RIVISTA DI FILOSOFIA / vol. CVIX, n. 2, agosto 2018 EUGENIO LECALDANO, PAUL RUSSELL, DENNIS C. RASMUSSEN David Hume e Adam Smith Riflessioni su un libro Nel 2017 Dennis C. Rasmussen ha pubblicato The Infidel and the Professor: David Hume, Adam Smith, and the Friend- ship that Shaped Modern Thought (Princeton-Oxford, Princ- eton University Press). Si tratta di uno studio destinato a suscitare un vivace dibattito sia per quel che concerne la re- visione dell’immagine canonica dei due filosofi, sia per le im- plicazioni teoriche ad essa inevitabilmente legate. La discus- sione tra Eugenio Lecaldano e Paul Russell è seguita da una replica dello stesso Rasmussen. EUGENIO LECALDANO Greater attention to the divergences between Hume and Smith rather than the convergences? Rasmussen’s book provides all the essential information on the friendship between Hume and Smith, and it will certain- ly become an essential starting-point for all future research on these two philosophers. The book is not only complete, but well-written and fluent, and absolutely up-to-date on the secondary literature listed in the tight-packed apparatus of notes. Rasmussen reconstructs in detail the friendship be- tween the two men, which began in Edinburgh in 1749 and continued until the final months of Hume’s life in 1776. There is also further useful information – well documented by Rasmussen (pp. 229-38) – from the last years of Smith’s life up to his death in 1790. The work centres on the na- ture of the friendship of the two men, and their characters are penetratingly reconstructed as they emerge from their let- ters or the testimony of those who were closest to them. Ras-