Hume's Scepticism: Pyrrhonian and Academic 9781474451147

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Hume’s Scepticism

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Edinburgh Studies in Scottish Philosophy Series Editor: James A. Harris, University of St Andrews Scottish Philosophy Through the Ages This new series will cover the full range of Scottish philosophy over five centuries – from the medieval period through the Reformation and Enlightenment periods, to the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The series will publish innovative studies on major figures and themes. It also aims to stimulate new work in less intensively studied areas, by a new generation of philosophers and intellectual historians. The books will combine historical sensitivity and philosophical substance which will serve to cast new light on the rich intellectual inheritance of Scottish philosophy. Editorial Advisory Board Angela Coventry, University of Portland, Oregon Fonna Forman, University of San Diego Alison McIntyre, Wellesley College Alexander Broadie, University of Glasgow Remy Debes, University of Memphis John Haldane, University of St Andrews and Baylor University, Texas Books available Adam Smith and Rousseau: Ethics, Politics, Economics, edited by Maria Pia Paganelli, Dennis C. Rasmussen and Craig Smith Thomas Reid and the Problem of Secondary Qualities, Christopher A. Shrock Hume’s Sceptical Enlightenment, Ryu Susato Imagination in Hume’s Philosophy: The Canvas of the Mind, Timothy M. Costelloe Essays on Hume, Smith and the Scottish Enlightenment, Christopher J. Berry Adam Ferguson and the Idea of Civil Society: Moral Science in the Scottish Enlightenment, Craig Smith Hume’s Scepticism: Pyrrhonian and Academic, Peter S. Fosl Books forthcoming Eighteenth-Century Scottish Aesthetics: Not Just a Matter of Taste, Rachel Zuckert Thomas Reid and the Defence of Duty, James Foster edinburghuniversitypress.com/series/essp

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Hume’s Scepticism Pyrrhonian and Academic

Peter S. Fosl

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Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com

© Peter S. Fosl, 2020 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in 11/13 Adobe Sabon by IDSUK (DataConnection) Ltd, and printed and bound in Great Britain. A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 5112 3 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 5114 7 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 5115 4 (epub)

The right of Peter S. Fosl to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498). Cover image: Tantalus, attributed to Giovanni Battista Langetti (1635–76). Kunsthaus Lempertz/Photo: Sascha Fuis Photographie, Cologne.

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Contents

Acknowledgements Series Editor’s Introduction List of Abbreviations and Conventions Introduction: Into Those Immense Depths

viii xi xii 1

Part I: Academic and Pyrrhonian Scepticism, Ancient and Modern

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1. Hume and Ancient Academic Scepticism 1.1 Doubt in the Old Academy 1.2 Probabilism, Fallibilism and Belief in the Middle and New Academies 1.3 The Theoretical Sceptics: Clitomachian and Metrodorian Scepticism 1.4 Conclusion

23

2. Hume and the Legacy of Academic Scepticism 2.1 The Career of Academic Scepticism 2.2 Hume’s Academic Scepticism 2.3 Conclusion

39 39 67 70

3. Hume and Ancient Pyrrhonian Scepticism 3.1 Origins: From Pyrrho to Sextus Empiricus 3.2 The Agogê of Appearances 3.3 Negative Pyrrhonism: Subversion, Suspension and Silence 3.4 Positive Pyrrhonism: Constructive Philosophical Theory 3.5 A General Framework for Pyrrhonian Scepticism 3.6 Conclusion

77 80 85

19 20

31 34

87 98 109 110

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4. Hume and the Legacy of Pyrrhonian Scepticism 4.1 The Career of Pyrrhonism 4.2 Pyrrhonism in Hume 4.3 Conclusion

117 117 153 171

Part II: Hume’s True Sceptical Philosophy 5. Phûsis: The Fatalities of Appearance 5.1 The Fluvial and the Necessary: The ‘Current of Nature’ 5.2 Apelletic Empiricism and the Priority of Hume’s Sceptical Naturalism 5.3 The Fatalities of Nature and Human Empereia 5.4 Conclusion

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187 189 202 208 209

6. Ethos: The Great Sceptical Guide 6.1 Inhabiting the World 6.2 Sceptical Politics 6.3 Scepticism and Religion 6.4 Conclusion

215 215 232 238 252

7. Technai: Dogmatism and the Technologies of Doubt 7.1 A Caveat and a Reminder 7.2 Epistemological Dogmatism 7.3 Metaphysical Dogmatism 7.4 Conclusion

260 261 265 290 302

8. Pathê: Hume’s Non-Dogmatic Philosophy 8.1 Hume’s Doxastic Scepticism and Non-Dogmatic Philosophy 8.2 Three Kinds of Assent 8.3 Sceptical Science and Dogmatic Hidden Standards 8.4 Conclusion: An End to the Voyage

311

Bibliography Index

338 371

314 321 329 331

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For my parents, Marian Ruth Colver Wasel and Joseph Henry Wasel

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Acknowledgements

Starting points in philosophy can be crucial. This book originated with a series of thoughts I began to work through as an undergraduate student at Bucknell University with Joseph P. Fell and Richard Fleming. I am thankful for the great good fortune that brought me to their classrooms. It was through Fleming that I came to another guiding star for my thinking about scepticism in Stanley Cavell. Fell, in his turn, convinced me to seek out graduate study in the history of philosophy, and I did so at Emory University. Generous seminars led by Donald W. Livingston and his instruction as my dissertation director showed me how Hume’s philosophy of common life fruitfully engaged the philosophical questions with which I had already been wrestling through phenomenology and ordinary language philosophy. When I came to Edinburgh as a Fulbright student to work on my doctoral dissertation during the 1990–91 academic year, Nick Phillipson challenged me to ‘do it the hard way’, by which he meant logging the many hours at the University of Edinburgh libraries as well as the National Library of Scotland necessary to determine precisely how Hume’s scepticism fitted into the history of sceptical thought. Informed by the work of Fell, Fleming and Livingston, I have undertaken in this volume to answer that challenge. I am deeply grateful for the resources and inspiration I received from the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH) at the University of Edinburgh – especially through Anthea Taylor, Donald Ferguson, Jolyon Mitchell and Peter Jones. I wish to thank, in particular, those who have sustained the David Hume Fellowship there, including the Scots Philosophical Association. The collegial support afforded me by Duncan Pritchard, Pauline Phemister and Mike Ridge among the philosophy faculty at Edinburgh energised and sustained me through my labour there. The viii

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Acknowledgements

ix

resources made available by the editors of DavidHume.org, especially Peter Millican, and by Diego E. Machuca through his online Bibliography of Skepticism, were important to the realisation of this volume as well. I am grateful to those who read drafts of parts or the whole of this manuscript for their guidance, their insight and their corrections. Those readers include Brom Anderson, Don Baxter, Richard Bett, Stephen Buckle, Luciano Floridi, Elijah Fosl, Jordan Hancock, Peter Kail, David Kaufman, Chris Laursen, Diego Machuca, Anton Matytsin, Kevin Meeker, Tom Merrill, José Raimundo Maia Neto, Dario Perinetti, David Purdie, Meagan Taylor, Harald Thorsrud, and insightful anonymous reviewers for Edinburgh University Press. Larry Coty deserves special thanks for his close reading, experienced editing and good humour. Roger Eichorn’s expertise in proofreading, language and sceptical philosophy brought invaluable nuance, precision and clarity to the text. Any remaining errors are my own. Don Garrett has been a steadfast supporter of mine over many years, and I thank him for his sustaining encouragement. I am grateful, too, for the faith that David Fate Norton placed in my work. The thoughtful generosity James Harris, Miriam Schliefer McCormick, Wade Robison and Ken Winkler have shown me as I pursued this project has been more important than they know. I wish to thank Byron Young for underwriting a course release for me at Transylvania University and Deans Bill Pollard and Laura Bryan for their consistent and generous support of my scholarship. Editors commonly receive far less recognition than they deserve, and that is so for my editor at Edinburgh University Press, Carol Macdonald. She merits special praise both for standing up for this project and for her knowing counsel in wrangling the manuscript into a manageable form. I am thankful, as well, for the care taken by the copy-editor Andrew Kirk, Eliza Wright and the production staff at EUP to bring a clean, coherent and well-executed book into print. Portions of this volume develop the results of my earlier investigations into Hume’s scepticism. The findings related to Hume’s citations of Sextus Empiricus in Chapter 4 first appeared in ‘The Bibliographic Bases of Hume’s Understanding of Sextus Empiricus and Pyrrhonism’, Journal of the History of Philosophy 16.2 (1998), pp. 93–109. Early versions of my ideas about Hume, Cicero and religion may be found in ‘Doubt and Divinity: Cicero’s Influence on Hume’s Religious Skepticism’, Hume Studies

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20.1 (1994), pp. 103–20. Emerging ideas about Hume and animals may be found in ‘Animality and Common Life in Hume’, 1650–1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era 4 (1999), pp. 93–120. Some of the ideas about nature and necessity developed in Chapter 5 gestated in ‘Scepticism and Naturalism in Cavell and Hume’, in Stanley Cavell and Skepticism, a special issue of the International Journal for the Study of Skepticism 5.1 (2015), pp. 29–54; the issue was edited by Duncan Pritchard and Diego E. Machuca for the series Brill Studies in Skepticism. Chapter 6 section 1 elaborates, with permission, ‘Habit, Custom, History, and Hume’s Critical Philosophy’, in A History of Habit: From Aristotle to Bourdieu, ed. Tom Sparrow and Adam Hutchinson (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2013), pp. 133–51. Material appears by permission in Chapter 6 that was in an earlier form published in ‘Skepticism in Hume’s Politics and Histories’, Araucaria: Revista Iberoamericana de Filosofía Política y Humanidades, 20.40 (2018), pp. 371–401; that special issue was edited by Gerardo Lopez Sastre. Material from that article is itself reworked in ‘Hume’s Teresic Political Skepticism’, forthcoming in Skepticism in the History of Philosophy: A Pan-American Dialogue, ed. Plínio Smith and Vincente Raga (Springer). My initial forays into these topics were oriented, sifted and revised in the light of feedback I received from colleagues at conferences, and I am grateful to the Hume Society, the American Philosophical Association, the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, the South Central Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, the British Society for Eighteen-Century Studies, the Inland Northwest Philosophy Conference, the Kentucky Philosophical Association and, especially, individual organisers Kevin Cope, Diego Machuca, Melissa Barry and Joe Campbell for producing sites where philosophers can meet, exchange ideas and test their thinking. I am grateful for the love and encouragement of my wife, Catherine A. Fosl, my son, Elijah, and my stepson, Isaac. I am grateful, too, for the brave steps taken by my immigrant grandparents as they established our family in, what was for them, a new and promising world. P.S.F. Louisville, Kentucky 15 March 2019

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Series Editor’s Introduction

Philosophy has been taught and written in Scotland since the fifteenth century. The purpose of this series is to publish new scholarly work on any and every aspect of the history of Scottish philosophising, from John Mair to John Macmurray. Scotland’s most celebrated philosophical achievements remain those produced by Hume, Smith, Reid, and their contemporaries in the eighteenth century. It is, however, no longer possible to believe that the Scottish Enlightenment had no indigenous roots. Nor is it possible to believe that there was no significant philosophy produced in Scotland once the Enlightenment was over. There is no single set of intellectual concerns distinctive of and unique to philosophy as it has been taught and written in Scotland. Historical study of Scottish philosophy must be, to a significant extent, study of the changing nature of philosophy itself. It should be open to the idea that the preoccupations and methods of philosophers today may not be those of philosophers in the past. It should also concern itself with philosophical connections and intellectual affinities between Scotland, England, Ireland, and the rest of Europe, and, where appropriate, between Scotland and America. James Harris

xi

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Abbreviations and Conventions

In citations of Hume’s works, ‘SBN’ indicates page numbers for the edition edited by L. A. Selby-Bigge and revised by P. H. Nidditch. A

AP D DP

E

EM ES H LG

LT MOL

‘An Abstract of a Book Lately Published, Entituled, A Treatise of Human Nature, &c. Wherein the Chief Argument of that Book is farther Illustrated and Explained’ (1740) ‘Appendix’ to the Treatise, published with Book 3 (1740) Dialogues concerning Natural Religion (1779) ‘Of the Passions’ (1757, in Four Dissertations; retitled, ‘A Dissertation on the Passions’, in Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects, 1758) Philosophical Essays concerning Human Understanding (1748; retitled, Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, in Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects, 1758) Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals (1751) Essays Moral, Political, and Literary (1741–2 up until the 1777 edition) History of England (six volumes: 1754, 1757, 1759, 1761, completed set 1762) ‘A Letter from a Gentleman to his Friend in Edinburgh: Containing some Observations on A Specimen of the Principles concerning Religion and Morality, Said to Be Maintain’d in a Book lately publish’d, intituled, A Treatise of Human Nature, &c.’ (1745) The Letters of David Hume The Life of David Hume, Esq., Written by Himself (1777); aka ‘My Own Life’

xii

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Abbreviations and Conventions N NLT ST T

xiii

‘The Natural History of Religion’ (1757, in Four Dissertations) New Letters of David Hume ‘Of the Standard of Taste’ (1757, in Four Dissertations) A Treatise of Human Nature: Being an Attempt to Introduce the Experimental Method of Reasoning into Moral Subjects (three volumes: Books 1 and 2, 1739; Book 3, 1740)

Abbreviations for Cicero’s Texts ACD DEO

Academica De natura deorum

Abbreviations for Sextus Empiricus’ Texts ADO

M PH

Adversus dogmaticos, five books, mistakenly cited as M 7–11; contains Adversus logicos (ADO 1–2), Adversus physicos (ADO 3–4) and Adversus ethicos (ADO 5) Adversus mathematicos, six books (M 1–6) Outlines of Pyrrhonism, three books

Other Abbreviations AT CA DHL DL OC

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René Descartes, Oeuvres de Descartes, 11 vols Augustine, Contra academicos David Fate and Mary J. Norton (eds), The David Hume Library Diogenes Laërtius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers Ludwig Wittengenstein, On Certainty

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Introduction: Into Those Immense Depths

The Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711–76) is commonly acknowledged to be the most important philosopher to have written in the English language, and scepticism is commonly understood to be central to Hume’s thought. Though the centrality of scepticism for Hume is clear, its specific character and the way it functions among his ideas is not; and the most enduring as well as the most important controversies among Hume interpreters have centred on questions about his scepticism. Does Hume refute or rebuke scepticism? Does he demonstrate that scepticism is false, pointless, impractical, pathological or senseless? Or does Hume embrace and cultivate scepticism? If so, what kind of scepticism do his publications and correspondence set forth? Can we meaningfully discern Hume’s own personal commitments in those texts? The sceptical tradition has commonly been divided into Pyrrhonian and Academic branches. If Hume is a sceptic, is his work best understood as located on one or the other branch, an intertwining of both, or neither? There are several reasons for the persistence of this debate, but one very serious obstacle to its resolution has been a generally inadequate understanding of precisely what sceptical philosophy comprises. This book aims to help remove that obstacle and thereby contribute to the resolution of these interpretive questions. It undertakes to do so in two ways. Part I explores the philosophical terrain of the sceptical traditions in ancient and modern times. Synthesising and extending current scholarship on the history of scepticism, Part I crafts an expansive and detailed survey of the origins of sceptical philosophies, the paths along which they developed, the uses to which they were put, and the manner in which they waxed and waned until Hume arrived on the scene. Chapters 1 and 2 describe the 1

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Academic tradition, ancient and modern. Chapters 3 and 4 gather the Pyrrhonian tradition, ancient and modern. In each case, the survey proceeds with an eye towards the way in which Hume may have inherited those sceptical currents. The resources identified by this geography make it possible to see how Hume produced a blended scepticism, drawing deeply from the wells of both Academic and Pyrrhonian thought. Part I largely yields what one might call an Empirical Case for Hume as a radical and hybrid sceptic. By that, I mean that evidence culled from Hume’s published and unpublished work, his private letters and his circumstances, illuminated by the sceptical traditions, sustains the claim that Hume’s thought is properly read as profoundly Pyrrhonian, as well as Academic. The similarities between Hume’s texts and others in the sceptical traditions, together with Hume’s own explicit and implicit references to precedent sceptical ideas, make compelling the case for his having developed, alongside his Academicism, a more radical and Pyrrhonian scepticism than he explicitly endorses. The Empirical Case is potent, but because the evidence is limited, its conclusions must be limited as well. To supplement and strengthen the Empirical Case, Hume’s Scepticism also constructs a Conceptual Case for reading Hume’s thought as a profoundly sceptical compound. If one accepts the idea of a logical or conceptual space for sceptical ideas, it becomes possible to consider how Hume may have been pulled unknowingly into streams of Pyrrhonian as well as Academic philosophy. It is possible too, of course, that Hume intentionally followed out radically sceptical trajectories in a conscious and calculated way but without explicit acknowledgement. Hume may not have fully understood the implications of his own work, or he may have masked or coded, for prudential reasons, the deeply sceptical dimensions of his thinking. Both to varying degrees may be true. Proceeding with a hermeneutic of suspicion in its interpretation, Hume’s Scepticism establishes the thesis of substantial conscious appropriation as credible and most likely. While Hume is commonly today accepted as some kind of Academic sceptic, the claim advanced here, that Hume is also deeply Pyrrhonian, has remained decidedly more contested. Many of the best-informed and most important Hume interpreters have discounted the Pyrrhonian qualities of his work. In Julia Annas’s assessment, for example, Hume simply did not understand Pyrrhonism.

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3

She finds that ‘Hume’s actual references to Sextus are disappointing; they do not suggest that he read and understood the parts of Sextus, notably Pyr. 1, in which ancient Pyrrhonism is discussed at length.’1 In Richard H. Popkin’s view, Hume was ‘sloppy’ in his exposition, at least in the way he handled Bayle on Pyrrhonism.2 James A. Harris takes Hume to be transparent, sincere and correct when he dismisses Pyrrhonian scepticism.3 In opposition to these deflationary interpretations and in addition to its exploration of Hume’s Academic philosophy, Hume’s Scepticism unpacks a positive and expansive reading of Hume and Pyrrhonism, and it does so, especially in Part II, by reading Hume through the Pyrrhonian ‘Fourfold observances’ of ‘common life’. The great Hellenistic philosopher and chronicler of scepticism Sextus Empiricus (2nd –3rd century AD) describes the Pyrrhonian Fourfold in the Outlines of Pyrrhonism (PH 1.11.23) as the practice of deferring non-dogmatically to appearances as they present themselves along four axes: nature, custom, the technical arts and the passions. Each of the four chapters composing Part II, accordingly, explains how the architecture of Hume’s philosophical system rests upon those four pillars. Chapter 5 mines the profoundly original sceptical conception of nature that Hume articulates as what I will describe as the pressing ‘fatalities’ of appearance – in the sense of what appears to be the human fate, what appearances humans seem fated to experience in common life. Chapter 6 shows how habit and custom pervade Humean philosophy and how scepticism figures into Hume’s thought about politics and religion, two sectors of life where custom and habit are especially prominent. Chapter 7 analyses the technologies of doubt and doxastic management that Hume deploys through sceptical argument and criticism. Chapter 8 investigates how the passions and feeling function sceptically in Hume’s philosophy, especially in relation to beliefs about the external world. Crucial to Hume’s Academic scepticism and its integration with his Pyrrhonism, I will argue, is a Clitomachian-Philonian doxastic position delineated first by the Hellenistic Academic sceptic Carneades of Cyrene (214–c. 129 BC). The suggestion that Hume’s thought has ancient Philonian roots of this sort is not entirely new. As long ago as 1932, John Laird speculated that Hume may have considered Cicero’s accounts of Metrodorus and Clitomachus in developing his philosophy.4 Donald L. M. Baxter has more recently

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recognised the same possible precedent.5 This volume bores into those speculations and draws out their logical and interpretive potential. The lode is rich and deep.

