We have Hume's own word that the definitive statement of his philosophy is not to be found in the youthful Treatise
of Human Nature but in the 1777 posthumous edition of his collected works entitled Essays and Treatises on Several
Subjects. Yet a major part of this definitive collection, the Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary (a volume
of near 600 pages, covering three decades of Hume's career as a philosopher) has been largely ignored. The volume
has rarely been in print, and the last critical edition was published in 1874-75. With this splendid, but inexpensive,
new critical edition by Eugene Miller, the door is open to a richer notion of Hume's conception of philosophy.
--Donald Livingston, Emory University
This edition contains the thirty-nine essays included in Essays, Moral, and Literary, that made up Volume I of
the 1777 posthumous Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects. It also includes ten essays that were withdrawn or
left unpublished by Hume for various reasons. The two most important were deemed too controversial for the religious
climate of his time.
This revised edition reflects changes based on further comparisons with eighteenth-century texts and an extensive
reworking of the index.
Eugene F. Miller is a professor of Political Science at the University of Georgia.