Hume's 'singular phænomenon'

British Journal of Aesthetics

Volumn 39, Issue 2, 1999, Pages 112-125

  Neill, Alex ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF ST ANDREWS   (United Kingdom)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 61149195179     PISSN: 00070904     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/bjaesthetics/39.2.112     Document Type: Article

References (21)

1. The Poetics of Aristotle, trans. and comment, by Stephen Halliwell (London: Gerald Duckworth, 1987), p. 46.
2. David Hume, 'Of Tragedy', in his Essays Moral, Political and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, rev. edn 1987), pp. 216-217. Hereafter page references to the essay, cited as 'OT', will be in the text.
3. Anthony Quinton is mistaken when he suggests that Hume is occupied simply with the question 'How can we enjoy the spectacle of the misfortunes and suffering of admirable people?' See A. M. Quinton, 'Tragedy', Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, suppl. vol. 34 (1960), p. 157.
4. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, 2nd edn rev. P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), p. 421. Hereafter page references to the Treatise, cited as 'T', will be in the text.
5. Mark Packer, for example, interprets 'Of Tragedy' along these lines in 'Dissolving the Paradox of Tragedy', Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 47 no. 3 (Summer 1989).
6. This is how Malcolm Budd, for example, understands Hume's position; see his 'Hume's Tragic Emotions', Hume Studies, vol. 17, no. 2 (November 1991).
7. As Flint Schier notes, tragedies often end with a sense of resolution. But not all do; and even in those that do, resolution is not often something that brings with it 'full joy and contentment and security'. See Flint Schier, 'Tragedy and the Community of Sentiment', in Peter Lamarque (ed.), Philosophy and Fiction: Essays in Literary Aesthetics (Aberdeen: Aberdeen U.P., 1983).
8. For example, he quotes from Julius Caesar in section 7, and from Euripides in appendix 4, of An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. Tom L. Beauchamp (Oxford: Oxford U.P., 1998).
9. As has also been noted by Eric Hill, in 'Hume and the Delightful Tragedy Problem', Philosophy, vol. 57 (1982),
10. and by Budd, 'Hume's Tragic Emotions'.
11. The question of how we can enjoy music that distresses us is discussed by Jerrold Levinson in 'Music and Negative Emotion', Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 63 (1982)
12. and by Aaron Ridley in chapter 7 of his book Music, Value and the Passions (Ithaca: Cornell U.P., 1995).
13. Noël Carroll discusses the pleasures of horror in chapter 4 of his book The Philosophy of Horror, or Paradoxes of the Heart (New York: Routledge, 1990).
14. For critical discussion, see Alex Neill, 'On a Paradox of the Heart',
15. and Susan L. Feagin, 'Monsters, Disgust and Fascination'
16. both published, with responses by Carroll, in Philosophical Studies, vol. 65 (1992).
17. A number of Hume's contemporaries criticized this claim; Walter J. Hipple, Jr summarizes and attempts to defend Hume against some of these attacks in his 'The Logic of Hume's Essay "Of Tragedy",' Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 6 (1956). More recent criticisms of this aspect of Hume's account can be found in the essays by Budd ('Hume's Tragic Emotions') and Schier ('Tragedy and the Community of Sentiment') cited above.
18. See his 'Tragedy and the Community of Sentiment' and 'The Claims of Tragedy: An Essay in Moral Psychology and Aesthetic Theory', Philosophical Papers, vol. 18, no. 1 (May 1989).
19. Responses of this sort are discussed by Marcia Eaton in 'A Strange Kind of Sadness', Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 41, no. 1 (Fall 1982)
20. and by Flo Leibowitz in 'Apt Feelings, or Why "Women's Films" Aren't Trivial', in Noël Carroll and David Bordwell (eds), Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996).
21. This is not to say that all Hollywood melodrama of this sort is merely sentimental; some of it is not. For more on this, see Leibowitz, 'Apt Feelings'.