A Short History of Interpretations Hume repeatedly describes himself as a relatively safe and ‘mitigated’ sceptic. His contemporaries and near contemporaries did not agree. They received his ideas as symptomatic of a dangerous and radical strain of sceptical philosophy that denies the possibility of any knowledge whatsoever, that would extinguish belief entirely, and that rejects the existence of God, or at least belief in God. The popular Scottish Common Sense philosopher Dugald Stewart (1753–1828) read Hume along these lines, writing that in his view, Hume’s ‘aim is to establish a universal scepticism, and to produce in the reader a complete distrust of his own faculties’.6 While Stewart and a number of other prominent early nineteenthcentury interpreters, including Thomas Brown (1778–1820), did at times defend le bon David as a more positive thinker on a limited range of topics, readings such as Sir William Hamilton’s (1788–1856) characterisation of Hume as a ‘sceptical nihilist’ dominated his early reception.7 Later in the nineteenth century, John Stuart Mill (1806–73) reinforced the dominant deprecating view, calling Hume ‘the profoundest negative thinker on record’.8 In the influential 1874 ‘Introductions to Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature’, opening the four-volume edition of Hume’s philosophical work that he published with T. H. Grose, the British idealist Thomas Hill Green (1836–82) fortified the conventional understanding. He described Hume there, in a text that would inform more than a generation of readers, as having drawn out the logic of empiricism to its most extreme and self-subverting conclusions, ‘rendering . . . all philosophy futile’.9 What remained valuable in Hume’s work, for Green, was just his having shown that empiricism is a dead end and that it is imperative to determine a new beginning in philosophy, just the sort of new beginning that Green and Grose’s idealism offered. The shadow that this negative reading cast was long. Even seventy years later, Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) would write that ‘Hume . . . developed to its logical conclusion the empirical philosophy of Locke and Berkeley, and by making it self-consistent made it incredible’.10

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Rebuking and Revising Scepticism By the time Russell penned those words, however, another reading of Hume’s scepticism had already taken root. Norman Kemp Smith’s ground-breaking 1905 reinterpretation (expanded in 1941) reversed preceding negative readings, arguing that, for Hume, natural belief trumps scepticism and establishes epistemically capable scientific inquiry on the indefeasible ground of nature. One might call this the ‘naturalistic anti-sceptical’ reading. It was not an entirely new gesture. Some seventy years before the Treatise and just shy of thirty years after Descartes’ Meditations, Blaise Pascal in Pensées §131 (1670) wrote about nature as a brake on excessive scepticism: What then is man to do in this state of affairs? Is he to doubt everything, to doubt whether he is awake, whether he is being pinched or burned? Is he to doubt whether he is doubting, to doubt whether he exists? No one can go that far, and I maintain that a perfectly genuine sceptic has never existed. Nature backs up helpless reason and stops it going so wildly astray.11

Centuries before Pascal there was also Horace: Naturam expellas furca, tamen usque recurret, or ‘Expel nature with a pitchfork, still it comes right back’, even the pitchfork of sceptical argument.12 It is just this sense of nature as a therapeutic salve, an invincible defeater of sceptical doubt and an irrepressible defender of the salubrious ordinary that has led so many important scholars to read Hume, in a variety of ways, as an anti-sceptical realist.13 Post-Kemp Smith interpreters who understand Hume to be a realist about causal power in particular have come to be called ‘New Humeans’. Later anti-sceptical readings, taking their cues from positivist, analytic and ordinary language philosophy, as well as from the sceptical traditions themselves, figure the scepticism in Hume’s texts as just a temporary moment of his intellectual journey to scientific realism. For example, Annette C. Baier reads Hume’s scepticism dialectically, as a stepping stone on the way to a dogmatic naturalism. ‘Hume’s “true sceptic”’, she writes ‘is the one who sees, clearly and without deception, what drives a person to fantastic and to despairing scepticism, and how unstable they ultimately are. In seeing them so clearly, one sees through them. True scepticism

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collapses into mere openmindedness.’14 For Baier, ‘Hume’s bold and interesting question is what a warrant is like when it comes from a source other than the human intellect’; and, in her regard, nature provides that dogmatic warrant for actual knowledge.15 Don Garrett pinpoints scepticism’s philosophical defeat at the hands of nature in Hume’s remark: ‘Where reason is lively, and mixes itself with some propensity, it ought to be assented to. Where it does not, it never can have any title to operate upon us’ (T 1.4.7.11, SBN 270). Garrett calls this keystone idea Hume’s ‘Title Principle’ and his ‘master principle’.16 Explicating the Title Principle’s dogmatic implications, Garrett writes that natural propensity ‘confers a fundamental epistemic value’.17 This book contests these readings and presents Hume as a thoroughgoing sceptic, fully situated in both the Pyrrhonian and Academic traditions. Hume, in the interpretation developed here, is a naturalistic sceptic rather than an anti-sceptical naturalist. It is not nature that defeats scepticism, for Hume, but rather scepticism that redefines nature.18 Indeed, one of the most radical and powerful dimensions of Hume’s philosophy, as Chapter 5 will show, is his sceptical conception of nature.

Coherent Scepticism, Incoherent World The relationship between nature and scepticism in Hume has proven difficult for interpreters to settle. Karánn Durland finds it to be impossible.19 One option attractive to interpreters has been to explain the relationship between Hume’s scepticism and his naturalistic theoretical apparatus as ironic, pushing a kind of irrationalism, or at least as problematically divided, bifurcated, even schizoid. Hegel finds in Hume a description of human existence chock-full of endemic contrarieties and contradictions. Those impasses present, says Hegel, a profound shortcoming in Hume’s philosophy, and Hegel locates that failure in Hume’s rejection of what sceptics call the ‘criterion’. In Hegel’s own terms: ‘In itself reason [for Hume] thus has no criterion whereby the antagonism between individual desires, and between itself and the desires, may be settled. Thus, everything appears in the form of an irrational existence devoid of thought.’20 Janet Broughton concludes that ‘When we think about Hume’s ambitions and conclusions in this way [i.e., as pursuing the constructive project of the science of man], I think we must regard

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7

his naturalism and his skepticism as incompatible.’21 In her assessment, because of the logical power of his sceptical criticism, Hume is only able to go on with naturalistic, scientific inquiries by regarding the philosophical-scientific project with ‘ironic detachment’.22 For Broughton, moreover, not only science but also common life itself depend on embracing the irrational. She writes that Hume’s naturalistic investigation into humanity’s cognitive powers reaches ‘a surprising verdict on the product of the understanding. That verdict is that the common-sense assumption with which he begins – the assumption that we have a large body of justified beliefs about the world around us – is not itself coherent, clear, and justified.’23 Wade Robison, in a not terribly different register, reads Hume’s scepticism as rationally coherent in itself but irreconcilably inconsistent with irrational natural science and common-life beliefs. For Robison, Hume discovers that human belief in an independent world is ‘contrary to reason’, and that discovery defines the radical depth of Humean scepticism (T 1.4.2.52 and E 12.1.16). It is not so much, according to Robison, that we suffer an epistemological finitude and are simply limited in what we can think and know about the external real. Our very thinking about external reality is irremediably incoherent and logically opposed to what reason demands. Robison writes: Hume’s point . . . is that the essential features of the human mind are such that the very conditions that make us suppose the existence of external objects make us unreasonable . . . Hume means to show that the constitution of the human mind is such that we cannot be reasonable.24

Humean human beings are, in short, for Robison, fated to irrationality.25

Coherent World, Incoherent Scepticism Still other interpreters have inverted Robison’s assessment, determining that, for Hume, scepticism, rather than common life and natural science, is intrinsically irrational, meaningless and even deranged. Extending Donald W. Livingston’s Philosophical Melancholy and Delirium: Hume’s Pathology of Philosophy (1998), Donald C. Ainslie argues in Hume’s True Scepticism (2015) that,

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for Hume, the very act of philosophical reflection upon ultimate epistemic justification is pathological. The sort of self-reflection characteristic of sceptical inquiry infects the mind with the narcissistic ‘Disease of the Learned’ with which Hume’s physician diagnosed him in 1729 (LT 1.14, #3). Similarly, Lisa Levers, working out of the ordinary language tradition, argues that Hume regards radical sceptical doubt as akin to ‘madness’ and that, therefore, therapy rather than argumentative refutation is proper to dealing with it.26 For Ainslie, while Hume identifies pathological species of scepticism, he still also argues for the acceptance ‘of “true” scepticism, where we continue to use our reason’ with the positive self-understanding that we are unable ‘to give it a fundamental justification’.27 That is to say, beyond Baier’s ‘openmindedness’, we can, says Ainslie, gain from sceptical reflection an important insight into the possibilities and limits of scientific and philosophical inquiry. The lesson is that we must suffer inquiry remaining ungrounded, but inquiry is not for that reason undermined. As Hume puts it, in a remark upon which Ainslie grounds his reading: ‘The sceptic still continues to reason and believe, even tho’ he asserts, that he cannot defend his reason by reason’ (T 1.4.2.1, SBN 187). Peter F. Strawson, in his important book Scepticism and Naturalism (1985), dispatches scepticism not by diagnosing it as ill or by defeating it epistemically but instead by showing how it is semantically senseless. Strawson figures Humean doubt-resistant natural beliefs as constitutive of the ‘framework’ of human knowledge.28 As part of the framework of knowledge, Hume’s natural beliefs function, according to Strawson, in a way similar to the synthetic a priori principles that, in response to Hume, Kant argues define the necessary conditions for the very possibility of knowledge and experience. Natural beliefs in Hume are, for Strawson, also like the ‘hinge’ propositions upon which Wittgenstein showed that knowledge turns but which are immune to doubt.29 In short, Strawson argues that Hume, anticipating both Kant and Wittgenstein, identified what simply cannot be meaningfully doubted. In a remark that Strawson finds indicative, Hume writes: ‘’tis vain to ask Whether there be body or not? That is a point we must take for granted in all our reasonings’ (T 1.4.2.1, SBN 187). The necessary conditions of the possibility of inquiry cannot themselves become objects of intelligible and coherent inquiry.

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Others have reached similarly negative conclusions about sceptical self-reflection in Hume. Yves Michaud, like Ainslie, argues that while, in part, Hume’s ‘scepticism stemmed from the defects in the analysis of natural beliefs and from the deliberate attack against metaphysical systems’, it also results from the ‘selfreference of philosophical research’.30 Before Ainslie and Michaud, Barry Stroud writes that ‘Philosophical reflection on the nature of perception inevitably leads to scepticism.’31 When it comes to philosophical reflection about the ultimate grounds of knowledge, for these interpreters, that way there be dragons.

The Reconciling Project of Sceptical Realists Hume’s early readers saw in his work a strictly destructive scepticism, and the Kemp Smith line of interpretation argues that, for Hume, nature or common life somehow defeats or refutes scepticism, while subsequent lines variously criticise either scepticism or natural science as irrational, incoherent, meaninglessness and pathological. Still another current of Hume scholarship, often overlapping with these others, has investigated ways of accepting scepticism but also nevertheless conceiving it as somehow complementary with a chastened, coherent, though still dogmatic, scientific naturalism. This aspiring dogmatic rapprochement accepts an epistemological limitation that somehow allows for a metaphysical realism as well as a circumscribed epistemic realism. This strain of Hume interpretation is often called ‘sceptical realism’. Martin Bell, for example, agrees that ‘the reflective standpoint’ itself is the cause of meaningful ‘sceptical doubts’.32 Bell maintains, however, in addition, that at least in ‘one species’ of philosophy (namely, naturalistic philosophy) ‘natural belief can be harmonized with profound reflection’ and thus with scepticism.33 M. A. Stewart writes that ‘The first Enquiry is an exposition and defence of scepticism as the only philosophy compatible with a true knowledge of the human mind.’34 Claudia Schmidt observes that an increasing number of studies have argued that Hume is presenting a version of scepticism that is not intended to subvert our reasonings in the sciences and in ordinary life, but rather to explain the principles of cognition presupposed by these reasonings, and to examine their limitations, while also considering the practical context and the purposes of human cognition.35

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Paul Russell, who pursues an irreligious reading of Hume’s intent, agrees that Hume is ‘both a skeptic and a naturalist’.36 Recently, Graciela de Pierris, consistent with Russell, has rendered Hume’s scepticism as a radical device for protecting the project of empirical science from metaphysics and religion. She portrays a Hume whose complementary Janus faces are both legitimate but nonetheless distinct: ‘the standpoint of Hume’s radical skepticism takes place at a different level (a meta-level) from the positive embrace of Newtonian inductivism within his naturalist standpoint’.37 Robert J. Fogelin develops a similarly multi-level and reconciling view, arguing that Hume is a total and unmitigated ‘theoretical’ sceptic but also, despite that, on a ‘prescriptive’ level, an advocate of mitigated yet realist belief restricted to empirical and natural matters.38 For the Humean sceptic, reason cannot, as David Owen explains, establish its own warrant, but for sceptical realists that limitation is not the end of Hume’s epistemological project.39 While, in the sceptical realists’ assessment, scepticism remains coherent and undefeated, as well as meaningful and not pathological, by some means other than reasoning Hume nevertheless succeeds in legitimating dogmatic epistemic and metaphysical claims. Fascinated by a remark that Hume made in an 18 February 1751 letter to his friend, Gilbert Elliot (1722–77), the 3rd Baronet of Minto, John P. Wright concludes that Hume’s realism in the face of unbreachable sceptical limits turns upon his identifying doubtresistant and epistemically ‘legitimate Grounds for Assent’ (LT 1.155, #72).40 Those legitimate and scepticism-tolerant grounds are, according to Wright, not determined by foundational acts of reason or intellect. Rather, they are discovered in the natural ‘solid, permanent, and consistent principles of the imagination’ (T 1.4.4.2, SBN 226). Donald W. Livingston looks similarly not to ultimate, independent and autonomous reasoning but instead to the customs, habits and traditions of common life for legitimacy – despite undefeated scepticism (a shift from his 1984 Kemp-Smithlike interpretation, where common life defeats scepticism).41 Louis Loeb argues that Hume surpasses Sextus, not only by recognising that the opposition of different claims does not necessarily lead to tranquillity, but also by crafting a kind of internal stability-based strategy for justification.42 Inspired by Colin Howson’s work on the problem of induction,43 Bredo Johnsen maintains that, despite acknowledging a fundamental inability to establish reason’s soundness, Hume anticipates more recent epistemologists such as

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11

Nelson Goodman in developing a ‘reflective equilibrium’ model of epistemic justification. Hume’s great ‘righting’ of epistemology, Johnsen asserts, is to show that ‘the possible truth of radical skeptical hypotheses has no epistemologically significant consequences: our beliefs are justified if they belong to certain kinds of bodies of beliefs that are in reflective equilibrium . . .’44 Readings such as these that posit a fundamental, meaningful and undefeated scepticism but also an ordinary, practical and scientific dogmatism have been accused of depicting a Hume who philosophises in what Arnauld and Nicole diagnose as ‘bad faith’.45 That assessment may be too strong, but sceptical realism is, like so many other interpretations, nonetheless mistaken. Hume’s Scepticism shows, in contrast, how reading Hume through the sceptical traditions uncovers resources that make it possible to understand the complex and ingenious way in which he forges modes of justification consistent with radical scepticism such that they remain utterly non-epistemic and free of metaphysical commitment – that is, non-dogmatic. Situating Hume as perhaps the most profound inheritor of the sceptical traditions allows readers to see that there are not two (or more) Humes; that in Hume there is not a fundamental sceptic who is also a dogmatic natural scientist. Hume is not schizoid or what Michael Williams calls ‘biperspectival’.46 He is no kind of dogmatic realist – sceptical or anti-sceptical – but neither is he a dogmatic anti-realist. Hume is a radical sceptic through and through.

Doxastic Dogmatists Still, how is it possible for Hume to affirm the restoration of belief at the end of Treatise 1.4 but not simultaneously endorse dogmatic realism? Does not belief entail dogmatic commitment? That doxastic restoration has been a stumbling block even for those sympathetic to otherwise radically sceptical readings of Hume’s work. Richard H. Popkin, for example, understood the Pyrrhonian tradition very well, and he accepts that Hume is in important ways a Pyrrhonian thinker. Popkin, however, still regards Hume’s appeal to natural belief as inconsistent with traditional Pyrrhonism. In Popkin’s view, even passive assent is, for Hume, a type of dogmatic assent; and it is, moreover, a kind of dogmatism that Hume’s properly consistent Pyrrhonism endorses. Popkin writes: ‘if one is really Pyrrhonian [in Hume’s clarified sense], one will be as dogmatic

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and as opinionated as one is naturally inclined to be’.47 Popkin, that is, reads Hume’s endorsement of dogmatic natural belief not as a rejection of Pyrrhonism (as Kemp Smith et al. do) but instead as a critique of Pyrrhonism from within a properly Pyrrhonian framework. Jani Hakkarainen, a biperspectival interpreter who reads Hume as a doxastic dogmatist, has argued that, while Hume is sceptical and not a metaphysical realist as a philosopher, he is a metaphysical realist in ordinary life. That is because, Hakkarainen argues, in ordinary life, unlike life immersed in intense philosophical reflection, Hume believes in the tenets of metaphysical ‘realism’ – namely, that ‘there are existentially and causally perception-independent entities that exist continuously (no gaps) and externally to the perceiver in perception-independent space’.48 Because he finds that naturalistic investigations into the foundations of knowledge lead to scepticism, Kevin Meeker calls scepticism the ‘fate’ of naturalised epistemology (rightly so), but not doxastic life. Instead of dividing Hume between philosopher and ordinary man, between sceptical critic and natural scientist, or between theoretical and prescriptive thinker, Meeker divides him between epistemologist (e-sceptic) and believer (anti-d-sceptic). Meeker writes that ‘Hume embraces epistemic’ and sceptical ‘egalitarianism but eschews D[oxastic]-scepticism. In other words’, says Meeker, ‘Hume contends that our beliefs lack any substantive positive epistemic status [i.e., they are all equal by virtue of that complete lack] but does not recommend on that account that we doubt everything.’49 David Fate Norton, while reading Hume as a mitigated and less thoroughgoing sceptic than Meeker, similarly distinguishes the sceptical implications of Hume’s theoretical logic from his doxastic dogmatism.50 Echoing the Kemp Smith line in the midst of the ‘New Hume’ debate about whether Hume is a realist regarding the existence of an independent causal power, the moderate causal realist Peter J. E. Kail writes that ‘reason suggests agnosticism [about the real existence of causal power,] but that is trumped by the natural propensities’ to believe in external realities, and belief is dogmatic as well as realist.51 Acknowledging that interpreting Hume as a thoroughgoing sceptic is conceptually cogent, Kail later attenuates this position with an increasingly qualified and weakened realism that reads Hume as less dogmatic and merely inclining towards or expressing a ‘minimal preference’ for the realist ‘metaphysical

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Introduction

13

position’.52 Kail continues to hold across this shift that if one is a thoroughgoing sceptic, then one must ‘reject all belief’ (T 1.4.7.8, SBN 268); and, contrapositively, if one does not reject all belief, then one is not a thoroughgoing sceptic.53

A Thoroughly Sceptical and Coherent Hume The reading developed here is contrary to all of these preceding lines of interpretation. Contrary to the line flowing from Kemp Smith, neither nature nor common life defeats scepticism for Hume. Contrary to irrationalist readings, Hume subtly develops a philosophical scepticism that renders both sceptical reflection and common life coherent and self-consistent and largely, though not entirely, consistent with one another. Contrary to reading Hume as a doxastic dogmatist, Hume’s Scepticism argues that, for him, sceptical assent can be understood as a mode of belief that, like the beliefs of common life, is entirely non-dogmatic. Hume’s Scepticism describes a single sceptical Hume, a Hume who is not only a radical theoretical epistemic sceptic but also a non-dogmatic believer in both philosophical and common life.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

Annas, ‘Hume and Ancient Scepticism’, p. 273. Popkin, ‘Bayle and Hume’, p. 153. Harris, David Hume, pp. 224–5. Laird, Hume’s Philosophy, p. 181. Baxter, Hume’s Difficulty, p. 9, cf. p. 101n9. Stewart, Dissertation, pp. 437f., quoted in Harris, David Hume, p. 4. Harris, ‘Reception’, pp. 315–17. Harris, David Hume, p. 9. Green, ‘General Introduction’, p. 2; Harris, ‘Reception’, p. 321. Russell, History, p. 645. Pascal, Pensées, §131 [434], p. 64. Horace, Epistles 1.10.24–5; quoted by Norton, David Hume, p. 191n75. 13. Kemp Smith, ‘Naturalism of Hume’; Kemp Smith, Philosophy of David Hume; Strawson, ‘powerless’, Scepticism and Naturalism, p. 13; Wright, Sceptical Realism; Garrett, Cognition. For a sense of the realist or ‘New Hume’ interpretation, see Read and Richman (eds), New Hume Debate.

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14 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22. 23.

24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

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Hume’s Scepticism Baier, Progress of Sentiments, p. 59; see also pp. 65–7. Baier, Progress of Sentiments, p. 59. Garrett, Cognition, pp. 234–7 Garrett, Hume, p. 232. Durland, ‘Extreme Skepticism’, p. 85. Ibid. Hegel, Lectures, 3.375. Kuehn, ‘Hume’s Antinomies’, p. 26, writes that ‘there is in Hume a fundamental class of contradictions which he believed were neither accidental nor created by his analysis, but were essential characteristics of the human mind’. Broughton, ‘Naturalism’, p. 432. Broughton, ‘Inquiry’, p. 553. Ibid., p. 543; cited by Greenberg and compared to Garrett in Greenberg, ‘Naturalism’, p. 725; Broughton, ‘Inquiry’, p. 553; Broughton, ‘Naturalism’, p. 432. Robison, ‘Naturalist and Meta-sceptic’, p. 98. Ibid., pp. 98–9. See also Coleman, ‘Hume’s Alleged Pyrrhonism’, p. 465. Levers, ‘Method in Hume’s “Madness”’. Ainslie, True Scepticism, p. 150. Strawson, Scepticism and Naturalism, p. 11. Wittgenstein remarks in On Certainty that ‘I want to conceive [the certainty of particular statements] as something that lies beyond being justified or unjustified; as it were, as something animal’ (OC §359). About ‘hinge’ propositions, see OC §§341–3. Thompson Clarke in an important article argues for a similar point; Clarke, ‘Legacy’, p. 754. Michaud, ‘How to Become’, p. 36. Stroud, Hume, p. 115. Bell, ‘Belief and Instinct’, p. 184. Ibid., p. 185. Stewart, ‘Two Species’, p. 95. Schmidt, David Hume, p. 138. Russell, Riddle, p. 222. De Pierris, Ideas, Evidence, and Method, p. 237. Fogelin, Hume’s Skepticism; Fogelin, Pyrrhonian Reflections; Fogelin, Hume’s Skeptical Crisis. Owen, Hume’s Reason. Wright, Sceptical Realism; Wright, ‘Scepticism’. Livingston, Philosophical Melancholy. Loeb, Stability and Justification; Loeb, ‘Sextus, Descartes, Hume, and Peirce’; and Loeb, Reflection and Stability.

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Introduction 43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

48.

49. 50. 51. 52.

53.

