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David Hume. An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals. Tom L. Beauchamp, editor. The Clarendon Edition of the Works of David Hume. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.
An edition of Hume's philosophic writings on rigorous, modern bibliographic principles has long been a scholarly desideratum. Readers in the many fields in which Hume's thought and style have made a profound impression have basically relied on the originals or derivatives of efforts of the Victorian era. One is Hume's Philosophical Works (4 v., London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1874-75), edited by the Oxford dons, T. H. Green and T. H. Grose. Well-known for his idealist philosophy and theory of liberalism, Green contributed introductions to the first and second volumes criticizing Hume from an anti-empirical standpoint. Grose offered a "History of [Hume's] Editions" as an introduction to the third volume, and claimed to have revised Hume's text throughout. This edition has the virtue of comprehensiveness, but is deficient in its offering of variant readings. Later there came from Oxford University Press editions of the Treatise of Human Nature (t 888), deemed generally sound, and the two Enquiries (t 894), marred by departures from Hume's text, prepared by a prominent civil servant, Sir Lawrence Amherst Selby-Bigge, whose chief contribution was to provide useful analytical indices. An attempt at achieving higher editorial standards was made by P. H. Nidditch, Professor of Philosophy in the University of Sheffield, in a "second" edition of Selby-Bigge's Treatise (1976) and a "third" edition of his text of the Enquiries (1975). Limits were imposed by Oxford...