-
Views
-
Cite
Cite
Johnson Kent Wright, Robert Zaretsky, John T. Scott. The Philosophers' Quarrel: Rousseau, Hume, and the Limits of Human Understanding. New Haven: Yale University Press. 2009. Pp. x, 247. Cloth $27.50, paper $18.00, The American Historical Review, Volume 115, Issue 3, June 2010, Pages 881–883, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr.115.3.881
Close - Share Icon Share
Extract
For whatever reasons, the lives of philosophers seem never before to have attracted so much attention, from scholars and popularizers alike—as if biographical context and event were sure routes to philosophical meaning. But what were the odds that two dual-author studies of the famous falling-out between Jean-Jacques Rousseau and David Hume would appear in such rapid succession? Given the finite nature of the evidence, there was bound to be a good deal of overlap between The Philosophers' Quarrel and David Edmonds and John Eidinow's Rousseau's Dog: Two Great Thinkers at War in the Age of Enlightenment, published in 2006. Robert Zaretsky and John T. Scott do acknowledge a debt to their predecessors for one crucial piece of detective work. More interesting, however, are the differences between the two books. Edmonds and Eidinow have now made a cottage industry of zestful accounts of intellectual combat, Rousseau's Dog having been preceded by Wittgenstein's Poker: The Story of a Ten-Minute Argument between Two Great Philosophers (2002) and Bobby Fischer Goes to War: How a Lone American Star Defeated the Soviet Chess Machine (2005).