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15

Howson, Hume’s Problem. Johnsen, Righting Epistemology, p. xi. Baier, Progress of Sentiments, pp. 57, 57n11. Williams, Unnatural Doubts, pp. 10, 26. Popkin, ‘David Hume: Pyrrhonism and Critique’, p. 406. Floridi reads Hume as adopting a similar position but doing so in an antiPyrrhonian way: ‘When Hume came to discuss the existential nature of skeptical life, he turned against the Pyrrhonian the very essence of Pyrrhonism itself’; Floridi, Sextus Empiricus, p. 51. Hakkarainen, ‘Why Hume’, p. 145. Hakkarainen, ‘Hume’s Scepticism and Realism’, p. 283. Cf. Hakkarainen, Hume’s Scepticism and Realism. ‘My interpretation, which I have defended elsewhere [Hakkarainen, ‘Hume’s Scepticism and Realism’, pp. 301–6], is that Hume suspends his judgement on Realism in the domain of philosophy, whereas, when the philosophical analysis of his belief in the domain of everyday life is given (as Hume does in THN 1.4.2), he can be said to be a firm Realist. Philosophy and everyday life are two domains of doxastic assent that differ in degree. They are distinct because epistemic standards in them are different: in philosophy, they are theoretical virtues such as consistency and coherence rather than the more practical values of everyday life’; Hakkarainen, ‘Why Hume’, p. 159. Meeker, Hume’s Radical Scepticism, p. 19; cf. pp. 16ff. Norton, David Hume, pp. 9, 238, 386. Kail, ‘How to Understand’, p. 262. Ibid., pp. 261–3. See Kail, ‘Is Hume a Realist?’, esp. p. 443, where Kail offers a clear historical summary of the realist strain of Hume interpretation, both New Hume interpretations and otherwise. Kail affirms a split between Hume the sceptical philosopher and Hume in common life; Kail, ‘How to Understand’, pp. 263–6. Kail, ‘How to Understand’, p. 261. Kail in this passage endorses the metaphysical implications of Garrett’s ‘Title Principle’ drawn from T 1.4.7.11, SBN 270.

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Part I

Academic and Pyrrhonian Scepticism, Ancient and Modern

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1

Hume and Ancient Academic Scepticism

‘Is there no way’, said I, ‘of escaping Charybdis, and at the same time keeping Scylla off when she is trying to attack my crew?’ Odysseus to Circe, The Odyssey, Book 12.111–121

To launch this investigation with an account of Academic scepticism seems natural, since in his 1748 Philosophical Essays concerning Human Understanding (what we today know as the Enquiry concerning Human Understanding) Hume characterises his thought as a kind of ‘academical’ scepticism, and on the basis of that self-description interpreters often read Humean scepticism as Academic (E 12, SBN 146ff., esp. E 12.24, SBN 161–2).2 In this opening chapter I wish to add detail, depth and background to the characterisation of Hume’s thought as Academic by laying out the principal features of Academic scepticism as it developed in the ancient world, thereby grinding a lens, as it were, through which to clarify Hume’s later variant. Academic scepticism comprises no single doctrine but rather an interwoven fabric of texts and theories originating first in Plato’s Academy and then extended and elaborated over time in a rich tapestry of iterations. These texts underwrite a network of philosophical ideas connected by genesis, by family resemblances and by self-conscious dialectics with one another; but they are not unified by any single essential theory that they all advance. To pinpoint Hume’s location in the sceptical traditions, this chapter and the next will unfold by tracing out a short history of Academic scepticism in its diverse forms, both ancient and modern, as they precede Hume, paying special attention to topics relevant to interpreting Hume’s thought. The present chapter will lay important groundwork for later chapters in its account of a controversy that emerged between Clitomachus of Carthage (c. 187–c. 110 BC) and Metrodorus of Stratonikeia (fl. 110 BC) regarding how to 19

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understand the Academy’s probabilistic criteria for thinking and believing.

1.1 Doubt in the Old Academy Academic thought emerged when, near the Kifisos River, roughly six stadia outside the Dipylon Gate in the western section of Athens’s formidable walls, Plato (428–348 BC) established an institution that would become by the mid-380s BC a gathering place for people interested in philosophical inquiry – the Academy. The land Plato inherited, once according to Plutarch a ‘bare, dry and dirty spot’, supported a sacred olive grove called Hekademia, named after the hero ‘Akademos’ and dedicated to Athena, the goddess of wisdom.3 Bare and difficult though the soil may have been for the olive trees that commemorated the one that Athena planted on the Acropolis in besting Poseidon for the city’s love, the site would prove exceedingly fertile in the search for wisdom. The kind of philosophy generated by Plato’s Academy during his lifetime has been dominantly conceived as metaphysical Platonism. According to the standard metaphysical reading, early Academic philosophy centres on an upward movement of the psûchê as it liberates itself through rational dialectic from its incarceration in the body and its attendant vicious, ignorant and ontologically diminished wanderings among the many opinions and appearances of common life. Deeply influenced by Parmenides, Platonic philosophy, understood this way, aspires to rise above common life and gain a comprehensive, orderly and knowing grasp of ultimate reality – in Plato’s case, the transcendent, singular, unchanging Forms (eidê) that exist beyond the phenomenal universe that mimics them. Philosophy of this kind promises not only transcendence but also independence, ultimacy and authority – to have the last word, the complete speech and, moreover, on that basis to possess the only legitimate warrant to judge and rule, politically and otherwise.4 I will call this type of philosophy, in its general form, ‘First Philosophy of the Real’. There was, however, another very different stream of thinking, with a different understanding of philosophy and wisdom, that poured out of Plato’s Academy. It was a current with which, as we have seen, Hume explicitly identified his work, and it was one that he, as well as many others, associated with Plato’s teacher, Socrates (c. 469–399 BC) – not without reason. This philosophical

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movement came to be known as ‘Academic scepticism’. Though perhaps less majestic than its metaphysical sibling, in its quieter way Academic scepticism became enormously influential too – much more so than is commonly realised today. In his 1745 ‘Letter from a Gentleman’, defending himself unsuccessfully against religious dogmatists for Professor John Pringle’s chair in moral philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, Hume associates himself with the most extreme of Academic sceptics: ‘Were Authorities proper to be employed in any Philosophical Reasoning, I could cite you that of Socrates the wisest and most religious of the Greek Philosophers, as well as Cicero among the Romans, who both of them carried their Philosophical Doubts to the highest Degree of Scepticism’ (LG 24, 1.426). Socrates, of course, is well known for having been identified by the oracle at Delphi, after a question posed by his friend Chaerephon, as a man compared to whom there is ‘no one wiser’ (Apology 20e–21a). After examining those associated with established wisdom and wisdom-teaching in Athens, Socrates seems to have reached a proto-sceptical position, having found neither knowledge nor wisdom among its conventional expositors. He speculated therefore that perhaps the oracle had named him wise, not because there was anything special about his epistemic achievements, but just because he, unlike others, acknowledged that he did not possess wisdom. In Plato’s recounting of Socrates’ words: God only is wise; and in this oracle he means to say that the wisdom of men is little or nothing; he is not speaking of Socrates, he is only using my name as an illustration, as if he said, ‘He, O men, is the wisest, who, like Socrates, knows that his wisdom is in truth worth nothing’. (Apology 22e–23b)

Despite the epistemic privation to which he confesses, Socrates as Plato portrays him does seem to express a kind of positive philosophical gain, a self-awareness or self-understanding perhaps not improperly characterised as ‘wisdom’ (sophia) but different from ‘knowledge’ (epistemê). Wisdom, in this curious and paradoxical sense, involves an acknowledgement that, like anyone else, like all people ordinarily, one does not possess wisdom. It is a conception not only of a kind of epistemic egalitarianism (equal in ignorance) but also of a philosophical self-understanding profoundly different from that of First Philosophy of the Real.5 For Academic

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sceptics, this self-aware not-knowing seemed characteristic of the ‘examined life’ that Socrates extols in the Apology (38a5–6). Perhaps, moreover, in this sense philosophy may be thought of as a kind of expertise or technê used to generate that distinctive selfunderstanding – that unknowing wisdom. The idea has proven both powerful and influential. The sceptical moments of Plato’s dialogues do not end with the Apologia or with the figure of Socrates. Despite the magnificence of their metaphysical architecture, many of Plato’s texts contain – in their framings, their aporias and their self-limiting remarks – suggestions that human beings neither possess nor are able to acquire wisdom through knowledge (sophia through epistemê), or indeed simply knowledge itself.6 Even Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 BC), some three centuries after Socrates, came to regard Plato as a philosopher who refused the proposition that humans can achieve philosophical certainty (e.g., ACD 1.12.46, Tusculanae disputationes 1.9). Hume places himself and his ‘science of man’ within this sceptical Academic lineage, as if his position were analogous to that of Socrates and the Academics who followed him by pursuing moral philosophy in the wake of the pre-Socratic naturalists. Hume, in the ‘Introduction’ to A Treatise of Human Nature (1739), sets the scene for his text this way: ’Tis no astonishing reflection to consider, that the application of experimental philosophy to moral subjects shou’d come after that to natural at the distance of above a whole century; since we find in fact, that there was about the same interval between the origins of these sciences; and that reckoning from THALES to SOCRATES, the space of time is nearly equal to that betwixt my LORD BACON and some late philosophers in England, who have begun to put the science of man on a new footing, and have engag’d the attention and excited the curiosity of the public. (T Intro. 7, SBN xvi–xvii)

Just as the (dogmatic) natural philosopher Thales led ultimately to (sceptical) Socrates and to Socrates’ practice of radically questioning claims to knowledge and wisdom, so the (dogmatic) natural philosopher Francis Bacon has led to our moral and humane (sceptical) Hume. The source of Hume’s comparison here may be Cicero, who in the Tusculanae disputationes (5.4.10–11) writes about Socrates as ‘the first philosopher to call philosophy down

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from the heavens and set her in the cities of men and bring her also into their homes and compel her to ask questions about life and morality and good and evil’.7 Plutarch similarly describes Socrates as doing philosophy amid common life – in markets, by joking with friends, on the battlefield, and while drinking wine or poison, rather than in classes ‘from the heights’ of a professorial chair.8

1.2 Probabilism, Fallibilism and Belief in the Middle and New Academies The sceptical qualities of Plato’s own texts and of the figure of Socrates, did not, of course, exhaust the conceptual geography of Academic scepticism. Those who inherited Plato’s texts, institutions and authority would elaborate upon them in important ways.

1.2.1 A Short History of the Sceptical Academy Whether or not Plato himself was actually a sceptic is, for our purposes, a moot point. Sextus Empiricus, the great Greco-Roman chronicler of Pyrrhonian scepticism, may well be right that, contra Cicero, Plato was on balance a dogmatist (PH 1.33.221ff., esp. 225). Whatever the case, the school that Plato founded later became a clearly sceptical institution. Tracing that history will help illuminate the conceptual legacy that Hume adopted. 1.2.1.1 The Academy turns sceptical. After Aristotle’s departure from the Academy and later Plato’s death circa 348 BC, the post of principal or ‘scholarch’ passed on to a series of successors – Speusippus, Xenocrates, Polemo and Crates. With Crates’ death in 266 BC and the subsequent ascension of first Arcesilaus of Pitane (c. 315–c. 240 BC) and then, in 241 BC, Lacydes of Cyrene, in what today is Libya, to the scholarchate, the Academy openly embraced Socrates’ self-assessment and turned in a decidedly sceptical direction. These transformative thinkers established what has come to be called the sceptical ‘Middle’ Academy, in contrast to Plato’s conventionally more dogmatic ‘Old’ Academy. Cicero reports of Arcesilaus that he knew nothing – not even, as Socrates had claimed, his own ignorance (ACD 1.12.44–5; cf. 2.5.15). Perhaps not coincidentally, Sextus describes Cyrenaic thought as similar to what he later recognised as scepticism proper (PH 1.31.215), as he pinpoints the origins of Academic scepticism (PH 1.33.220).9

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Fourth in line as scholarch after Arcesilaus came Carneades (214–c. 129 BC), another thinker from Cyrene. Carneades’ scholarchate in 155 BC established the so-called sceptical ‘New’ and later Academy, which expanded scepticism’s investigative scope. Hume seems in ‘The Natural History of Religion’ (N 12.25) to associate his own work with this moment and ‘the chief business of the sceptical philosophers’ as it was practised by Carneades – namely criticising religion and theology.10 Among Carneades’ most important students was Clitomachus of Carthage who became scholarch in 127 or 126 BC and who continued what had become the Academic work of undermining stoic epistemology.11 Philo of Larissa (c. 159–c. 84 BC), the successor to Clitomachus in 110 or 109 BC, is commonly understood to be the last head of Plato’s Academy as a school of scepticism. Academic Philo appears, notably, as the central character in Hume’s 1779 Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, a rhetorical choice that emphasises the centrality of Academic-Philonian ideas in Hume’s thought.12 For clarity we might map the sequence like this: Socrates ã Plato ã Arcesilaus ã Carneades ã Clitomachus ã Philo of Larissa (Old)

(Middle)

(New Academy)

Aristotle (peripatetic philosophy)

Late Academic scepticism has thus become known as ‘Philonian’ scepticism. Like Socrates, neither Arcesilaus nor Carneades wrote anything. The ideas of these ancient Academics have come to us at least secondhand, principally through Cicero in his Academica, among the most important texts for transmitting the ideas of Academic scepticism to modernity. Sceptical ideas, however, pepper many of Cicero’s later texts, including Hortensius, De finibus, Tusculanae disputationes, De natura deorum, De divinatione and De fato. Cicero seems to have drawn many of his views about Academic scepticism from Philo, whom Cicero met when he was about twenty years old.13 Additional information about the Academics has been passed on through the later compiling work of Sextus Empiricus (late 2nd–early 3rd century) and Augustine of Hippo (AD 354–430) in his Contra academicos. The chronicling and historical texts of Plutarch (AD c. 46–c. 120, Parallel Lives

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and Moralia), as well as Diogenes Laërtius (fl. 3rd century, Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers), provided more popular, though less philosophically sophisticated, vehicles for scepticism’s transmission.14 1.2.1.2 A dogmatic revival. By whatever name, scepticism’s antagonistic relationship to First Philosophy of the Real precipitated a split within the school when Antiochus of Ascalon (c. 125–c. 68 BC) seceded from the sceptical Academy around 90 BC during Philo’s scholarchate, just before its campus was ravaged by the forces of the Roman dictator Sulla in 86 BC. Antiochus, who later became Cicero’s teacher in Athens when Cicero was in the city in 79 BC, was appointed ‘camp-philosopher’ by Cicero’s friend, the military leader Lucullus, to whom Book 2 of Cicero’s Academica is dedicated and who appears there as a central figure. In the course of an argument against the eternity of the world, Hume, in Book 6 of the Dialogues concerning Natural Religion (D 6.10), refers to Lucullus and his having brought the first cherry tree from Asia into Europe.15 This Antiochus, it seems, broke from Philo in order to recover what he thought to be the true philosophy that informed Plato’s Old Academy. Crafting what has come to be confusingly known as ‘Middle Platonism’ (even though it developed long after both the Middle and New Academies), Antiochus, who had studied with the stoic Mnesarchus of Athens (c. 160–c. 85 BC), wove elements of stoicism, Aristotelianism and other diverse doctrines into his school’s syncretic teachings. Plutarch is commonly counted within this movement, though the evidence is scant.16 Later, largely through the neo-Pythagoreanism of Numenius of Apamea (fl. AD 160), Middle Platonism’s dogmatic eclecticism would evolve into the more systematic but still dogmatic ‘neo-Platonic’ line that is standardly understood to have spawned Greco-Roman Plotinus, Proclus, Augustine, the medieval pseudo-Dionysius, Boethius and al-Farabi, as well as later the Renaissance Platonist Marsilio Ficino. 1.2.1.3 Another sceptical stream. Another apparent student from Philo’s first-century BC Academy, Aenesidemus, broke off from the withering school around the same time that Antiochus did, launching a competing project of recovery that clarified the opposition between scepticism and First Philosophy of the Real.17 That

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new movement also merged, at least for a time, the Academic with what would become a different stream of sceptical thought. Aenesidemus’ school claimed its provenance not in Plato’s or Socrates’ or Arcesilaus’ teachings but instead in those of one of Arcesilaus’ contemporaries from the far side of the Peloponnesus, Pyrrho of Elis (c. 365–c. 275 BC). The new branch of scepticism that Aenesidemus initiated would become known as ‘Pyrrhonism’. It advanced a powerful and attractive alternative to neo-Platonism and Western metaphysics, and it was, moreover, a current of thinking that was profoundly important to Hume. These lines of descent from the Academy would shape the intellectual contours of philosophy’s future, influencing later thinkers long after the formal final closing of the Academy in 529 by, it seems, the Christian Roman emperor Justinian in Constantinople, who shuttered all the pagan schools of philosophy, including the schools of Athens. The tradition-defining split that succeeded Philo and the end of the sceptical Academy can be mapped like this: Philo of Larissa (Academy)

Antiochus ã Middle Platonism ã Neo-Platonic dogmatism Aenesidemus ã Sextus Empiricus ã Pyrrhonian scepticism

1.2.1.4 Scepticism’s stoic opposition. While the Platonism of the Old Academy is usually and rightly understood in relation to its pre-Socratic predecessors and its contemporary competitors – the sophists, the Olympian religions and the poets – the scepticism of the Middle and New Academies names stoicism as its philosophical opponent, though it also opposes in prominent ways Aristotelian philosophy as well as Epicureanism. Stoicism originated with Zeno of Citium (c. 344–262 BC), who taught students including Cleanthes of Assos (c. 330–c. 230 BC) in the Stoa Poikile (the painted colonnaded porch) on the north side of the Athenian agora. While Arcesilaus positioned his thought against Zeno’s and Cleanthes’ doctrines, Carneades figured his theories against those of Cleanthes’ student, Chrysippus of Soli (c. 279–206 BC), who succeeded Cleanthes as scholarch of the Stoa. The contests among these opponents were philosophically fecund, crucial even to the development of scepticism. So it comes as no surprise that, according to Diogenes Laërtius, Carneades proclaimed: ‘Without Chrysippus there would be no Carneades’ (DL 4.62). Chrysippus appears in Hume’s Dialogues. The first ancient philosopher to surface there, he argues that theology comes last among the sciences

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(D n1; cf. N 12.25). The Academic sceptics’ agonistic pairings with stoicism, then, look like this: Arcesilaus âã Carneades âã Hume’s Philo âã

Zeno/Cleanthes [the pairings of the Middle Academy] Chrysippus [the pairing of the New Academy] Hume’s Cleanthes [the pairing in Hume]

Hume, in short, re-enacts in his own text the Hellenistic dialectic. 1.2.1.5 Defining Academic scepticism against stoicism. What were the specific philosophical differences between the Academic sceptics and the stoics? Both Arcesilaus and Carneades share an opposition to stoic claims. They oppose not only 1) the stoic purported apprehension through reason of ultimate reality, but also 2) the stoic claim to having identified, as the means of that apprehension, socalled ‘cataleptic impressions’ (katalêptikê phantasía, καταληπτικὴ φαντασία). Cataleptic or ‘cognitive’ impressions are phenomena whose veracity is 1) self-evident as well as 2) distinguishable from other phenomena, such that what is cataleptic simply 3) cannot be doubted and 4) conforms to reality (ACD 1.11.41–2, 2.24.77). Much like the epistemologically foundational ideas that Descartes identified, cataleptic impressions are clear, distinct and indubitable. Phenomena of this sort are, indeed, crucial for a great deal of dogmatic philosophy.18 Chrysippus, for example, along these lines, according to Plutarch, held as self-evident the metaphysical idea that ‘No particular thing however slight can come into being except in accordance with universal Nature and its rationality [logos].’19 Early modern dogmatists reiterated this supposedly self-evident idea as the ‘principle of sufficient reason’. In Leibniz’s well-known formulation it reads: ‘There can be found no fact that is true or existent, or any true proposition, without there being a sufficient reason for its being and not otherwise.’20 In contrast, for Hume as for the ancient Academics, highminded metaphysical declarations and epistemological pretensions of this sort are not so much false as without warrant. Against, for example, a modern iteration of Chrysippus’ principle that all events must be caused and governed in a rational way, Hume writes: The separation . . . of the idea of a cause from that of a beginning of existence is plainly possible . . . and consequently the actual separation of these objects is so far possible, that it implies no contradiction

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Hume’s Scepticism nor absurdity; and is therefore incapable of being refuted by any reasoning from mere ideas; with which ’tis impossible to demonstrate the necessity of a cause. (T 1.3.3.3, SBN 79–80; cf. T 1.3.3.4, SBN 80)

This is a powerful rebuke to rationalistic metaphysics and its fundamental claim that not only does everything have a cause, but also that everything has a cause that, because it conforms to reason, can be rationally apprehended. It is important to emphasise, however, that the ancient Academics did not per se refuse the epistemic categories of true and false or the metaphysical idea that some phenomena are as they appear, while others are deceptive or illusory. The sceptics’ dispute with the stoics was over whether inquirers could in any case tell the two apart without doubt, as well as about what sort of doxastic commitments inquirers should properly make in light of that limitation. Hume similarly does not in the passage above assert the negative dogmatic metaphysical claim that something can in fact come to be without sufficient reason or cause. He merely asks the question: what reason is there to think this impossible?21 In this, Hume refuses the age-old principle of First Philosophy of the Real defined by Parmenides and embraced by philosophical dogmatists ever since: that ‘it is the same for thinking as for being’.22 The labour of scepticism, however, was not entirely negative. Against katalêpsis (κατάληψις) – which directly translates as ‘catch’ or ‘apprehend’, in the sense in which the police apprehend criminals – the sceptics advanced akatalêpsía (ἀκαταληψία) by positively advocating various forms of more limited or guarded judgement and commitment. In place of the stoics’ assertion of catalepsis, for example, the sceptics instead proffered what Arcesilaus called in his cautious way to eulogon (το εὐλογῶν, the reasonable) and what Carneades called to pithanon (το πιθανόν, the plausible or the persuasive).23 Academic sceptics, that is, attempted to formulate ways to make judgements and enter claims about phenomena, but only in a way that stops short of claims to apprehension. Philosophers have come to call these conceptual options ‘probabilism’ (a doctrine of the less than certain) and ‘fallibilism’ (of the possibly wrong).

