Hume's Ethical Writings: Selections from David Hume Book

My first reaction to the book is to be very impressed at how the author has managed to organize a great deal of material in a manner that is instructive, but which I mean it promotes understanding of the material. This it does extremely well, and I am very thankful for that and glad I read the book. However, I am concerned that there are issues with the book that surely generate misunderstanding and the book did not flag very well what those misunderstandings are.

There are three identifiable causes of the misunderstanding that could be generated by this book: First, the aim of the book is to understand the history of philosophy as if it were all leading to Kant. This is an extremely useful organizing principle, but it is bound to create some problems. Second, the author is forced to admit (p. 509) that he has selected sources that in some way make sense to him to include in this history, not because Kant was even aware of them. Third, the book is about what it says it is about (The Invention of Autonomy) and yet the hope that it closes with is about Kant's Newtonian principle- how wills have some unknown coalescence like gravity causes the coalescence of objects.

So, I don't know. I would recommend the book to anyone at my level of education or less because it certainly left me with a far improved understanding of the history of ethics than I previously had. But I think the reader should be concerned that they are likely to also absorb misunderstandings that the author has not gone out of his way to identify for the reader.