Hume's General Rules - Serjeantson

Serjeantson-16
judge aright’. 53 Thus while works of logic commonly took the form of sets of rules the
philosophical status of the rule itself was not so often considered.
In general, early modern philosophers manifested a striking reluctance to
reflect upon the nature of the rules that they crammed into their writings. They were
normative, but unexamined. This tendency is particularly evident in the Cartesian
tradition. Descartes’s first sustained piece of philosophical writing was his Regulae ad
directionem ingenii (first published in Latin in 1701 and hence potentially accessible
to Hume). Like Hume, Descartes clearly regarded the function of his rules as being to
‘direct the judgment’, since his first regula is ‘The aim of our studies should be to
direct the mind with a view to forming true and sound judgments about whatever
comes before it’. 54 But he is reticent about the status such rules themselves have
within his philosophy. He did note with curiosity in his earliest surviving papers (the
so-called Cogitationes privatae, unpublished until 1859) that he was ‘making use of
definite rules’ in his thinking. 55 Nonetheless, subsequent explicit reflection on their
function in the Regulae is restricted to comments such as this one: ‘a large number of
rules is often the result of inexperience in the teacher’. 56 It is notable, however, that in
his later writings Descartes placed much less emphasis on philosophical ‘rules’. In the
Meditationes (1641)--which was one of the works of metaphysics Hume
recommended to his friend Michael Ramsey as preparatory reading for understanding
the Treatise 57 --Descartes is not concerned with formulating rules at all.
53 Isaac Watts, Logic; or, The Right Use of Reason, in the Enquiry after Truth. With a variety of rules
to guard against error, in the affairs of religion and human life, as well as in the sciences (Chiswick:
Thomas Tegg, 1828), p. 183 (2.4).
54 René Descartes, Regulae ad directionem ingenii, in Œuvres de Descartes, ed. C. Adam and P.
Tannery, 12 vols (Paris: Vrin, 1964-76), vol. 10, pp. 359-472, p. 359. Translation from Descartes,
Rules for the direction of the mind, trans. Robert Stoothoff, Dugald Murdoch, and John Cottingham, in
The Philosophical Writings, 3 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), vol. 1, pp. 7-78, p.
9.
55 Descartes, Cogitationes privatae, in Œuvres, vol. 10, p. 214.
56 Descartes, Regulae, in Œuvres, vol. 10, p. 461 (regula 18). Translation from Descartes, ‘Rules’, in
Philosophical Writings, vol. 1, p. 71.
57 Mossner, Life of Hume, p. 627.