1.2.2 Were the Academic Sceptics Dogmatists? The critical use of the terms ‘dogma’ and ‘dogmatism’ did not emerge until later among sceptics. There nevertheless seems to

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have been a specific controversy among ancient Academics that bears particular relevance to interpreting Humean scepticism along these lines, in particular the question of scepticism’s relationship to what now may be called dogmatic realism and naturalism. The logical space laid out in the ancient controversy will prove crucial in helping us later in Chapter 8 to understand how the reassertion of belief in the wake of Hume’s devastating sceptical arguments may, contrary to popular readings, be understood in sceptical and non-realist terms. For Plato and the Old Academy, doxa (δόξα) was distinct from knowledge and categorically deficient in relation to knowing (such that knowledge as true, justified doxa becomes oxymoronic). Doxa, moreover, is itself closely associated with appearance and only with appearance.24 Following the Old Academy, First Philosophies of the Real labour to surpass or penetrate beyond much disparaged doxa. Might, however, the ancient understanding of doxa and its modern cousin ‘belief’ be conserved in a different kind of philosophical project such that belief per se may be detached or liberated from metaphysical claims about the real, about being, and about ‘what is’, as well as from epistemological claims about the ‘true’ and justifications for truth claims about the ‘real’? Might Hume have crafted an understanding of ‘belief’ along just such lines? 1.2.2.1 Non-dogmatic Carneades and Philonian scepticism. Pascal understood Arcesilaus to have failed in crafting a non-dogmatic alternative to catalepsis, describing him in entry §520 [375] of his 1670 Pensées as ‘the skeptic Arcesilaus who became a dogmatist’.25 Sextus Empiricus famously portrays Academic akatalêpsía as a form of negative dogmatism; and he characterised Carneades’ to pithanon as a dogmatic criterion of truth (ADO 1.173 [M 7.173]; cf. PH 1.33.220ff.). A fascinating suggestion to the contrary, however, crystallises in the Academica (‘Lucullus’) when Cicero suggests that Carneades was able to assent to a phenomenon or proposition as more likely true than a different one, but to do so only in a provisional or hypothetical way, holding opinions only as opinions in the selfconscious awareness that they are not knowledge. In Cicero’s account, Clitomachus argued that his teacher’s vision of sceptical ‘approval’ did not imply belief in the truth apparent in what is pithanê. That is to say, according to Cicero’s Clitomachus, while Carneades approved some phenomena as appearing to be more

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veridical than others, he neither believed nor disbelieved them to be really so. As Cicero puts it at ACD 2.32.104: Clitomachus added: ‘The wise person is said to suspend assent in two senses: in one sense, when this means that he won’t assent to anything at all; in another, when it means he will restrain himself even from giving responses showing that he approves or disapproves of something, so that he won’t say “yes” or “no” to anything. Given this distinction, the wise person accepts suspension of assent in the first sense, with the result that he never assents; but holds on to his assent in the second sense, with the result that, by following what is persuasive wherever that is present or deficient, he is able to reply “yes” or “no”.’26

A bit later, at the conclusion of the book, the voice of Catulus, a follower of Philo of Larissa, elaborates. In the course of describing the ideas about akatalêpsía that he has inherited from Carneades through his father, he explains that while he agrees that nothing is epistemically apprehended (‘perceived’), he disagrees about holding a universal epochê, and non-dogmatically assents: Then Catulus said: ‘What do I think? I am returning to my father’s view, which he at least said was Carneades’s. That is, while I don’t think that anything is apprehensible [percipi], I still reckon that the wise person will assent to something he hasn’t apprehended [non percepto] – that is, hold opinions – but in such a way that he understands that it is [a mere] opinion and realises that nothing is apprehensible [nihil esse quod comprehendi et precepi possit]. So, while I can’t accept that universal epokhê [ἐποχήν illam omnium rerum], the other Academic view, that nothing is apprehensible [nihil esse quod precepi possit], has my vehement approval.’ (ACD 2.47.148; trans. Brittain, who also refers to ACD 2.59 and 2.78)

Cicero’s voice responds to Catulus tentatively, ‘I don’t entirely reject [nec eam admodum aspernor]’ that Carneadean view. Then Hortentius proclaims more decisively, ‘that’s a view that suits the Academy’ [nam ista Academiae est propria sententia] (ACD 2.47.148; cf. ACD 2.18.59, 2.32.104–5).27 Cicero, laying the groundwork for Hume, adopts this nondogmatic doxastic view and advances a positive but non-dogmatic Academic alternative by translating to pithanon using a special form of probet (‘approval’, ACD 2.31.99) in conjunction with

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his describing the sceptical practice of merely ‘following’ but not dogmatically believing in ‘probabilities’ (sequitur probabilia).28 At ACD 2.20.66, Cicero suggest that to be wise is not to hold opinions (to be an opinator), but that probabilities of the proper kind offer an alternative. As Cicero casts it, the sort of ‘probabilities’ (probabilia) one follows on the sceptical model are neither those that are ‘grasped nor perceived nor assented to but that possess verisimilitude’.29 1.2.2.2 Dogmatic Carneades and Philonian scepticism. A competing, more realist, and perhaps dogmatic reading of Carneades’ to pithanon was advanced by Metrodorus of Stratonikeia, another student of Clitomachus (as well as by Sextus Empiricus, PH 1.33.229). Metrodorus seems to have thought that Carneades accepted certain elements of Platonism and advanced the pithanon as a criterion for achieving real epistemic gain.30 Augustine and the later Philo of Larissa follow Metrodorus.31 This line can be illustrated this way: Carneades to pithanon

dogmatic ã late Philo, Metrodorus, Augustine non-dogmatic ã early Philo, Clitomachus, Cicero

Hume follows the second, non-dogmatic stream.

1.3 The Theoretical Sceptics: Clitomachian and Metrodorian Scepticism Regardless of who is right in this historical controversy about Carneades and to pithanon, the logical or conceptual space is clearly demarcated; and one can distinguish several doxastic-epistemic options, as well as, correlatively, several views of Academic scepticism, which we can deploy in interpreting Hume.

1.3.1 Non-Realism vs. Moderate Realism Let us call the kind of Academic scepticism whose type of assent does not include belief that phenomena are probably really as they appear ‘Clitomachian Academic scepticism’ (CAS); and let us call the kind of Academic scepticism whose form of assent does include such probabilistic belief ‘Metrodorian Academic scepticism’ (MAS). We may also call Clitomachian Academic scepticism, ‘Academic sceptical non-realism’ (ASN) – where ‘realism’ means that ɸ (some

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phenomenon or proposition) not only appears to be so but also is so independent of the way it appears to us. We may call Metrodorian Academic scepticism, then, in contrast, ‘Academic sceptical realism’ (ASR).32 This is the kind of realism that informs many interpretations of Hume, but, as we shall see, it is a reading of Hume that is mistaken. We may for brevity’s sake organise the alternatives this way: 1. Dogmatism: belief that ɸ (some phenomenon or proposition) is really as it appears. 2. Academic scepticism: a. Clitomachian Academic scepticism (CAS): assent to ɸ without belief that a) ɸ is or b) ɸ more probably is as it appears (ASN). b. Metrodorian Academic scepticism (MAS): assent to ɸ with a mitigated belief that ɸ more probably really is as it appears (ASR).

1.3.2 Criteria and Academic Doxastic Technai Ancient Academic scepticism is associated, however, not only with probabilism but also with procedure, especially, as we will see, in contrast to Pyrrhonian scepticism. That some phenomena (including propositions) ‘probably’ in some sense are as they appear to be was not simply a theory or doctrine; it was associated with a set of discriminating procedures, methods and practices for distinguishing the more probable from the less probable. What became known in the Academics’ disputes with the stoics as the ‘problem of the criterion’ involved a search for ways of distinguishing truth from falsehood, veridical phenomena from those that are illusory, phenomena (what Hume calls a ‘mark or character’; T 1.1.7.6, SBN 20) that reveal the real natures or essences of things from those that do not. Phenomena that are veridical, or that can serve as criteria of truth, will either, participants in this dispute argued, 1) themselves possess certain features by which one can see that they are not illusory or false, or 2) be separable from those that are not veridical by some clear set of procedures (cf. PH 2.3.14–22ff.). One might therefore say that identifiable sets of features that probably or apparently veridical phenomena possess, along with formulable sets of procedures for making this sort of discrimination among phenomena, compose sceptical logic and method – so long as these

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procedures are consistent with akatalêpsía. Carneades, for example, advanced a threefold system of internalist criteria for distinguishing what is 1) merely ‘persuasive’ (pithanon) from what is 2) persuasive and ‘undiverted’ (aperispastos, uncontradicted and stable), and from 3) what is persuasive, undiverted and ‘thoroughly explored’ (diexhôdeumemê or perihôdeumenê, scrutinised), especially by considering the assessment of other philosophical inquirers (ADO 1.242–3 [M 7.242–3]; cf. ACD 2.11.33, ACD 2.11.36).33 Just as Carneades and the Academics accepted doxastic options that are plausible, explored and un-contradicted or stable, so Hume accepts those that are ‘durable and useful’ (E 12.24, SBN 161) as well as ‘stable’.34 We will later see comparable procedures in Hume for avoiding dogmatism but still accepting claims that, while perhaps not true, in a ‘satisfactory’ way meet the criteria of legitimate inquiry and withstand the ‘test’ of the most critical sceptical scrutiny (T 1.4.7.14, SBN 272).

1.3.3 Non-epistemic vs. Epistemic Clitomachian Scepticism We have reached an important juncture in preparing an interpretation of Hume in light of the sceptical tradition, as we now possess the conceptual resources to refine our sceptical typography by distinguishing epistemically egalitarian CAS from CAS that is purely non-epistemic and practical, refusing in its assent any conclusion about the epistemic status of appearances – positive, negative or egalitarian. Dividing CAS into these two alternatives yields: 2.a.i Clitomachian non-epistemic Academic scepticism (CNAS): a) assent to ɸ that are more pithanê and pass practical criteria b) without any belief that those ɸ really are more probably veridical and c) without the claim that all ɸ are epistemically equal; its assent refuses even probable claims about the nature of reality and does not make claims about the ultimate epistemic status of ɸ; in other words, its assent guides practice but involves neither metaphysical claims about the nature of reality (even probabilistic claims) nor claims about the real epistemic status of ɸ. 2.a.ii Clitomachian epistemic Academic scepticism (CEAS): a) assent to ɸ that are more pithanê and pass practical criteria b) without any belief that those ɸ really are more probably

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Hume’s Scepticism veridical and c) with the claim that all ɸ are epistemically equal; its assent refuses even probable claims about the nature of reality but does make claims about the ultimate epistemic status of ɸ; in other words, its assent guides practice, does not make probabilistic claims about metaphysical reality, but does make negative claims about the real epistemic status of ɸ (namely, that all ɸ are epistemically equal, that all truth claims are equally unjustifiable).

Both of these are types of Academic sceptical non-realism (ASN), but CNAS, as we will see, correlates better with what Sextus Empiricus describes as the Pyrrhonian Fourfold criterion of sceptical practice and living in accord only with appearances. Indeed, to the extent that CEAS maintains a claim about epistemic egalitarianism, it is actually a form of epistemological realism. Metrodorian Academic scepticism, of course, possesses no non-epistemic variant.

1.4 Conclusion We have now delineated a number of the central interpretive lenses for the project of this text. We have sketched out how scepticism emerged as a distinctive stream of thought from Plato’s Academy, and we have articulated the way in which scepticism set itself off from stoicism along the lines of akatalêpsía or non-apprehension. We have seen, too, how subsequent Academic sceptics followed Carneades’ delineated competing conceptions of non-dogmatic belief, especially with regard to what is more and less probable. Clitomachus defined a thoroughly non-apprehensive theory of the probable, while Metrodorus maintained that the probable still carries a limited epistemic load. These conceptual coordinates will prove crucial to defining Hume’s scepticism. Hume, as we will see, is a Clitomachian non-realist kind of Academic, both in terms of metaphysics and epistemology.35 Hume’s scepticism does not entail making positive epistemological claims about the true and the real, probable or otherwise; and it does not involve any positive epistemological claims, even the minimal claim of epistemic egalitarianism on the basis of epistemic nullity. The conceptual space of these ancient Academics shows that Hume is a thoroughgoing radical sceptic on metaphysical, epistemological, and even, as I will argue in Chapter 8, doxastic

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grounds. That is to say, my position is radical because in my reckoning Hume is not so much an epistemological egalitarian as no epistemologist at all – at least not if epistemology is understood as entailing another kind of dogmatism, a dogmatism about the real epistemic status of truth claims and the possibilities of knowledge. Completing my case for this radically sceptical interpretation, however, will require a number of additional steps. Primary among them are both a survey of Academic scepticism as it developed in early modernity as well as a thorough inquiry into the expansively Pyrrhonian and radically Academic dimensions of Hume’s thought. Coming to terms with the extent of Humean scepticism, in particular how Hume philosophises through the Pyrrhonian Fourfold, will in subsequent chapters reinforce a reading of Hume’s texts as presenting a sophisticated form of Clitomachian non-realist Academic scepticism.

Notes 1. For an assessment of Homer, The Odyssey and scepticism, see Zerba, ‘Penelope’. For Diogenes Laërtius’ report of Pyrrho’s admiration for Homer, see DL 9.67, and cf. 9.71 and 9.73; see below §3.3.2. In my reading, Homer’s metaphor points here to the dangers of both positive and negative dogmatism. Hume’s scepticism charts a non-dogmatic course between the two. Hume frequently refers to Homer and at EM 7.15 (SBN 255) as well as ST 227–8 compares him to François de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon (1651–1715), who had written on Odysseus’ son, Telemachus, and on Pyrrhonism; see below §2.1.3.3. 2. See Olshewsky, ‘Classical Roots’. 3. Plutarch, ‘Life of Cimon’, 13.7. My thanks to Dr David Purdie for this citation. See also DL 3.7–8. Augustine plays on the word, ‘Academos’, to mean ‘remote from the people’, CA 3.9.18.4. 4. Livingston, Hume’s Philosophy. 5. Meeker, Hume’s Radical Scepticism, pp. 16ff. 6. Important acknowledgements of epistemic limits are to be found at, e.g., Phaedrus 277e; Plato’s ‘Seventh Letter’, 341b–c; Symposium 198a–201c, 203b; Diogenes Laërtius, DL 9.72. See Vogt, Belief and Truth; and Vogt, ‘Scepticism and Action’. 7. Merrill, ‘Hume’s Socratism’, p. 24. 8. Plutarch, ‘Whether a Man Should Engage in Politics When He is Old’, 26, 796d; quoted by Hadot, What Is Ancient Philosophy?, p. 38.

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9. On the differences between scepticism, as Sextus defines it, and Cyrenaic thought, see Bett, ‘Cyrenaics’, pp. 14ff. 10. It is a pregnant passage, as Hume there in the ‘Natural History’ calls upon Cotta, who roughly corresponds to Philo in Hume’s Dialogues. The Dialogues is modelled on Cicero’s De natura deorum, and the character, Cotta, figures prominently there. Hume in the ‘Natural History of Religion’ (N 12.25) cites a related passage from Against the Physicists 1.182–90, ADO 3.182–90 (erroneously Adversus mathematicos, M 9.182–90); see below §4.2.1.1. 11. Tarrant, ‘Philo of Larissa’, pp. 83ff. 12. Cicero describes himself and Cotta as ‘disciples of Philo’ who ‘have learned from him to know nothing’ (DEO 1.17). 13. While Philo was elected to the scholarchate as a radical Clitomachian sceptic, interpreters regard him as shifting later to a more mitigated scepticism or possibly even a non-sceptical fallibilism; Brittain, ‘Philo of Larissa’. See De inventione 2.10; cf. DEO 1.5; quoted by Wynne, ‘Cicero’, p. 99n1. 14. Bonazzi, ‘Plutarch and the Skeptics’, pp. 121–34; Bonazzi, ‘Plutarch on the Differences’, pp. 271–98; De Lacy, ‘Plutarch and Academic Sceptics’, pp. 79–85; Blackwell, ‘Diogenes Laërtius’s “Life of Pyrrho”’, pp. 324–57. See Machuca, Bibliography on Skepticism. 15. See Glucker, Antiochus. More precisely, Book 2 of the first version (the Priora) of Cicero’s Academica is known as the ‘Lucullus’ and features him. 16. Lévy, ‘Middle Platonism’, pp. 116ff. 17. There is some uncertainty about Aenesidemus’ relationship to the Academy; see Caizzi ‘Aenesidemus’; Polito, Sceptical Road; and Castagnoli, ‘Aenesidemus’, p. 67. 18. Descartes, ‘Meditation 2’, p. 149 (AT 7.24), writes: ‘Archimedes, that he might transport the entire globe from the place it occupied to another, demanded only a point that was firm and immovable; so, also, I shall be entitled to entertain the highest expectations, if I am fortunate enough to discover only one thing that is certain and indubitable.’ 19. Plutarch, De stoicorum repugnantiis; see Plutarch, Moralia, p. 547. 20. Leibniz, Monadology, §32. 21. Devout Demea, in Hume’s Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, will of course have nothing of such questions, and he responds with the ire characteristic of dogmatism: ‘Nothing exists without a cause; and the original cause of this universe (whatever it be) we call God; and piously ascribe to him every species of perfection. Whoever

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22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

28.

29.

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scruples this fundamental truth, deserves every punishment, which can be inflicted among philosophers, to wit, the greatest ridicule, contempt and disapprobation’ (D 2.3). Cf. T 1.3.3.3–5, SBN 79–81; and E 8.25, SBN 95–6. Parmenides, Fragment 3. Kirk, Raven and Schofield, Presocratic Philosophers, p. 246; Photius, Biblioteca 5.1.8. Obdrzalek, ‘Living in Doubt’. Vogt, Belief and Truth, pp. 11–12. Pascal, Pensées, p. 185, §375; Krailsheimer collects this as remark §520. Translation Brittain, ‘Cicero’s Sceptical Methods’, p. 19n13. Ibid., pp. 19–20. Cf. Thorsrud, ‘Arcesilaus and Carneades’, pp. 76–8; Thorsrud, ‘Radical and Mitigated Scepticism’, pp. 140, 150n18. Clitomachus may have read Carneades as merely advancing an argumentative gambit and not properly describing sceptical ideas (ACD 2.24.78). Vogt, ‘Scepticism and Action’, p. 170; Bett, Pyrrho, p. 174. Sextus Empiricus delineates a similar distinction between dogmatically holding opinions and merely following, acquiescing or passively yielding to them: ‘It must also be borne in mind that what, as we say, we neither posit nor deny, is some one of the dogmatic statements made about what is non-apparent; for we yield to those things which move us emotionally and drive us compulsorily to assent’ (PH 1.20.193). I thank Harald Thorsrud for this comparative citation. Sextus also notably writes at PH 1.33.230 very much in line with Cicero’s use of sequitur: ‘For the word “believe” has different meanings: it means not to resist but simply to follow without any strong impulse or inclination, as the boy is said to believe his tutor; but sometimes it means to assent to a thing of deliberate choice and with a kind of sympathy due to strong desire, as when the incontinent man believes him who approves of an extravagant mode of life’ (emphasis mine). For Cicero, that is, probabile entails presenting not truth, even to a limited degree, but rather merely what he calls in the Academica ‘verisimilitude’ or similia veri; he writes there: Etenim is quoque qui a vobis sapiens inducitur multa sequitur probabilia, non comprehensa neque percepta neque adsensa sed similia veri; quae nisi probet, omnis vita tollatur; in the ‘Lucullus’, ACD 2.31.99–100. Cf. Tusculan Disputations 2.2.5, and see modern philosophers’ use of Tusculan Disputations 2.2.5 below in §2.1.3.8. On Academic Plato and the ‘probable’, cf. Diogenes Laërtius, DL 9.72.

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30. Perhaps sounding a more Metrodorian note at Tusculan Disputations 1.9, Cicero writes: ‘I will do as you say, and will explain these things to the utmost of my ability, yet not with the assurance befitting the Pythian Apollo, that all that I say is certain and beyond dispute, but as an ordinary man endeavoring to conjecture what is probable; for I will go no further than to state probabilities, while those will speak with certainty, who both maintain that these things can be ascertained with precision, and profess themselves to be possessed of infallible wisdom.’ 31. For more on the distinction between these two types of sceptic in Cicero, see ACD 2.11.32–6 and 2.30–6.98–114; Brittain, ‘Cicero’s Sceptical Methods’, pp. 18–19, 19n13. See also Augustine, CA 3.27; Neto, ‘Epoche as Perfection’, pp. 20–1. Cicero’s sceptical text Hortensius helped draw Augustine into philosophy; see Augustine, Confessions, Book 3. 32. Academic sceptical realism anticipates the realist interpretation of Hume taken up by the ‘New Hume’ scholars; Read and Richman (eds), New Hume Debate. 33. Schofield, ‘Academic Epistemology’, p. 349. At ACD 2.11.36, Cicero describes what is thoroughly examined (circumspiere diligentissime), and at De Legibus 1.37 what is diligently explored (diligenter explorata); see Atkins, Cicero on Politics, pp. 182–4. 34. Baxter, Hume’s Difficulty, p. 101n16 writes: ‘Precedence for seeking stability is found in Sextus’s discussion of the preference of the New Academy for “appearances which are plausible and scrutinized and undistractable”, or, as Mates translates it, “the phantasia that is plausible, tested, and stable”’ (PH 1.33.229). Loeb, Reflection and Stability, renders stability the central criterion around which Hume constructs his theories of knowledge, science and belief. It is worth noting, however, that in the discussion of PH 1.33.229–30, Sextus criticises the Academics for taking up a doxastic position that is too strong, even ‘incontinent’ – one that follows from ‘strong impulse or inclination’ and ‘with a kind of sympathy due to strong desire’; see below §8.2. 35. Baxter, Hume’s Difficulty, p. 9.

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Hume and the Legacy of Academic Scepticism

But were these hypotheses once remov’d, we might hope to establish a system or set of opinions, which if not true (for that, perhaps, is too much to be hop’d for) might at least be satisfactory to the human mind, and might stand the test of the most critical examination. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature 1.4.7.14

Charles B. Schmitt and Richard H. Popkin laid the interpretive foundations of our contemporary understanding of the transmission and reception of scepticism in early modernity.1 Schmitt’s work focused on Cicero’s Academica, while Popkin set out a broader interpretive framework. Both scholars tell a tale of loss and return – but not of utter loss, nor of a return to unaltered circumstances.

