocabulary, rhetoric, thought experiences, examples and references, literary genres) or about the invention of arguments and their future in posterity (in philosophy of sciences, moral psychology, aesthetics, politics). The entirety of the symposium should help to define in which terms philosophy is influenced by Hume’s ‘philosophical invention’, and towards which future. For further information, please visit http://www.plc-grenoble2.fr:80/index.php?code=158.