Hume's General Rules - Serjeantson

Serjeantson-18
‘rules’ formed a fundamental component of early modern Aristotelian philosophy in
general, and of the disciplines of logic, physics, and metaphysics in particular. It was
of this tradition that Leibniz commented in the Nouveaux essais that, ‘There are
certain philosophical rules--big books crammed with them--which people like to
use’. 61 One such book, the Jena Aristotelian Daniel Stahl’s (1585-1654) Regulae
philosophicae (‘Philosophical rules’, 1657) explains the value of rules precisely as
inhering in their general nature. Stahl began his treatise by explaining that ‘We have
put together these Philosophical rules, which, on account of their generality (propter
generalitatem), are conspicuously valuable in all disciplines’. Hume’s account of rules
retains the Aristotelian emphasis on generality. But he could not endorse a further
aspect of these axiomatic regulae, which held them to be praecognita; that is, selfevident,
and indeed prior to reasoning or experience. 62
It was in their Aristotelian aspect as precognitive maxims that John Locke
launched a devastating attack on general rules in Book IV, chapter 7, of the Essay
Concerning Humane Understanding. In his Free and Impartial Censure of the
Platonick Philosophie (1666), Samuel Parker (who seems to be one of Locke’s targets
in this chapter) had attempted to rehabilitate such maxims by arguing that their basis
was fundamentally empirical: ‘general Axiomes are only the results and abridgements
of a multitude of single Experiments’. 63 Locke, in contrast, equated such rules of
reasoning with Aristotelian metaphysical maxims that the mechanical philosophy had
done so much to explode. Locke’s objection to such maxims was that their self-
61 Leibniz, Nouveaux essais, p. 419. Translation from Leibniz, New Essays, p. 419.
62 Daniel Stahl, Regulae philosophicae (Oxford: J. Webb, 1663), p. 1. On this point see further
Maclean, 'Evidence, logic, the rule and the exception’, who discusses (pp. 235, 238) the senses of
generaliter, and concludes persuasively (p. 256): ‘The laws which [Renaissance doctors and jurists]
invoke under the name of “axiomata,” “praecognita,” “regulae,” “ordo” are different in kind from those
which preoccupy such thinkers of the seventeenth century as Descartes and Newton. If there is a
decisive shift in mental habit which occurred between these figures and the late Renaissance, it is
perhaps to be located here rather than in the slavish and uncritical adherence to Aristotelian doctrines
of which they were accused by their successors.’
63 Samuel Parker, A Free and Impartial Censure of the Platonick Philosophie (Oxford: Richard Davis,
1666), p. 55. See also the discussion by Milton, 'Induction before Hume', p. 64.