2.1 The Career of Academic Scepticism It was in the context of that history and those altered circumstances that Hume artfully crafted his ‘Academical’ thought. In many ways, it is the most powerful rendering of the Academics’ philosophical achievement ever produced, and it calls upon much of the Academic philosophy that preceded it.

2.1.1 Augustine, Cicero and the Persistence of Academic Scepticism Luciano Floridi, who took on Schmitt’s mantle, has undertaken an exhaustive search of texts and usage. According to his findings, by the late fourth century ‘the word Academicus had become synonymous with Skeptic, a linguistic use that remained unchanged until the seventeenth century’.2 A powerful critique of the Academics was formulated in the late fourth century by a young man who

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would become Augustinus, the influential patristic Bishop of Hippo. Augustine converted finally to Christianity in a Milan garden on a September day in AD 386. Resigning his post as court rhetorician and breaking off a high-status engagement to be married, Augustine withdrew with his mother Monica and some companions to a villa owned by his friend, Verecundus, in rural Cassiciacum (Cassago Brianza), not far from Milan. Over the next six or seven months, Augustine prepared for the baptism he would receive from Ambrose, the Bishop of Milan. While in Cassiciacum, Augustine composed a clutch of Soliloquia and three dialogues: De beata vita, on the centrality of the Church in a happy life; De ordine, on the providential order of the universe; and Contra academicos, his earliest extant writing, a critique of the Academics, to whom he seems to have been seriously drawn in 383. Augustine’s critique was, however, among the least of the Academics’ concerns in 386. A Roman law passed that same year announced that those ‘who contend about religion . . . shall pay with their lives and blood’.3 Contra academicos recounts days of lively discussion with Augustine’s cohort in November of 386 and argues against the sceptics along a number of axes. Augustine argues in Book 1 that the happy life is properly one that knows the truth rather than, as the sceptics report, searches for it. He argues, furthermore, in Book 3 that the wise man is one who knows rather than one who does not know, reasserting the deep internal connection between sophia and epistemê. Augustine criticises the sceptical description of the ‘plausible’ (to pithanon) in terms of verisimilitude or appearance of truth (CA 2.7.16.17ff.). He argues that just as one cannot meaningfully claim that a son is similar to his father without having known the father as well as the son, one cannot understand what is similar to truth without having known actual truth as well as the appearance of it (CA 2.7.19.70). In a more moral and religious register, Augustine maintains not only that sceptical arguments lead to suspension of judgement but that they also, despite protestations to the contrary, obstruct both the search for and the apprehension of truth. In this way, scepticism promotes intellectual laziness and the shirking of duties (CA 2.5.11–12). It can amount, in fact, to a wilful refusal of God’s truth.4 Still, Augustine’s troubled sense of being cast out into a dangerous world, like Adam and Eve, placed at a distance from God, vulnerable and without an apparent sense or purpose or plan, seems to exhibit

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the lingering influence of scepticism’s acknowledgement of human cognitive weakness and finitude. If so, then Augustine retains, despite himself, something of the Academic scepticism in which he had been immersed before his conversion.5 So if the Academics influenced Augustine, if Augustine influenced Jean Calvin and John Knox, and if Calvin and Knox influenced Hume, then the impact of religious culture upon Hume was, in fact, actually another way by which Academic scepticism reached him. In other words, the religious milieu that Hume inhabited exerted an influence not utterly distinct from that of the sceptical traditions (see §7.2 below). Against the sceptics, Augustine argues for two kinds of knowledge: 1) mathematical and logical truths, especially disjunctions, which are true even in cases of radical disagreement (CA 3.10.23), and 2) assertions about mere appearances, which are true even if the appearances are deceptive (CA 3.11.24–6). In De trinitate, anticipating Descartes’ cogito and Avicenna’s ‘falling man’ arguments, Augustine reasons that even if dreaming, mentally ill or otherwise in error, one still knows that one is alive and that one exists (CA 15.12.21). Augustine advances similar arguments at Enchiridion 7.20 and Civitate dei contra paganos, where he argues: ‘For we exist, and we know that we exist . . . If I’m in error, I exist.’6 In De magistro, Augustine argues that Platonic recollection of the kind described in the Meno is actually the divine revelation of Christ in our minds. In Contra academicos, Augustine also advances a curious and provocative claim about Academic sceptics. He says that they misrepresented their actual positions. While distinguishing the New Academy from the Old, Augustine maintains that, since the positions of the sceptics are so easily refuted, it must be the case that Arcesilaus (Middle Academy) as well as the New Academics were actually dogmatic Platonists. Augustine’s inference is that rather than advancing their arguments and ideas sincerely, the Academics were just pursuing dialectical gambits against the stoics (CA 2.6.14), as well as deceptive strategies to mislead weaker but potentially oppressive minds: Arcesilaus, it seems to me, prudently and with great advantage completely concealed the view of the Academy . . . Arcesilaus – the most clever and humane of men – decided . . . to disabuse those he found to have been wrongly taught rather than to bear the burden of teaching those he didn’t consider teachable. (CA 3.17.38.52–8)

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Cicero beforehand had described even Socrates as concealing his own opinions (ACD 2.5.15, Tusculanae disputationes 5.11).7 It was, in Augustine’s view, Antiochus’ misinterpretation of the Academics that established the false historiography of the Old and New Academies as opposed and contrary to one another (CA 2.6.15; 3.18.41). Might Hume have turned a lesson in Academic prudential dissimulation from Augustine to a different purpose – that is, to the purpose of concealing scepticism rather than dogmatism (see §4.2.2 below)? In any case, Augustine’s criticisms of the Academics, powerful as they are, did not fully extinguish interest among the philosophers of Christendom in Academic scepticism. While Cicero’s texts went virtually unrecognised by scholars in the Muslim world, his sceptical writing made a more durable impact upon Christian thinkers and other intellectuals in the West, especially De natura deorum and the Academica priora (more particularly, Book 2 of the Academica, commonly called the ‘Lucullus’). Despite Augustine’s objections, these texts, along with those of Plutarch, would march sceptical ideas through the curricula of the European Schools of the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and on into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, where they would become influential on young David Hume. Still, although texts produced by the Academics and Cicero survived among medieval Christians, their philosophical impact seems to have been rather limited. Runnels of influence are discernible in the works of a very small number of that period’s thinkers, among the most important of whom was the Anglo-Saxon scholar John of Salisbury (aka Johannes Parvus or ‘John the Little’, c. 1115–76). Trained in Paris under the logician Peter Abelard (1079–1142), Salisbury became secretary to the Archbishop of Canterbury and then Bishop of Chartres. Salisbury is remarkable for having in the twelfth century argued in favour of Academic probabilism. He distinguishes three kinds of Academic sceptics: adherents of the first group claim that they know nothing at all . . . adherents of the second group accept as knowledge only things that are necessary and known per se, that is, things that one cannot fail to know. The third kind comprises those of us who do not venture to state an opinion in cases that are doubtful to the wise man. (Metalogicon 4.31)8

Salisbury opts for the third type and for a kind of fideism; but, in contrast with the position of Aristotelian epistemology, he also writes that ‘Nothing can be known with necessity about what is

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corruptible.’ Salisbury explicitly defends a Metrodorian version of Carneades’ probabilism (Metalogicon 3.3) and foregrounds Academicism in the Prologue to the first book of his Policratus, as well as in Book 7 of that work.9 Henry of Ghent (c. 1217–93) seems familiar with at least some of Cicero’s ‘Lucullus’ in his De academicis, and Duns Scotus criticises Henry for taking positions too close to those of the Academics.10 Henry praises the Academics’ modesty, a virtue later also emphasised by the sixteenth-century scholar Johannes Rosa (1532–71), in his commentary on the Academica of 1571. The Parisian professor of rhetoric Omer Talon (Audomarus Talaeus, c. 1510–62) also extols that virtue in both his Academica (1548), which draws from Diogenes’ Lives and reprises Cicero’s scepticism, and in his edition of Cicero’s Academica posteriora (1547). Hume writes in the ‘Letter from a Gentleman’ that ‘Modesty then, and Humility, with regard to the Operations of our natural Faculties, is the Result of Scepticism’ (LG 21, 1.425). Petrarch (1304–74), the great Italian Renaissance poet and humanist, called Cicero’s Academica one of his favourite books, and interest in the Academica spread prodigiously in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, expanding its reach northward into Germany and France. Yet, as Schmitt puts it, despite ‘this reawakening of interest in the Academica at the end of the fourteenth and the beginning of the fifteenth century, we do not find . . . an outbreak of [Academic] scepticism’.11 Philosophically speaking, this was perhaps in part because of Augustine’s still stifling authority. The widespread adoption of Academical philosophy was still to come.

2.1.2 Historical-Textual Evidence of the Academics in Hume There is no doubt that Hume drew deeply from Cicero, whose importance to him is evident in many of the texts he produced. In the autobiographical, retrospective essay ‘My Own Life’, which he composed just before his death in 1776, Hume musters a final effort to shape the way that he and his writings would subsequently be understood. Recounting the years of feverish study that he pursued during the late 1720s after having left university, Hume reports that: My studious Disposition, my Sobriety, and my Industry gave my Family a Notion that the Law was a proper Profession for me. But I found an unsurmountable Aversion to every thing but the pursuits of Philosophy

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Hume’s Scepticism and general Learning; and while they fancyed I was pouring over Voet and Vinnius, Cicero and Virgil were the Authors which I was secretly devouring. (MOL xxxiii).12

Three decades before he penned those final recollections, Hume describes Cicero in the 1745 ‘Letter from a Gentleman’ as reaching the ‘highest Degree of Scepticism’ (LG 24, 1.426). As a 22-yearold, Hume wrote what he also called a ‘History of my life’ in a March or April 1734 letter drafted for an unidentified London physician. In the letter, Hume describes a psychological crisis that he had suffered; and he remarks on the demands he experienced after ‘having read many books of Morality, such as Cicero, Seneca, & Plutarch’ (LT 1.13–4, #3). Other references scattered across his epistolary life testify to Hume’s enduring interest in Cicero’s work. Hume’s earliest reference to Cicero in any extant text appears in a letter of 4 July 1727 to his childhood friend Michael Ramsay (LT 1.10, #1) when he was just 16 years old. In a letter of 17 September 1739, the same year that Books 1 and 2 of the Treatise were published, Hume wrote to the stoical Scottish naturalistic moral sense philosopher, the Revd Professor Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746), about the influence of Cicero’s moral theory upon him: ‘Upon the whole, I desire to take my catalogue of Virtues from Cicero’s Offices [De Officiis], not from the Whole Duty of Man. I had, indeed, the former Book in my Eye in all my Reasonings’ (LT 1.34, #13; cf. EM App 4n72.3, SBN 319). Hume certainly meant his reasonings in moral philosophy, and he refers explicitly to Cicero fifteen times in the Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals (1751).13 In the 1740 Treatise (T 1.3.8n21App., SBN 630), Hume quotes from Cicero once (De finibus, 5.2), a passage he again cites in the 1748 Enquiry concerning Human Understanding (E 5n9, SBN 52–3). Hume acquired at some point the Olivetus edition of Cicero’s complete works, an edition published in Paris in 1740–41 (DHL 82, #275).14 He cites Cicero around that same time in his essay ‘Of the Dignity or Meanness of Human Nature’ (1741) as an exemplar of wisdom – moral wisdom, it seems in particular, since Hume there positions Cicero in contrast to Francis Bacon (ES 83). Hume recognised Cicero’s influence not only upon himself, but also more widely across the general intellectual milieu in which he worked, observing in his first enquiry that ‘The fame of CICERO flourishes at present; but that of ARISTOTLE is utterly decayed’ (E 1.40, SBN 7).

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Many readers in the eighteenth century credited Cicero principally as an orator rather than as a philosophical theoretician. It is a view that Hume acknowledges and seems to share, not only in his 1727 letter to Michael Ramsay but also three decades later in his 1757 essay ‘Of the Standard of Taste’, where he reports that ‘The abstract philosophy of Cicero has lost its credit: The vehemence of his oratory is still the object of our admiration’ (ST 243).15 Earlier, in ‘Of Eloquence’ (1742), Hume opines: It is observable, that the ancient critics could scarcely find two orators in any age, who deserved to be placed precisely in the same rank, and possessed the same degree of merit. CALBUS, CÆLIUS, CURIO, HORTENSIUS, CÆSAR rose one above another: But the greatest of that age was inferior to CICERO, the most eloquent speaker, that had ever appeared in Rome. (ES 98)

Hume even made clear his admiration for Cicero the man in his essay ‘Of the Rise and Fall of the Arts and Sciences’ (1742), when he calls him ‘one of the finest gentlemen of his age’ (ES 128). Hume himself, however, admired the Roman’s sceptical thinking every bit as much as his moral philosophy, his rhetoric and his character. They are not, in fact, for Hume, distinct, as Hume appropriated the Ciceronian idea that philosophy and rhetoric are intimately connected.16 Nevertheless, Hume foregrounds Cicero as an ‘academic’ philosopher rather than as a rhetor in the dedication to ‘The Natural History of Religion’ (N 2); and in the first Enquiry, following traditional usage, he virtually identifies the ‘ACADEMIC’ with ‘the SCEPTICAL philosophy’ (E 5.1.34, SBN 41). (Cicero describes himself as an Academic at De finibus 5.76 and elsewhere, for example, ACD 2.35.112–3.) In the dedicatory epistle prefacing his 1757 publication Four Dissertations, Hume praises Cicero as an Academic sceptic for exemplifying the tolerance of diverse opinions characteristic of that school: ‘Cicero, an academic, addressed his philosophical treatises, sometimes to Brutus, a stoic; sometimes to Atticus, an epicurean’ (Ded 2). As a sceptical diagnostician, Cicero, writing in the Academica, roots the disturbances that inquirers face not in sceptical doubt but instead in dogmatism, and he does so through the image of dogmatism as a ‘rock’, the ‘bondage’ (tenentur adstricti) from which scepticism makes escape possible. Perhaps Cicero’s rock was even the inspiration for the famous ‘barren rock’ upon which

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Hume finds himself stranded at the end of Treatise Book 1, and from which common life and a positive embrace of scepticism rescues him (T 1.4.7.1, SBN 264). (Hume may also in that image be alluding, of course, to the dogmatic rock Peter or Petras, upon which the Christian church is founded; Matt. 16:18.) Dogmatists, Cicero writes, ‘cling as to a rock [saxum] to whatever theory they are carried to by stress of weather [tempestate]’, but scepticism, for Cicero, sets people free from dogmatic masters to whom they fearfully cling (ACD, 2.3.8–9). Scepticism is, in other words, a practice of liberation: ‘we are more free and untrammelled [liberiores et solutiores] in that we possess [integra] our power of judgement uncurtailed [ulla cogimur], and are bound by no compulsion [necessitate] to support all the dogmas laid down for us almost as edicts by certain masters’ (ACD 2.3.8). In the opening lines of De natura deorum, Cicero invokes a similar liberty of judgement when he describes himself as judging freely and without prejudice (libero iudicio), ‘under no sort of bond or obligation [adstrictum necessitate] willy nilly to uphold some fixed opinion’ (DEO 1.7.17). Several important later sceptical writers took note of Cicero’s metaphorical Alcatraz-like rock of dogmatism. Montaigne (1533–92) quotes this same passage from the Academica in his magisterial sceptical essay of 1580, the Apologie de Raimond Sebond.17 The quasidogmatic atomist and quasi-sceptic Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655) also quotes this passage in his well-known 1624 Dissertation . . . against the Aristotelians, when attacking another of the sceptics’ central targets, Aristotelian metaphysics.18 I wish to argue that Hume follows this Academic line in his own sceptical project. As for how to navigate philosophically once released from the false security of dogmatic rocks, Cicero describes two alternatives. One can 1) appeal to dim and difficult-to-apprehend constellations, or one can 2) adopt an orientation, as Hume does, that is ‘easy and natural’ (T 1.4.7.6, SBN 267; cf. E 1.11 and E 12.2). Cicero says that one can, metaphorically, either follow the bright and easy Septentriones (the Big Dipper) or the dim and difficult but more direct constellation called the Cynosure (Ursa Minor; ACD 2.20.66; DEO 2.104–6).19 Weighing the options, Cicero rejects the dim and difficult guides. He does so not only because they are dim and difficult but also because the idea that theories of this sort can serve human practical purposes is, in comparison, dubious (ACD 2.47.146).20 Just so will Hume do away with what

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he calls ‘abstruse’ and ‘difficult’ species of ‘false philosophy’, and in their place advance the easy and ‘true’ as he sails. As we will see, however, in §7.2.2 below, he does accept a special, abstruse and difficult form of philosophy that is sceptical and ‘true’. Hume draws explicitly as well as implicitly from Cicero while casting his philosophy of religion. In its format, Hume’s Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, begun in the 1750s, is substantially modelled on Cicero’s De natura deorum, and his contemporary audience would have readily noticed this. Hume’s Dialogues are populated by characters who imitate Cicero’s originals and who relate to Cicero’s intellectual history. Hume’s devout ‘Demea’ corresponds to Cicero’s Velleius; his sceptical ‘Philo’ (surely named after Philo of Larrisa) corresponds to Cicero’s Cotta (one of Philo’s students); and Hume’s natural theologian, ‘Cleanthes’, corresponds to Cicero’s Balbus, another stoic. The opening and closing passages of Hume’s Dialogues and Cicero’s Deorum are very similar. Hume’s text, moreover, as a matter of logic, adopts many of the argumentative strategies that Cicero deploys in Deorum, as well as in the Academica.21 Cicero appears ten times explicitly in the body of ‘The Natural History of Religion’ (1757), and Hume draws on Cicero in that text in many other, less obvious ways.22 Hume writes at N 12.13, for example, that although ‘we might expect’ that Cicero ‘would have been . . . the most declared abettor’ of infidelity and challenges to the authority of public religion, that ‘great man’ bridled the ‘sceptical liberties’ that he was willing to exercise. He also ‘avoided, in the common conduct of life, the imputation of deism and profaneness’, even among members of ‘his own family’. The great man, in other words, says Hume, kept hidden his radical scepticism about religion, masking it with his public and even domestic representations of faith. In contrast to figures such as Pompey, Cicero’s devotion in Hume’s estimation finally seems ‘much’ less ‘sincere’ (N 12.14). Could that characterisation of Cicero present an oblique confession of Hume’s own insincerity? Indeed, in ‘The Natural History of Religion’ Hume implicitly seems to align himself with the Academic sceptic Carneades – and therefore symbolically the Academic movement in general – whose ‘chief business’ (N 12.25), he says, is nothing less than exposing the lack of ‘foundation’ for religious belief. For this reason, Hume’s personal declarations of religious conviction and ‘true religion’ should be taken with a grain of salt.

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2.1.3 The Early Modern Recovery: From Theology to Natural Philosophy When it reached the modern era, Academic scepticism would not only confront variants of its ancient dogmatic opponents; it would also encounter an intellectual scene informed by a host of new philosophical dogmatisms, including modern Christianity and nascent dogmatic species of modern science. Scepticism, of course, played a central role in shaping these movements, and they in turn changed scepticism. 2.1.3.1 Academicism and the Reformation. As we saw in §2.1.1, Academicism may have influenced Augustine’s religious ideas. Academic ideas, in fact, appear strewn across the Christianity of the Reformation, both Catholic and Protestant. The Catholic Erasmus of Rotterdam’s 1524 criticism of Martin Luther in De libero arbitrio exemplifies the sceptical argumentative strategy of maintaining that human cognitive capacities are simply too weak to risk going it alone outside the Church. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Erasmus’s earlier Encomium moriae (1511), which engages a critique of the Catholic Church from within, had in contrast been accused of being too sceptical. The German reformer and colleague of Luther, Philipp Melanchthon, in 1533 explored Academic scepticism, Erasmus and a humane religious faith. Academic scepticism’s rejection of katalêpsis in thinkers who had come to be called ‘nouveaux academiciens’ also surfaced among Calvinists in the course of controversies surrounding the 1553 burning at the stake of Miguel Servetus (aka Miguel de Villanueva). Servetus, who criticised both Catholics and Protestants, was a remarkable Spanish polymath, humane theologian, natural scientist and personal physician to the Archbishop of Vienna. An adversary of Calvin, he was burned on the order of Geneva Protestants for opposing infant baptism and for spreading the idea that the doctrine of the Trinity is false.23 Troublingly for Protestants, Servetus advanced his heretical ideas by appeal to just the same criterion of ‘inner persuasion’ or inner light to which Calvin laid claim. Calvin’s aide, Theodore Beza, accused Servetus’s defender Sebastian Castello of reviving the New Academy by casting doubt on the criterion of inner persuasion.24 Earlier, in Paris, Servetus had tellingly been accused of teaching Book 2 of Cicero’s De divinatione, which employs arguments drawn from the Academic sceptics to undermine justifications of divination. Scepticism could be useful, but too much of it could prove dangerous.

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The effect of scepticism in these religious controversies was to promote fideism against both theological rationalism and appeals to conscience, inner experience and sola scriptura, the exclusive reliance upon Scripture. Of course, fideism, even when enlisting elements of Academic scepticism, predates Reformation controversies. But scepticism functioned as an intensifier in debates over the criterion in the course of the Reformation’s advances. Intellectuals, both Catholic and Protestant, increasingly found that the cudgels that scepticism offered most effectively warranted fideistic understandings of religious truth. That implication of sceptical criticism has persisted in Western ideas about religious faith through to the present day. Interest in Academic scepticism also appeared in university settings, especially among those criticising Aristotelian rationalism, in particular around the University of Padua. The so-called Paduan Averröists (who separated religious and scientific discourses) maintained that neither the existence of God nor the immortality of the soul could be demonstrated by natural reason. Such doctrines were, in their view, matters of faith alone.25 Cardinal Jacopo Sadoleto, for example, wrote in defence of the Paduan humane rationalists and against Academics in his Phaedrus sive de Laudibus philosophiae (1538). The pro-sceptical fideist and friend of French humanist Petrus Ramus, Omer Talon (see §2.11 below), used Copernican theory at the Collège du cardinal Lemoine in Paris to argue both against the reliability of sense perception (since the senses tell us that the Earth is still) and against Aristotelianism. A number of histories of Academic thought appeared connected to these controversies. Guy de Brués, following Talon, published a re-enactment of contemporary sceptical dialectics in his Dialogues contra les nouveaux academiciens (1557), which in name opposes the Academics but perhaps subversively in logic seems to support them. Brués’s Dialogues, Talon’s Academica and Gentian Hervet’s 1569 edition of Sextus’ work were all dedicated to Charles de Guise, Cardinal of Lorraine – the founder of Reims University, protector of Rabelais and brother of Marie de Guise – who had himself been accused of scepticism.26 Pertus Valentiae, or Pedro de Valencia, published another but more popular history of Academical philosophy along with the Academica itself in 1596. 2.1.3.2 Emergent Pyrrhonism and resurgent Academicism. Academicism, then, was not absent from the sixteenth century. It was, however, among leading sceptics of the period, typically

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subordinated to Pyrrhonism. In reaction to dogmatic Cartesianism’s powerful rejection of scepticism, a clutch of early modern philosophers in the seventeenth century emerged as important figures reasserting the Academic sceptical current, and they did so with a new vigour. A number of them apparently exerted significant influence upon Hume. New forms of natural philosophy, along with renewed interest in Academic scepticism, began to displace or at least to compete with Pyrrhonism, so much so that it is meaningful to speak of an Academical resurgence in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. In a gesture typical of this movement, the highly influential natural philosopher Robert Boyle places the mise en scène of his argument for modern chemistry inside an imaginary version of Carneades’ garden in his well-known book The Sceptical Chymist (1661). Understanding the powerful sceptical undercurrents of early modern thought makes Boyle’s title seem predictable, but the impact of Academic scepticism across early modern European thought, including natural philosophy, remains today underappreciated. The standard interpretation of the history of early modern philosophy still presents it as a contest between empiricism and rationalism. It is a narrative that occludes philosophy’s self-understanding of the period as a struggle with scepticism. Descartes did not understand himself to be a ‘rationalist’, nor did Locke understand himself to be an ‘empiricist’. Rather, the salient axis along which early modern philosophers distinguished themselves was the extent to which they understood philosophy to be able to grasp the ultimate truths of reality – in particular God, nature, moral goodness and the self. Kant did not credit Hume with awakening him from his rationalist slumbers, but from his dogmatism. The rise of first Pyrrhonism and then renewed Academic scepticism in France is particularly relevant to an investigation into the sources of Hume’s scepticism, since it was in France, indeed at Descartes’ old college, that Hume wrote the lion’s share of his first major philosophical work, A Treatise of Human Nature (Books 1 and 2 published in 1739, Book 3 in 1740). The French period of Hume’s philosophical development is vitally important to understanding his work. 2.1.3.3 Scepticism at La Flèche. Hume decamped to France in July 1734.27 He was received in Paris first by his countryman, the

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Chevalier Andrew Michael Ramsay (1686–1743) from Ayrshire, who was cousin to his friend Michael Ramsay. The Chevalier was a Freemason and Jacobite who served as tutor in Rome in 1724 to the ‘Young Pretender’, Prince Charles Edward Stuart (the Jacobites’ ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’). Ramsay nurtured a keen interest in Bayle’s scepticism, and he helped Hume gain entry to important social circles in France. In his book The Philosophical Principles of Natural and Revealed Religion (1748), the Chevalier advances a critique of occasionalism remarkably similar to Hume’s at E.7, and Hume agrees with Ramsay’s important claim that ‘we have no adequate idea of power’ in itself.28 Hume cites Ramsay’s Principles in the course of his critique of natural theology in ‘The Natural History of Religion’ (N 13.7n87), suggesting that he was familiar with the Chevalier’s work. The Chevalier Ramsay had been converted to Catholicism by the sceptical Archbishop of Cambrai, François de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon (1651–1715), author of a number of works that address Pyrrhonism. Diogenes Laërtius’ account of the life of Pyrrho is paraphrased and recounted, for example, in the Abregé des vies des plus illustres philosophes avec a recueil de leurs plus belles maximes (1726), posthumously attributed to Fénelon.29 In addition, Fénelon’s Dialogues des morts (1712), taking up a popular genre of the time by imitating Lucian, discusses Pyrrhonism in its Dialogue 29.30 Fénelon also authored the anti-absolutist and pro-tolerance Les aventures de Telémaque (1699; reissued 1717). Edited and imitated by the Chevalier Ramsay, Telémaque became one of the most widely read books of the eighteenth century. Given Hume’s connection to Ramsay, as well as the popularity of Fénelon’s Telémaque, it would be surprising if he had not become familiar with these works.31 Departing Paris after a short time, Hume took up residence first, by September 1734, in Reims. Perhaps with the Chevalier’s letter of introduction in hand, Hume lodged or met in Reims with Henry St John Viscount Bolingbroke’s friend, Louis-Jean Lévesque de Pouilly, whose sceptical memoir of 1722, Dissertation sur l’incertitude de l’histoire des quatre premiers siècles de Rome, calls into question claims to historical knowledge (a conclusion he defended before the Académie Française, which became fascinated with the topic). Pouilly’s subsequent work, Nouveaux essais de critique sur la fidélité de l’histoire (1724), develops arguments against the rationality of belief in miracles that may have influenced Hume.32 Bolingbroke,

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whose Letters on the Study and Use of History (1752) exhibit an interest in Pyrrhonism, was himself in France at Fontainebleau, some 170 miles from La Flèche, concurrently with Hume.33 Finally, in the spring of 1735, Hume arrived at the town of La Flèche in Anjou (today Maine-et-Loire, department of La Sarthe) in western France. There, in that intellectually vibrant and relatively cosmopolitan town, the majority of the magisterial Treatise would be realised. As Hume put it on 3 May 1776, just three months before his death, in ‘My Own Life’: ‘During my retreat in France, first at Reims, but chiefly at La Flèche, in Anjou, I composed my Treatise of Human Nature’ (MOL xxxiv). It was a time for Hume of prodigious, immensely creative and intense work as he forged, in an atmosphere thick with sceptical ideas, what would become one of the most influential books of Western philosophy. Hume remained in La Flèche, ‘passing three years very agreeably’ (MOL xxxiv), until the spring of 1737. Then, in August of that year, a virtually complete manuscript in hand, Hume left France and returned to London to negotiate the publication of the Treatise. Hume took up residence at La Flèche, according to local tradition, in the small château of Yvandeau, about two miles from the town and from the elite, cosmopolitan Collège Royal Henry-LeGrand, established in 1604 by Henri IV. Both Copernican theory and scepticism were topics of study at the Collège. From 1607 to 1615 Descartes, perhaps the school’s most famous alumnus, had been educated there. Descartes himself wrote in 1638, a year after the publication of the Discours, that ‘there is no other place in the world where philosophy is better taught than at La Flèche’.34 By the time Hume arrived, the institution remained philosophical but had become decidedly anti-Cartesian and anti-Malebranchean in its outlook, though many there, including the rector in 1734, Robert Besnard, were well schooled in at least Malebranche’s thought.35 It may not be too much to say that the Collège was by then a reactionary stronghold of scholasticism and even something of a reformatory for intellectually heterodox Catholic clergy.36 The well-stocked library at the Collège held works by Cicero.37 We also now have strong reason to believe that the library contained a copy of the 1621 Chouet edition of Sextus Empiricus’ work, which included Latin translations of both the Outlines of Pyrrhonism and Adversus mathematicos. It is a volume that may have served as the source of several of Hume’s curious citations and perhaps informed his understanding of Pyrrhonism (see §4.2.1.1 below).38 The four-volume 1720 Rotterdam folio edition of Bayle’s

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Dictionnaire historique et critique seems also to have stood among the library’s holdings.39 So did two editions of Montaigne’s Essais (1594, 1692).40 Although Hume complains in a May 1735 letter to James Birch that he knows of no ‘celebrated Professor’ whom he might meet in the region, the intellectual scene of La Flèche, as well as the more widespread circulation of philosophical books to which he was then exposed in France, could not but have been influential at that crucial moment. In 1762, the same year that the Jesuits were expelled from the Collège by Louis XV, Hume remarks in a letter to George Campbell that he conceived in La Flèche the basis of his argument against the rationality of belief in miracles (but not the existence of them), while ‘walking in the cloisters’ in conversation with a Jesuit priest. The essay ‘Of Miracles’ (E 10) manifests detailed knowledge of the figures and materials involved in debates concerning miracles performed at the tomb in the Jansenist Abbé Pâris (LT 1.361, #194).41 Hume’s sceptical ideas about miracles might also have been stimulated by the transfer of relics associated with St Thomas to the parish church of La Flèche on 3 July 1735 (cf. T 1.3.8.6, SBN 101).42 Hume’s essay ‘Of Superstition and Enthusiasm’ addresses a debate then current between Jesuits and Jansenists (ES 79).43 Hume’s probable studies at La Flèche provide a suggestive point of connection between him and seventeenth-century French Academic philosophy. Departing La Flèche in 1737, Hume wrote to Michael Ramsay on 26 August saying that in order to ‘enter into’ the philosophy that he had crafted in his new book, Ramsay ought to ‘read once over’ not only Berkeley’s Principles of Human Knowledge, but also Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy, ‘La Rechereche de la Verité of Pere Malebranche’ and ‘some of the more metaphysical Articles of Baile’s Dictionary’, including those on Zeno of Elea and Spinoza.44 Notably, in addition, the Collège ‘library possessed a copy of [Antoine] Arnauld and [Pierre] Nicole’s La logique ou l’art de Penser (the Port Royal Logic), the first edition (1683) of Arnauld’s Des vrayes et des fausses idées and his Nouveaux élémens de géométrie (1687)’.45 Among the many other figures sure to have been topics of discussion on the French scene were the Academics Marin Mersenne and Simon Foucher. 2.1.3.4 Mersenne: Academic science. A superlative networker and founder of the aptly named Académie Parisienne in 1635 (a precursor of the Académie des Sciences and pursuing much the same agenda as the Royal Society of London would twenty-five

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years later), Father Marin Mersenne (1588–1648) set a fascinating precedent to Hume’s Academic scepticism. Working in Paris at the centre of an extraordinarily creative philosophical moment, the polymath Mersenne functioned as something of an intellectual nexus, promoting new philosophy by connecting thinkers such as Pierre Gassendi, Thomas Hobbes and his close friend, René Descartes. A defender of Kepler’s astronomical mathematics against the Hermetic-Platonic harmonies of Robert Fludd and a translator-disseminator of Galileo’s work, Mersenne was one of the earliest students at the Collège of La Flèche and one of its most prominent graduates.46 Like Hume, Mersenne identifies himself explicitly with Academic scepticism and criticises Pyrrhonism. Nevertheless, and remarkably also like Hume, Mersenne accepts that Pyrrhonian arguments remain logically undefeated, while simultaneously holding on to the idea that the new natural sciences are legitimate. In this way, Mersenne prefigures what I will describe as Hume’s sceptical naturalism (Chapter 5). Academic philosophers, as we have seen, appeal to probability in response to doubt. Mersenne’s principal argument in La verité des sciences contra les sceptiques ou Pyrrhoniens (1625) is not exactly probabilistic. Like Humean philosophy, however, it seems to be proto-pragmatic in the sense that Mersenne observes that, whether or not we can justify them epistemically, the sciences and mathematics simply work, providing people with predictive power about the course of nature as it appears to us. Mersenne’s embrace of natural science was, in practice, not only sceptical but also cautious. Although he supported the general thrust of the new sciences emblematised by Copernican theory, as a good sceptic he remained undecided about the position and movement of the Earth. Mersenne also parted ways with Galileo over matters of epistemology. While Galileo believed that ‘necessary demonstrations’ were possible in natural philosophy, Mersenne, anticipating Hume, argued in his more seasoned 1634 Les questions théologiques, published just as he was about to establish the Parisian Academy, that even the new sciences suffer an ‘ignorance of true causes’ and are limited in their findings to appearances. No natural science can, according to Mersenne, marshal the ‘force of perfect demonstration’.47 Unlike Hume, however, Mersenne fretted about the effects of scepticism on Christian faith, registering with alarm in 1622 that he thought there to be

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some 50,000 atheists in Paris, a city then of just 400,000.48 Still, despite that worry and like Hume, Mersenne launched in his 1624 L’impiété des déistes sharp assaults upon natural religion and the effort to give religious dogma rational warrant.49 2.1.3.5 Foucher: the Academic critique of Cartesianism. The elfin Abbé Simon Foucher (1644–96) was a contemporary of Descartes who was alive to the sceptical dimensions of Plato’s Academy. Publishing some fifty years after Mersenne’s La verité and over thirty years after Descartes’ Meditations (1641), Foucher, like Hume, associates his philosophy with Academic scepticism. He does so most notably in his 1673 Dissertations sur la recherché de la verité, ou sur la logique des academiciens, his 1675 Critique de la recherche de la verité . . . Lettre par un academicien, the 1687 Dissertation . . . contenant l’apologie des académiciens and the Dissertation . . . contenant l’histoire des académiciens of 1693 – all of which attack Cartesian and post-Cartesian rationalism, especially in Malebranche.50 Malebranche’s work seems to centre Hume’s criticism of Cartesianism, and it is possible that this is so because of Foucher’s influence upon Hume. The heart of Foucher’s critique condemns Malebranche for making dubious suppositions and unjustifiably dogmatic assertions. Among the ‘suppositions’ in Malebranche about which Foucher complains are: 1. Supposition contrary to the purpose of the search [for truth], etc. In particular, Foucher complains that Malebranche merely supposes that ‘The mind or the soul of man being neither material nor extended is without doubt a simple substance, indivisible, and without any composition of parts, etc.’51 Hume, of course, argues for a bundle theory of mind (T 1.4.5.24, SBN 244), for separable perceptions (T 1.4.6.4, SBN 252) and indeed more generally against various metaphysical dogmatisms of mind, both materialist and immaterialist, in his selfdescribed ‘sceptical’ sections 4 and 5 closing Part 4 of Book 1 of the Treatise (see §7.3.2 below). 2. Supposition of necessary truths. Consistent with Hume’s critique of necessity as an apprehensible metaphysical property, as well as his refusal of certainty even in matters of demonstration (T 1.4.1), that there are necessary truths at all seems dubious to Foucher: ‘I do not know by what reason he regards this incontestable, nor

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3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

Hume’s Scepticism why he does not think of proving it, because this question is one of the most important that has occupied scholars, and especially the ancients . . . The Pyrrhonians have even maintained that nothing is constant, nothing truly determined, or if there were something constant, one could know nothing of it.’52 Supposition of truths of faith. For Foucher, only fideism is philosophically cogent; and, like Bacon, he argues that faith must remain separate from philosophy. Hume, of course, undermines justifications for faith by reason, even if he does not endorse fideism. Supposition of the pure understanding. Foucher, like Hume (T 1.4.4.3–8), rejects the Cartesian doctrine of purely abstract ideas and with it the primary/secondary quality distinction (see §7.3.1.2 below). Supposition of ideas that represent what is outside of us. Well before Berkeley and Bayle, Foucher argues that ‘the imagination is not capable of representing objects that are outside us’; about the idea that the intellect can grasp external essences, ‘it is based on the supposition that . . . we know things that are outside us’. Hume rejects epistemic representation.53 Supposition of ideas that represent without being likenesses. Central to Humean scepticism is the idea that ‘’tis impossible for us so much as to conceive or form an idea of any thing specifically different from ideas and impressions’ (T 1.2.6.8, SBN 67–8; see §7.2.3.2 below).54 Supposition that we know by the senses that there is extension outside of us. In response, Foucher writes: ‘Because all our sensations being nothing other than experiences of several ways of being of which our soul is capable, we know truly by the senses only what objects produce in us’, a view with which Hume agrees in his critique not only of the primary/secondary quality distinction but also of epistemic representationalism per se (T 1.4.2).55

Of the dogmatic ‘assertions’, Foucher criticises: 1. Assertion concerning judgements of the will. Foucher criticises the Cartesian theory of free will, as does Hume (E 8). 2. Assertion of the general rule for the sciences. Foucher adopts the classic Academic strategy of criticising the Cartesian doctrine that scientific inquiry must be based upon cataleptic-like clear and distinct ideas, and so does Hume.

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3. Assertion concerning probabilities. According to Foucher, probabilities do not possess the epistemic strength Malebranche asserts, certainly not the strength of demonstrations. It is a claim with which Hume agrees, though at the close of Treatise Book 1 he also argues against the possibility of demonstration (T 1.2.2.6, SBN 31; 1.4.1.1, SBN 180).56 4. Assertion concerning judgement of the senses. Foucher objects to Malebranche’s assertion that ‘We have no sensation of external things that does not contain a false judgment’ by arguing that this ‘supposes that one knows perfectly the nature of the soul and the nature of matter’.57 5. Assertion of beings that are neither bodies nor minds. Malebranche asserts that it is possible that there are beings of a different sort from bodies and minds. Oddly, though perhaps ironically, Foucher complains that he has not proven this and that ‘one lapses into Pyrrhonism if one follows this opinion’, as there is, then, no reason not to assert the extreme possibility that ‘there is an infinity of beings of different kinds of which we have no knowledge at all’. Moreover, it becomes impossible, according to Foucher, to know whether or not our perceptions might be caused by some unknown kind of being, rather than the material world. Academic modesty and integrity are better served, Foucher thinks, by keeping silent about what range of beings are possible and impossible beyond those we perceive: ‘if one need not prove this truth positively, at least one should not, as does the author, maintain the contrary, otherwise one’ opens oneself up to an excessively radical doubt and entirely ‘excludes oneself from knowledge of what one searches’.58 6. Assertion concerning the essence of soul and of the essence of matter. Descartes and Malebranche assert that they have apprehended the essence of mind (thought) and matter (extension). Both Foucher and Hume refuse to accept this claim (T 1.4.6). Foucher writes: ‘if one can doubt that there is something in the soul that precedes thought, as the author concedes one can do, one is not at all obliged to pronounce on the essence of the soul. And one cannot be assured whether extension is a way of being of the soul.’59 If there ‘were something more primary than extension, it is obvious that extension would not be the essence of matter because the essence always consists in what is primary in each being’. In fact, ‘we remain in doubt concerning all the other essences that we do not know’, too.60

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Perhaps anticipating Hume’s theory of natural beliefs, according to Foucher dogmatic belief is natural, or anyway natal, to us: ‘We are dogma-prone from our mothers’ wombs.’61 But if we are to achieve a scientific understanding of the world, it is not dogma but first doubt that is required: ‘One needs to exit doubt in order to produce science – but few people heed the importance of not exiting from it prematurely.’62 Scepticism in this sense is the incubator of science. In the Preface to the Critique, Foucher follows Mersenne by affirming both the sciences and Academic scepticism, writing: But because I philosophize in the manner of the ancient Academy . . . I refrained as much as possible from making the mistake of all prevailing logics according to which one takes the liberty of supposing a number of things as the conclusions of sciences he believes he already possesses . . . One will always see that of all the manners of philosophizing, that of the Academics is the most legitimate and judicious, because, after all, there is nothing more reasonable in the sciences than to conduct oneself only by demonstrations, to make a great difference between the things one knows and those one does not know, to admit that one knows very little and that one is ignorant of very much, and to search always for new knowledge.63

Following Augustine and Descartes, Foucher accepts logical truths.64 Though we have no direct evidence that Hume actually read his work, Foucher is reasonably understood to be an underestimated source for Hume’s Academicism.65 The influence of Foucher’s wellknown critique upon Hume may well have been indirect or transitive, and the conceptual space of scepticism that Foucher opens is illuminating and suggestive. Foucher corresponded with Leibniz and was highly enough regarded in French intellectual circles to have been invited by Jacques Rohault to deliver an oration upon the return of Descartes’ remains (such as they were) to Paris in 1667.66 Foucher was also a friend of the sceptical Bishop Pierre-Daniel Huet (1630–1721), whom we have good reason to think influenced Hume. Perhaps most importantly, Bayle’s enduring and highly influential article on ‘Pyrrho’, Remark B, in his 1695 Dictionnaire historique et critique, an article almost certainly familiar to Hume, seems to draw upon Foucher in substantial ways.67 2.1.3.6 Locke: Academic sceptical empiricism. Just as Foucher was composing his Dissertations and Critique in Paris, across the English Channel in London’s Exeter House, the younger, lankier,

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doe-eyed personal physician to Anthony Ashley Cooper, the 1st Earl of Shaftesbury, was intermittently at work on another text that would undermine Cartesian First Philosophy of the Real. That text, John Locke’s Essay concerning Human Understanding (1689), is well read as a work of Academic scepticism, at least with regard to matters of natural philosophy.68 It would have a profound effect upon Hume. Among related texts, the 1702 AntiScepticism by the Locke commentator Henry Lee may have also taught Hume something about Locke and scepticism. The Lockean Jean Barbeyrac also criticises scepticism in the 1706 preface to his French translation of Samuel Pufendorf’s Le droit de la nature et des gens. Barbeyrac’s preface would itself be translated and published in English as a Historical and Critical Account of the Science of Morality (1729). Unlike Hume, Locke (1632–1704) argues that humans possess certain, demonstrable knowledge of God and certain, intuitive knowledge of the self: ‘we have the knowledge of our own existence by intuition’ and ‘of the existence of God by demonstration’.69 Moral truths, too, depending only upon relations of ideas, can for Locke be apprehended with certainty.70 But things are rather different and decidedly more sceptical for Locke with regard to investigations into the external, natural world. Locke and Hume agree that the world beyond us can be experienced only ‘by sensation’.71 Locke sounds characteristically Academic notes of epistemic finitude and modesty when he writes in the Introduction to the Essay that philosophy ought ‘to be more cautious in meddling with things exceeding its Comprehension; to stop when it is at the utmost Extent of its Tether; and to sit down in a quiet Ignorance of those Things, which, upon Examination, are found to be beyond the reach of our Capacities’.72 Locke elaborates later: ‘our faculties are not fitted to penetrate into the internal fabric and real essences of bodies’.73 Locke is, moreover, like Hume, a nominalist about general terms, and this means that the vocabulary of the natural sciences and philosophy denote only what Locke calls ‘nominal essences’, not ‘real essences’.74 Nominal essence, writes Locke, emphasising the sceptical import of his position, ‘being only abstract ideas, and thereby removed in our thoughts from particular existence . . . gives us no knowledge of real existence at all’.75 The natural, external world, however, is not entirely for Locke beyond the human tether. There, says Locke, only Academic-like probability but not utter scepticism reigns: ‘We are fitted for moral science, but only for probable interpretations of external nature.’76

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Locke’s inspiration in this may have been a young Oxford divine called William Chillingworth (1602–44). Although Chillingworth did not characterise himself as an Academic and apparently had no truck with Cicero or other Academic philosophers, he does, like Hume and the Academics, advance a kind of probabilism in response to Pyrrhonian doubt and Pyrrhonian sceptical tropes. Even if, however, he was a quasi-Academic in his probabilism, Chillingworth was no Clitomachian. Chillingworth’s anti-Pyrrhonian ‘right reason’ embraces an exceedingly dogmatic and Metrodorian probabilism that claims to have apprehended in some partial but genuinely epistemic sense the real. These epistemically freighted ‘twilight’ probabilities Locke adopts but Hume refuses (see §8.2.3.1 below).77 Locke also still clings to a gasping but not-yet-dead substance– accident metaphysics in order to explain the cohering and sustaining of different qualities in unified, independent objects. In a now infamous remark from Book 2, chapter 23 of the Essay, Locke implores his readers to hold on to some last shred of substance metaphysics even while simultaneously admitting that there is no reason to do so: ‘if any one will examine himself concerning his Notion of pure Substance in general’, Locke concedes, ‘he will find he has no other Idea of it at all, but only a Supposition of he knows not what support of such Qualities, which are capable of producing simple Ideas in us; which Qualities are commonly called Accidents’.78 Locke similarly writes: ‘of Substance, we have no Idea of what it is, but only a confused obscure one of what it does’.79 This sceptical distance is but one step away from abandoning substance metaphysics and primary-quality epistemology entirely. That step Berkeley haltingly and then Hume boldly do finally take (see §7.2.3.2 below). Hume explicitly credits Locke as a source (for example, T n1, SBN xvii; A 2–6, SBN 646). 2.1.3.7 Huet: the continuity of scepticisms. Hume was influenced by the Bishop of Avranches (Hume spells it ‘Avaranches’), PierreDaniel Huet (also Huetius; 1630–1721), and in particular his highly sceptical and posthumous work, Traité philosophique de la foiblesse de l’esprit humain (1723; later spelled faiblesse), as well as his Demonstratio evangelica of 1679. Huet’s Treatise was published in English in 1725 as A Philosophical Treatise concerning the Weakness of Human Understanding, a title that could have suited Book 1 of Hume’s Treatise quite well. We know that Huet influenced Hume, because Hume refers directly to these works, once in

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‘A Letter from a Gentleman’ and once in the Dialogues concerning Natural Religion.80 Huet also published in 1689 (the same year as Locke’s Essay) a profoundly sceptical broadside aimed at Cartesian philosophy, Censura philosophiae Cartesianae.81 Trained as a Jesuit, Huet hailed from Caen in Normandy, where he founded and financed the Académie du Physique, the first provincial academy of science to receive a royal charter (1668). A friend of Simon Foucher, Huet was also well known on the national intellectual scene, and he moved in 1651 among the Academic sceptics and so-called libertines of Paris.82 Just a year later, Huet joined the court of Sweden’s Queen Christina in Stockholm, where only two years before, in 1650, Descartes had perished. Rising in stature as an intellectual, especially for his biblical criticism and studies of Origen, Huet was admitted in 1674 at the age of 43 to the Académie Française. These associations along with the Censura and Traité placed Huet squarely in the anti-Cartesian Academic current of late seventeenth-century France to which Hume would have been exposed. More particularly, however, Huet may have influenced Hume’s specific ideas about the nature and meaning of Academic scepticism. While the Academics, including Carneades and Cicero, figure in important ways in the Censura, the Traité offers a much richer and more detailed rendering of Academic thought. Rooting sceptical practices in Socrates, Huet explains – especially in Book 1, chapter 14 of the Traité – how ‘the law of doubting has been established by many excellent philosophers’.83 The chapter offers a short history of scepticism, including not only pre-Socratics (Anaxarchus, Pherecydes, Pythagoras, Empedocles, Gorgias, Xenophanes, Epicharmus, Parmenides, Xeniades, Zeno of Elea, Heraclitus, Anaxagoras, Democritus, Protagoras) and classical philosophers whom he associates with the ‘First Academy’ (Socrates, Plato, Aristotle), but also, and importantly for our purposes here, ‘Second Academy’ doubters (Arcesilaus and Lacydes of Cyrene) as well as doubters of the ‘Third Academy’ (Carneades and Clitomachus), the ‘Fourth Academy’ (Philo) and finally the ‘Fifth Academy’ (Antiochus). Huet also describes in Traité 1.14 the philosophical doubt of Cicero, Varro, Piso, Lucullus, Brutus, Metrodorus and Anaxarchus. Surprisingly multicultural, the text discusses doubt in Turkish, Arab, Indian and Jewish philosophers, notably Maimonides. Across Book 1, moreover, Huet compares scepticism with its ancient adversary, stoicism.84

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Huet addresses the full range of characteristic sceptical issues, especially the problem of the criterion, akatalêpsía, the natural light and the question of probability as an alternative to certain knowledge. His emphasis on akatalêpsía and probability gives his text a decidedly Academic cast.85 While Huet names Plato, Proclus and ‘Cartesius’ as opponents, his principal adversary seems to be Cartesian certainty. Consequently, he affirms a probabilism of an apparently Metrodorian (MAS) sort, and he also endorses probability as a basis for action in the world (see §8.2.3.1 below). More precisely, like Hume (T 1.4.1), Huet maintains that knowledge properly requires perfect certainty, and so for him, despite it entailing a positive epistemic gain, ‘probability’ is not a kind of knowing. Just as Hume concludes that ‘demonstration is subject to the controul of probability’ (T 1.4.1.5, SBN 181–2), Huet argues that, although the sciences ought to be practised, properly speaking ‘there is no Demonstration’ because no proof is infallible, ‘which it ought to be in order to amount to a Demonstration’ (see §7.2.3.1.1 below).86 Provocatively, Huet reads Academic and Pyrrhonian scepticism as continuous with one another. On the basis of his historiography of ancient scepticism, Huet determines that ‘It was on their Precepts [i.e., those of Pyrrho] Arcesilau [sic] undertook to reform the old Academy and form a new one.’87 After a survey of what seems to Huet to be nothing more than seven ‘trivial’ differences between them, he finds himself ‘satisfy’d that the sect of the Academicks, and that of the Pyrrhonians, was one and the same’.88 Concluding that there was no substantive difference between the two ancient schools of scepticism, Huet holds that I could not forbear often wondering why the philosophers, who embrac’d it [i.e., scepticism], chose rather to be call’d Academicks than Pyrrhonians, as if they were asham’d of the latter, and the former had been an honour to them. Whilst I was endeavouring to account for it, two very probable reasons occur’d to me: the one was, that few philosophers of any reputation ever came out of Pyrrho’s school, whereas the Academy has produc’d many excellent ones, to whom it was an honour to be associated; the other is, that both Pyrrho and his disciples have been ridicul’d, as if they had entirely reduced men’s lives to a state of inactivity, and that those, who should be call’d Pyrrhonians, would fall under the same whimsical imputation.89

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In short, Huet speculates that sceptics chose, despite their philosophical congruence, to differentiate themselves as ‘Academics’ or ‘Pyrrhonians’ (whom he also just calls ‘sceptics’) principally for reasons of audience. As we saw, Cicero understands Socrates and Augustine understands the Academics to have concealed their own views. Huet, similarly, reads those who call themselves ‘Academic’ sceptics with a hermeneutic of suspicion, regarding them as at least potentially Pyrrhonian and interpreting their self-descriptions as misleading – though, of course, Huet reads the Academics as more deeply sceptical, while Augustine reads them as less so. In Huet’s assessment, the purpose of the deception was to secure reputation and avoid ridicule or worse. Might Hume, also for prudential reasons of audience, have adopted a similar strategy, inspired by Huet, Augustine and Cicero, in cloaking the Pyrrhonian qualities of his own work? We will consider just that possibility in §4.2.2 below. 2.1.3.8 Bayle: the sceptical arsenal of enlightenment. Among the most important vehicles for disseminating sceptical thought, as well as for determining what was regarded as scepticism, in the eighteenth century was the 1695 colossus called Dictionnaire historique et critique (reissued in 1702). The Dictionnaire was a vast compendium assembled by a French refugee from dogmatic religious persecution who came popularly to be known as the philosophe de Rotterdam. His name was Pierre Bayle (1647–1706).90 One of the most celebrated works of its time, Bayle’s Dictionnaire became the most common text held by French private libraries between 1750 and 1780, surpassing, it seems, even the Bible.91 Ernst Cassirer called it ‘the real arsenal of all Enlightenment philosophy’.92 Bayle was raised by a Calvinist minister but then converted to Catholicism after attending the Jesuit college of Toulouse, where earlier Montaigne had studied and Servetus taught. Bayle returned to Calvin’s fold, however, after yet another turn in his thought as the protégé of the dogmatic Calvinist Pierre Jurieu (1637–1713). Despite their early partnership, Jurieu later came to regard Bayle in a deeply hostile way as heterodox and even as an atheist. The stakes that Bayle faced in positioning himself in this milieu were high, and he knew it. Fleeing France for Holland, Bayle secured his own safety, but his brother and father were both murdered at the hands of anti-Huguenot Catholics.

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Hume would acquire access to the 1720 Rotterdam edition of the Dictionnaire through the library of La Flèche, and Bayle was a topic of extensive criticism during his time there.93 We possess, however, textual evidence from a 1732 letter to Michael Ramsay that as early as a few years prior to his departure for France to write the Treatise, Hume was already familiar with something of Bayle’s work.94 Bernard Mandeville may have brought Bayle to the young Hume’s attention, principally through his Free Thoughts on Religion, the Church, and National Happiness (1720, 1731).95 By whatever means, Bayle’s influence seems to have reached Hume during the crucial early stages of his philosophical development, as a substantial portion of Hume’s early memoranda relate directly to Bayle – those apparently through 1740 and the publication of the Treatise, especially those on ‘Philosophy’.96 Thirteen of the memoranda properly cite Bayle, and Hume seems to have drawn these principally from Bayle’s Oeuvres diverses – especially volume 3 (1727), which contains volume 2 of the Réponse aux questions d’un provincial (1706).97 Bayle may have undergirded Hume’s understanding of Spinoza, Manichaeanism, animal intelligence, the argument from design, infinite divisibility, space and time (T 1.2), his curious critique of both materialism and immaterialism of mind (T 1.4.4), perhaps even his bundle theory of the mind, and, most importantly for our purposes, scepticism.98 Hume cites Bayle only once in the 1739 Treatise (T 1.4.5.22n), where, discussing the immateriality of the soul, he cites Bayle’s article on the Jewish-Dutch dogmatic metaphysician Benedict Spinoza (1632–77). In total, however, Hume refers to Bayle five times in his published work. Besides his single reference in the Treatise, he refers to Bayle once in each inquiry (E 12.1.15n32, SBN 155; EM 24.38n13, SBN 200, to Bayle’s article on Loyola), once in ‘The Natural History of Religion’ (N n57), and once in the Dialogues concerning Natural Religion (D 1.17). In the first Enquiry, Hume connects Bayle with the sceptical implications of Berkeley’s critique of primary-quality representationalism, which he calls ‘the best lessons of scepticism’ (E 12.1.15n32, SBN 155). Hume’s remarks in the second Enquiry relate Bayle to criticism of philosophical theology as morally corrupting, in particular the way casuistry and dogmatic argument relaxed the morals of Jesuits. Cicero’s ensemble of characters in De natura deorum – Cotta, Balbus and Velleius – appears frequently in the Dictionnaire, and Philo, Hume’s reprise of Cotta, complains in the Dialogues about

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the impossibility of adopting the radical scepticism and atheism of ‘Bayle and other libertines’.99 Bayle is most often associated with Pyrrhonian scepticism (see §4.1.5.4 below), especially through the Dictionnaire’s article on ‘Pyrrho’. What is striking, however, in that article and elsewhere, is the way that Bayle, like Huet, perhaps intentionally elides the distinction between Pyrrhonian and Academic scepticism. Just a few sentences into his article on Pyrrho, after mentioning Pyrrho’s teacher, the atomist Anaxarchus, whom he accompanied to India in the train of Alexander, the first properly sceptical philosopher discussed is not a Pyrrhonian such as Sextus or Aenesidemus but instead an Academic, Arcesilaus. Deploying the founder of Academic scepticism to characterise Pyrrho, Bayle writes there: ‘His [Pyrrho’s] views were hardly different from those of Arcesilaus, for he was very close to teaching, as the latter did, the theory of the incomprehensibility of all things.’100 Bayle’s closing for the article, or at least its capstone Note F, is also suggestive, with a reference to perhaps the most prominent voice of Academic thought in Hume’s time, that of Cicero. In other sections of the article on Pyrrho, too, Bayle sounds an Academic note. Although he implicitly valorises there an unnamed Pyrrhonian abbé, whom he recounts as calmly defending Arcesilaus in the face of a raging dogmatist, Bayle does not foreground the characteristically Pyrrhonian end of ataraxia or tranquillity.101 Moreover, like other French Academics of the seventeenth century such as Foucher and Mersenne, Bayle in Note B on Pyrrho defends the emerging empirical sciences against Pyrrhonian subversion (though his notes on Leucippus and Zeno may obliquely suggest otherwise). Bayle, in a manner consistent with the Academic sceptics, accepts both the limits of human cognition along with the unknowability of nature, but still argues that science may nevertheless operate by adhering to the Academics’ probabilistic criterion: It does not matter much if one says that the mind of man is too limited to discover anything concerning natural truths, concerning the causes producing heat, cold, the tides, and the like. It is enough for us that we employ ourselves in looking for probable hypotheses and collecting data. I am quite sure that there are very few good scientists of this century who are not convinced that nature is an impenetrable abyss and that its springs are known only to Him who made and directs them.102

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The congruence between Bayle’s and Foucher’s views on sceptical science is hardly accidental, as clearly Bayle was familiar with Foucher. In what would become an especially important passage, in Note B Bayle enlists Foucher’s argument against the epistemically representative capacity of primary qualities.103 Bayle, indeed, was ‘thoroughly indoctrinated’ in dogmatic Cartesian science after he was sent in 1670 to the Academy of Geneva, and he later (1684–87) corresponded with important epistemologists and philosophers of science such as Malebranche, Leibniz, Arnauld and Locke.104 The view of science that Bayle developed was as a result self-consciously sceptical and probabilistic, both Pyrrhonian and Academic: ‘Thus, all these [natural] philosophers are Academics and Pyrrhonists in this regard’ (emphasis mine).105 This appeal to at least Academic strategies appears in Bayle, however, not only in relation to the natural sciences. In morals, too, Bayle embraces the Academic criterion, arguing that, consistent with scepticism, people can ‘act upon matters on the basis of probabilities without waiting for certainty’.106 Bayle suggests, with perhaps more than a touch of irony, not only in the Dictionnaire’s article on Pyrrho but also earlier in his 1682 Lettre sur la comète, that sceptics and atheists are no less moral than Christians.107 Similarly, Bayle’s Academicism is evident in a remark registered in chapter 11 of his 1715 Cabale chimerique, ou réfutation de l’examen d’un libelle, in which he defends himself against Jurieu’s charge of an impious Pyrrhonism. Bayle there aligns himself specifically with the Academics’ deference to probabilities, and, as if to make the Academic point crystal clear, in doing so he explicitly calls upon Cicero and Cicero’s adoption of Carneades’ pithanon as probabilia, writing of ‘we who follow only probabilities’ that I identify with what he [Jurieu] says about my way of philosophizing and I admit that, apart from truths of religion, I regard the other disputes only as a clever game, one in which it doesn’t matter to me whether I’m proven right or wrong. If those I must live with are more comfortable with peripatetics than Gassendism or Cartesianism, I happily leave them here, no less their friend and servant, finding it in no way wrong to be contradicted, and as soon as a greater probability presented, I side easily with it without difficulty or shame. That has always been the view of academic philosophers. [We who follow only probabilities], says Cicero in their name, [and who cannot go beyond that which has verisimilitude, can confute others without obstinacy and are prepared to be confuted ourselves without resentment].108

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The ‘indifference’ of Academic non-apprehension or akatalêpsía as well as Pyrrhonian epochê is here too, of course. But, perhaps more importantly, this passage from the Cabale also exhibits a curious coincidence of phrasing that may indicate that Hume had read and drawn from it, since in the ‘Letter from a Gentleman’ Hume calls Pyrrhonian scepticism ‘a Kind of Jeux d’esprit’ (LG 21, 1.425). Perhaps more telling is the way Bayle’s Academicism is evident when – in Note G from the ‘Chrysippus’ entry, as well as in his own account of his method in a ‘Dissertation concerning the Project of a Critical Dictionary’ – he not only characterises Academicism as probabilism but also aligns himself directly with ‘Sceptics or Academics’, whose practice is that of a reporter (rapporteur) rather than a dogmatic advocate (avocat).109 Cicero, in the first pages of De natura deorum, describes himself as an impartial listener (auditorum; DEO 1.7.17), and Academic sceptics of the sort with whom Bayle identifies himself represent ‘the strong and the weak arguments of the two opposite parties faithfully, and without partiality’ – though Bayle confesses of the historic Academics, perhaps because of their probabilism, that while ‘their Speculation hung betwixt two Contraries . . . their Practice stuck fast to one of them’.110 Dogmatists, by contrast, ‘do not present the arguments of both sides with the same force’.111

2.2 Hume’s Academic Scepticism This backstory establishes the context of Academic scepticism within which Hume developed his own thought. Here, however, our task is not simply to explore that broad context but, more narrowly, to define the particular features of Hume’s Academic scepticism in light of that context.

2.2.1 Hume’s Self-Described Academic Scepticism Hume offers this description of Academic philosophy and associates himself with it: The academics always talk of doubt and suspense of judgement, of danger in hasty determinations, of confining to very narrow bounds the enquiries of the understanding, and of renouncing all speculations which lie not within the limits of common life and practice. (E 5.1.19, SBN 41)

We see here what will by now be familiar Academic traits: suspension and akatalêpsía, caution, limiting inquiry and locating philosophical

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thought within common life. Hume also describes his ‘academical’ scepticism as a ‘mitigated’ form of sceptical thought, most prominently in the first Enquiry (E 12.1.1, SBN 149ff.; esp. E 12.3.24, SBN 161). Mitigated or Academic scepticism Hume contrasts against two other types of scepticism, one ‘antecedent’ and the other ‘consequent’ (E 12.1.3, SBN 149–50) to philosophical investigation. ‘Antecedent’ scepticism employs the kind of ‘universal doubt’ (E 12.1.3, 12.1.14; SBN 149, 153; emphasis mine) clearly associated with Descartes’ hyperbolic doubt in Meditation 1. It is a kind of doubt that does not simply suspend judgement but in quasidogmatic fashion assumes all truth claims to be false as a preliminary to inquiry. In this sense, Cartesian doubt is not doubt at all. ‘Consequent’ scepticism of the sort Hume rejects, on the other hand, is a twinned but similarly inverted form of dogmatism – an absolute and negative conclusion reached after epistemological inquiry. Like its antecedent kin, consequent scepticism presents not proper scepticism but instead a portrait of total human epistemic impotence and doxastic annihilation, purportedly proven so by inquirers who claim to have ‘discovered, either the absolute fallaciousness of their mental faculties, or their unfitness to reach any fixed determination in all those curious subjects of speculation, about which they are commonly employed’ (E 12.1.5, SBN 150; emphasis mine). Hume associates these non-Academic forms of scepticism with Pyrrhonism. He rejects antecedent scepticism in its entirety, but he does accept, in a way he sees consistent with his Academicism, a thoroughgoing but not absolute form of consequent scepticism. Of the two non-Academic varietals, Hume writes that these illicit, ‘Pyrrhonian’ scepticisms are ‘excessive’ (E 12.23–5, SBN 158–61) and are probably impossible to enact (E 12.1.3, SBN 150). They ‘admit of no answer and produce no conviction’ (E 12.1.15n32, SBN 155n1). In their impotence, writes Hume, ‘Their only effect is to cause . . . momentary amazement and irresolution and confusion’ (E 12.1.15n32, SBN 155n1; cf. LG 21, 1.425–6). This characterisation of Pyrrhonism is in complete agreement with Cicero’s, as well as with Cicero’s contention that radical scepticism places its followers’ physical well-being in jeopardy. ‘Therefore’, Cicero writes, articulating an extreme variant of what has come to be known as the apraxia or ‘inaction’ objection to scepticism, ‘those who assert that nothing can be grasped deprive us of these things that are the very tools or equipment of life, or rather actually overthrow the

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whole of life from its foundations and deprive the animate creature itself of the mind that animates it . . .’ (ACD 1.10.31; cf. ACD 2.31.99). While Pyrrhonian scepticism – at least of this sort, at least on the surface – is of dubious value for Hume, Academic scepticism is to be preferred because it is ‘durable and useful’ (E 12.3.24, SBN 161). Where does all this bring us?

2.2.2 Hume and a General Academic Framework Hume’s self-description of his Academic philosophy in section 12 of the first Enquiry, along with other features of his philosophical theory, fits well with the general framework that José R. Maia Neto has formulated to characterise the early modern Academic tradition generally. This is telling. Neto culls from Cicero five philosophical characteristics typical of Academic scepticism as it meandered across much of early modern thought. Each and every one is also characteristically Humean. Let us pause a moment, then, and briefly summarise the definitive features of Hume’s Academic scepticism. Neto, together with our survey of the Academic tradition, establishes the framework. Subsequent chapters will examine each of these characteristics in a still more thoroughgoing way. A General Framework for Academic Scepticism 1. Non-apprehending: Academic scepticism does not deny that reality, truths about reality or criteria (kriteria) for those truths exist, but either: a. refuses to affirm truth claims, or b. denies the claim that truth can be apprehended either because i. truth is hidden, or because ii. human epistemic capacities are too weak.112 2. Doxastic moderation: Often, through probabilistic or persuasive criteria and usually in ways consistent with religious belief, Academic scepticism produces results that are persuasive (or pithanê) rather than proven and stakes out a doxastic middle ground between a. dogmatic belief and b. extreme sceptical doubt, understood as the utter extinguishing of belief (commonly called ‘Pyrrhonian’ doubt by Academics). 3. Limited inquiry: Academic scepticism inquires but also limits inquiry, typically to experience or to what sceptics call common life, in contrast to metaphysical or theological speculation.

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4. Integrity: Academic scepticism prioritises intellectual integrity ahead of the acquisition of truth or making truth claims. 5. Modesty: Academic scepticism refuses claims to have apprehended the truth and to have transcended appearances; it criticises dogmatism on moral grounds as immodest, arrogant, and prone to social-political sectarianism, faction and discord. As we will see in subsequent chapters, these five qualities describe Hume’s thought exceedingly well.

2.3 Conclusion To understand whether and to what extent Hume is an Academic philosopher, one must first understand Academic scepticism. To that end, Chapter 1 surveyed the way in which Academic scepticism emerged from Plato’s Academy, and how it established itself in contrast to other philosophical schools, principally those of the stoics. Chapter 2 charted the paths along which Academic scepticism was conveyed from the ancient world to modern European readers, as well as its strategic deployment by those engaged in the contests of the Protestant Reformation and Catholic Reformation (or Counter-Reformation). Chapter 2 also examined Academic scepticism’s role in the gestating new sciences of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with special regard for what figures and texts may have influenced Hume. This survey has been historical, but it has also been conceptual. In Chapter 8, we will return to the doxastic topics addressed here. We will see how Hume cultivates an Academic practice that is not only modest, moderate, and maintains its philosophical integrity, but is also non-dogmatic. Hume’s philosophy, however, is not entirely Academic, and the Academic dimensions of his thought do not exhaust his scepticism. Hume’s philosophical practice is partly Academic, but it is also partly Pyrrhonian. Understanding the way his Pyrrhonism is stitched together with his Academicism will require repeating the historical-philosophical project of the last two chapters in the next two, as we survey Academic scepticism’s sister stream.

Notes 1. Schmitt, Cicero Scepticus; Schmitt, Gianfrancesco Pico; Popkin, History of Scepticism. 2. Floridi, Sextus Empiricus, p. 14; Floridi, ‘Rediscovery’, p. 268.

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3. See the Theodosian Code: Codex Theodosianius, 16.4.2: De his qui super religione contendunt. 4. Curley, Augustine’s Critique. 5. Heffernan, ‘Augustinian Skepticism’, pp. 73–86. 6. King, ‘Introduction’, pp. xii–xiii, 158–63. 7. See Thorsrud, ‘Carneades’, p. 51. 8. Bloch, ‘John of Salisbury’, p. 187. Translation Bloch. 9. Schmitt, Cicero Scepticus, p. 37. 10. Pickavé, ‘Henry of Ghent’. 11. Schmitt, Cicero Scepticus, p. 48. 12. The 1985 Liberty Fund edition editor Eugene F. Miller finds thirtyfour references to Cicero in Hume’s Essays. 13. Regarding the influence of Cicero on the second Enquiry, see Moore, ‘Utility and Humanity’. My thanks to Aaron Garrett for this reference. 14. Ciceronis, M. Tulii, Opera. Cum Delectu Commentariorum. Edente Josephi Olivetii. 9 vols. 15. In his 1727 letter to Ramsay, Hume remarks about ‘the finest Sentence in Cicero’ as a standard against to which to judge other writers, including Virgil (LT 1.10, #1). 16. Jones, Hume’s Sentiments. 17. See the section of the ‘Apologie’ subtitled ‘Man Has No Knowledge’, in Montaigne, Complete Works: Essays, ‘Apology’, 2.12, p. 373. 18. Gassendi, Exercitationes paradoxicae adversus Aristoteleos (1624/58). 19. Thorsrud, ‘Radical and Mitigated Scepticism’, p. 141. My thanks to Harald Thorsrud for this quote. 20. Ibid., p. 141. 21. Fosl, ‘Doubt and Divinity’; Battersby, ‘Dialogues as Original Imitation’. See also Price, ‘Empirical Theists’. DEO 1.17, 1.19, 1.72, and 2.13. 22. N 12.9, 12.9n61, 12.9n62, 12.13, 12.14n67, 12.22n72, 12.24, 12.24n79, 12.24n81, 14.7n93. Beauchamp finds thirty references to Cicero’s texts in ‘The Natural History of Religion’, including five to De natura deorum and two to De divinatione. Hume’s own index to the ‘Natural History’ cites seven quotations from Cicero: ‘12.9, n. 61, n. 62, 12.24, n. 79, 14.7, n. 93’ (N, p. 274). The index registers nine proper citations to Cicero, including one to De divinatione and two to De natura deorum (N, p. 267). 23. For the controversy and scepticism’s role, see Sebastian Castellio, De haereticis (1553) and the reply by Calvin’s aide, Theodore Beza. Calvin supported the execution. 24. Popkin, History of Scepticism, p. 12. 25. Matytsin, Specter, p. 95. 26. Limbrick, ‘Introduction’, pp. 74–5.

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27. Harris, David Hume, p. 80. 28. Ramsay, Principles, p. 109; these similarities are identified by Winkler, ‘New Hume’, pp. 572–3. 29. Blackwell, ‘Diogenes Laërtius’s “Life of Pyrrho”’, p. 330. 30. Adam Smith recounts in his letter of 9 November 1776 to William Strahan that as death approached, Hume was reading Lucian’s Dialogues of the Dead. See Eugene Miller’s edition of Hume’s Essays (1985), p. xlv. 31. Hume refers to Fénelon’s Telemachus at EM 7.15 (SBN 255) and ST 227–8. 32. Perinetti, ‘Hume at La Flèche’, pp. 62–3. 33. On Bolingbroke and Pyrrhonism, see Kramnick, Bolingbroke, pp. 15–16. 34. AT 2.378; quoted and translated by Perinetti, ‘Hume at La Flèche’, p. 49. See also Gopnik, ‘Could David Hume?’ 35. See Gopnik, ‘Could David Hume?’, and Perinetti, ‘Hume at La Flèche’, p. 66. Perinetti reports that by ‘1725, there were no open defenders of Malebranche in the French province of the Jesuit order’. 36. Laird, Hume’s Philosophy, pp. 7–8. See Brockliss, French Higher Education. 37. Perinetti, ‘Hume at La Flèche’, p. 55. 38. Ibid., pp. 58–9. Cf. Fosl, ‘Bibliographic Bases’. Cf. Perinetti et al., La bibliothèque. See also LT 1.361, #194, and Harris, David Hume, p. 80. 39. Perinetti, ‘Hume at La Flèche’, p. 59. 40. Ibid., p. 59. 41. Ibid, p. 51; see also E 10.27 and n. 25 there. 42. A connection identified by Perinetti, ‘Hume at La Flèche’, p. 52. 43. Ibid., p. 51. 44. Mossner, ‘Hume at La Flèche’, p. 32; letter also quoted by Perinetti, ‘Hume at La Flèche’, p. 46; and Norton and Norton, ‘Historical Account’, 2.443. Cf. Jones, Hume’s Sentiments. See also Perinetti, ‘Hume at La Flèche’, pp. 65–6. Hume’s interest in the French Academy is also indicated by his having at some point acquired a 1730 (Amsterdam) copy of Histoire de l’Académie Françoise depuis 1652 by Paul Pellisson-Fontanier and the Jesuit Abbé Pierre-Joseph Thoulier d’Olivet; this text was also it seems held by the library of the Collège at La Flèche; DHL 117, #926. 45. Perinetti, ‘Hume at La Flèche’, p. 52. 46. Popkin, History of Scepticism, pp. 112–20ff. Cf. Jardine, ‘Forging’. 47. Mersenne, Les questions, pp. 18–19, 116–17; quotes in Crombie, ‘Mersenne’, and see Lüthy, ‘Confessionalization’, esp. pp. 108–9.

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48. Kogel, Pierre Charron, p. 146; Mersenne, ‘Use of Reason, etc.’, p. 137n2. Kogel cites Mersenne’s 1622 Quaestiones celeberrimae in genesim, col. 671. See also Hecht, Doubt, p. 309. 49. Cf. Mersenne, ‘Use of Reason, etc.’, pp. 136–65. 50. Smith, ‘Hume’s Academic Scepticism’, esp. pp. 356ff. See also Foucher’s response to Robert Desgabets’ criticism in his Nouvelle dissertation of 1676. 51. Foucher, Critique, p. 22. 52. Ibid., p. 23. 53. Ibid., pp. 30–1. 54. Ibid., pp. 32–3. 55. Ibid., p. 38. 56. Ibid., pp. 44–6. Drawing upon Hume, Lord Drummond recognises these limits to probability and demonstration in his aptly titled Academical Questions (1805); Holden, ‘Modern Disciple’, pp. 172, 185n19; Drummond, Academical Questions, pp. 17, 135, 362. 57. Foucher, Critique, p. 46. 58. Ibid., p. 48. 59. Ibid., p. 48. 60. Ibid., pp. 48–9. 61. Talib, ‘Ludic Fallacy’, p. 129. 62. Ibid., p. 129. 63. Foucher, Critique, pp. 14–15. 64. Hickson, ‘Varieties’, p. 336. 65. Neto, ‘Academic Scepticism’; see also Neto, ‘Skeptical Cartesian Background’. 66. Watson, Breakdown, pp. 33, 55–6, 128–30. The story of Rohault’s invitation appears in Adrien Baillet’s biography, La vie de monsieur Descartes (1691), 2.439; cited by Watson, ‘Simon Foucher’, p. 13. 67. Popkin, ‘Berkeley and Pyrrhonism’; Popkin, ‘Bayle’s Place’; Watson, ‘Breakdown’; all cited in Bayle, Dictionary (1991), p. 197n11. 68. Buckle, ‘British Sceptical Realism’. 69. Locke, Essay, 4.9.2. 70. Ibid., 1.1.6 and 4.3.18. 71. Ibid., 4.9.2. 72. Ibid., 1.1.4; cf. Robison, ‘Naturalist and Metasceptic’, p. 35. 73. Locke, Essay, 4.12.10. 74. Ibid., 4.12.9. 75. Ibid., 4.9.1. 76. Ibid., 4.12.10. 77. Popkin, History of Scepticism, pp. 146–7. See also Craik, English Prose, p. 2.

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78. Locke, Essay, 2.23.2. 79. Ibid., 2.13.19. 80. Hume writes in ‘A Letter from a Gentleman’: ‘All the antient Fathers, as well as our first Reformers, are copious in representing the Weakness and Uncertainty of mere human Reason. And Monsieur Huet the learned Bishop of Avaranches (so celebrated for his Demonstration Evangelique which contains all the great Proofs of the Christian Religion) wrote also a Book on this very Topick, wherein he endeavours to revive all the Doctrines of the antient Scepticks or Pyrrhonians’ (LG 24, 1.426). In the Dialogues, Hume writes about Huet: ‘A celebrated prelate too, of the Romish communion, a man of the most extensive learning, who wrote a demonstration of Christianity, has also composed a treatise, which contains all the cavils of the boldest and most determined Pyrrhonism’ (D 1.7); Hume cites Huet there with a footnote, ‘Mons. Huet’ (D, n. 3). 81. Lennon, Plain Truth, p. viii. 82. Lennon argues that it was Huet’s reading of Malebranche that turned his thought towards scepticism; Lennon, ‘Huet, Malebranche’, p. 152; Popkin, History of Scepticism, p. 279. 83. Hickson, ‘Varieties’, p. 324. 84. Popkin, History of Scepticism, p. 280; Popkin, ‘High Road’, pp. 23–4. 85. For Huet on ‘Acatalepsy’, see especially Book 1, chapter 14 of his Treatise. Specifically, he uses the term at §29, i.e., 1.14.29 (p. 94); on the criterion also see 1.14.29 (pp. 95–6), but in addition cf. 3.3 and 3.11. See Hickson, ‘Varieties’, pp. 326–8, for more on Huet’s critique of Descartes’ Principles 1.30 and the natural light as a criterion of truth. 86. Huet, Treatise, 1.13, p. 202; Popkin, History of Scepticism, pp. 280–1. 87. Huet, Treatise, 1.14.29, p. 99. 88. Ibid., 1.14.37, p. 112; and then 1.23.38, p. 113. 89. Ibid., 1.23.38, p. 113. Note that the table of contents of the 1725 edition differs from the numbering within the text itself. The table of contents erroneously designates this text section, ‘39’. 90. There were many editions of Bayle’s Dictionnaire. See Matytsin, Specter, for a detailed account of them as well as of the many translations. 91. Matytsin, Specter, p. 29. 92. Cassirer, Philosophy of the Enlightenment, p. 167. 93. Perinetti, ‘Hume at La Flèche’, pp. 59ff. 94. Hume writes to Ramsay: ‘I thank you for your trouble about Baile. I hope it is a Book you will yourself find Diversion & Improvement in’ (LT 1.12, #2).

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95. Harris, David Hume, pp. 62ff. 96. Stewart, ‘Dating’, pp. 276–88; cited by Wright, ‘Hume on the Origin’, p. 201n40. 97. Mossner, ‘Hume’s Early Memoranda’, pp. 492–512. Volume 1 of the Response appeared in 1704. Pittion, ‘Hume’s Reading of Bayle’, pp. 373–86; cited by Wright, ‘Hume on the Origin’, p. 201n20. Bayle’s Oeuvres diverses was published 1723 and 1727–31, then republished in 1737. 98. Kemp Smith, Philosophy of David Hume, pp. 83, 325–38; cited by Pittion, ‘Hume’s Reading of Bayle’, p. 373n3. Popkin, ‘Bayle and Hume’, pp. 151ff.; Harris, David Hume, 1.3.3.1; Laird, Hume’s Philosophy, pp. 78ff., 145, 158. Laird also suggests that Bayle may have informed Hume’s sceptical views about causality (Hume’s Philosophy, p. 136). Kemp Smith (Philosophy of David Hume, pp. 496ff.), suggests via quotation that Hume’s bundle theory of mind may have antecedents in Bayle’s article on ‘Rorarius’. On Hume’s use of Spinoza in regard to T 1.4.5, as well as Hume’s work on substance and identity, see Kemp Smith, ‘Appendix to Chapter 23’ (Philosophy of David Hume, pp. 506ff.); Popkin, ‘Bayle and Hume’, p. 152; Neto, ‘Bayle’s Academic Skepticism’, p. 275. Bayle’s articles in the Dictionary on ‘Manichées’ and ‘Paulicians’ may have informed Hume’s remarks about Manichaeanism at D 11.14. 99. ‘The ill use, which BAYLE and other libertines made of the philosophical scepticism of the fathers and first reformers, still farther propagated the judicious sentiment of Mr. LOCKE: and it is now, in a manner, avowed, by all pretenders to reasoning and philosophy, that Atheist and Sceptic are almost synonymous. And as it is certain, that no man is in earnest, when he professes the latter principle, I would fain hope, that there are as few, who seriously maintain the former’ (D 1.17). My thanks to Aaron Garrett for the clue about Bayle’s use of Cicero’s characters; see Van der Lugt, Bayle, pp. 59–61. 100. Bayle, Dictionary (1991), p. 194. 101. Ibid., pp. 197, 203; Neto, ‘Bayle’s Academic Skepticism’, p. 273. 102. Bayle, Dictionary (1991), pp. 194–5. 103. Ibid., p. 199: ‘For if the objects of our senses appear colored, hot, cold, odoriferous, and yet they are not so, why can they not appear extended and shaped, in rest and in motion, though they are not so?’ 104. Popkin, History of Scepticism, pp. 284–5; see also Ryan, Pierre Bayle’s Cartesian Metaphysics, ch. 1.

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105. Bayle, Dictionary (1991), p. 194. 106. Ibid., ‘Note B’, p. 195; Irwin, ‘Implication’, p. 278. 107. Bayle’s letter was published in Cologne in 1682 in Pensées diverse à l’occasion d’une comète de 1680; see §104 in Bayle, Oeuvres diverses (La Haye, 1727), 3.187. See also Wright, ‘Hume on the Origin’, p. 201n40. 108. Bayle, Oeuvres diverses, 2.676, trans. mine with Ellen Cox; cited by Neto, ‘Bayle’s Academic Skepticism’, p. 272. Bayle quotes Academic Cicero from the Tusculan Disputations 2.2.5. It was a well-known passage in Cicero; Neto, Academic Skepticism, p. 79. The translation of Cicero’s Latin in Bayle’s entry is by C. D. Yonge, modified by me. Cf. Bayle’s discussion in his article on ‘Heracleotes’ (Dionysius) about Tusculan Disputations 1.7–9 and about the Academica with regard to stoicism and not arriving at certainty. 109. Neto, ‘Bayle’s Academic Skepticism’, pp. 273–4; Bayle, Dictionary (1826), p. 398. 110. Bayle, Dictionary (1826), p. 398. Comparing dogmatists and Academics, Bayle writes in the entry on the stoic ‘Chrysippe’: ‘Il voulait que ceux qui enseignent une vérité ne parlassent que sobrement des raison du parti contraire, & quels imitassent les Avocats. C’étoit l’esprit général des Dogmatiques: Il n’y avait guère que les Académiciens qui proposassent avec la même force les Argumens des deux Partis’; quoted by Laursen, ‘Skepticism against Reason’, p. 138. My thanks to Aaron Garrett for bringing to my attention Cicero’s usage at DEO 1.7.17. 111. Bayle, Dictionary (1826), p. 398. In the ‘Table des Matières’ of the 1740 edition of the Dictionaire (p. 741), Bayle characterises dogmatics along correlative lines: ‘Dogmatiques: Ne proposoient pas avec la même force les Argumens des deux Partis.’ 112. Cicero: ‘We do not deny that some truth exists but deny that it can be perceived’, or that it can be apprehended in an epistemic sense (ACD 2.23.73). Quoted by Neto, ‘Academic Scepticism’, p. 204.

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Appearances prevail everywhere . . . Diogenes Laërtius on Pyrrho, Lives of Eminent Philosophers 9.105

If it was natural to begin this investigation with the Academic dimensions of Hume’s thought, since he himself characterises his philosophy as ‘academical’ (E 12), inquiring into Hume’s Pyrrhonism requires justification. There are two very good reasons why it may at first seem odd, even wrong, to conjoin the terms ‘Hume’ and ‘Pyrrhonian’: 1) Hume explicitly rejects Pyrrhonism and 2) he does not seem to have understood Pyrrhonism terribly well. When Hume mentions Pyrrhonism at all – and he does not mention it often – he does so in an almost uniformly disparaging way. What characterisations of Pyrrhonism he presents seem at best distortions, tired old caricatures common among Pyrrhonism’s sloppiest critics. Hume’s first explicit, published mention of Pyrrhonism, for example, appears in the Abstract of A Treatise of Human Nature, issued in 1740, the year after Books 1 and 2 of the Treatise were published. He writes there about the way ‘nature’ defeats Pyrrhonian doubt: ‘Philosophy wou’d render us entirely Pyrrhonian, were not nature too strong for it’ (A 27, SBN 657). Hume also emphatically distances himself from Pyrrhonism and its ‘universal doubt’ in his apologetic 1745 ‘Letter from a Gentleman’. Describing himself to his audience not as an extreme doubter but instead as humble, modest, and possessing the intellectual integrity associated with Academic scepticism, he writes: As to the Scepticism with which the Author is charged, I must observe, that the Doctrines of the Pyrrhonians or Scepticks have been regarded in all Ages as Principles of mere Curiosity, or a Kind of Jeux d’esprit, without any Influence on a Man’s steady Principles or Conduct in Life.

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Hume’s Scepticism In Reality, a Philosopher who affects to doubt of the Maxims of common Reason, and even of his Senses, declares sufficiently that he is not in earnest, and that he intends not to advance an Opinion which he would recommend as Standards of Judgment and Action. All he means by these Scruples is to abate the Pride of mere human Reasoners, by showing them, that even with regard to Principles which seem the clearest, and which they are necessitated from the strongest Instincts of Nature to embrace, they are not able to attain a full Consistence and absolute Certainty. Modesty then, and Humility, with regard to the Operations of our natural Faculties, is the Result of Scepticism; not an universal Doubt, which it is impossible for any Man to support, and which the first and most trivial Accident in Life must immediately disconcert and destroy.1 (LG 21, 1.425–6)

This letter was composed six years after the publication of the first two books of the Treatise, five years after the Abstract, and three years before publication of the first Enquiry, but it is consistent with the characterisations of Pyrrhonism and ‘total’ scepticism (T 1.4.7.7, SBN 267–8) that appear in those texts. In fact, in the Enquiry concerning Human Understanding (1748), Hume describes Pyrrhonian scepticism in almost precisely the same terms. The total or universal doubt of Pyrrhonism is, says Hume, a fatuous ‘dream’ that, again, has no enduring or ‘constant influence on the mind’. Pyrrhonism is a condition from which even the ‘most trivial’ events in life will awaken those unfortunate enough to have become entangled in its doubts. Hume moreover not only seems to repeat Academic Plato’s/Socrates’ complaint at Meno 86 about the laziness engendered by accepting the impossibility of knowledge. Calling upon the apraxia (no-action) criticism of scepticism, Hume, like Cicero, writes that Pyrrhonism would render even ordinary human life impossible. In the closing sections of Book 1 of the Treatise, Hume cautions readers that a sceptical ‘resolution [to reject all the trivial suggestions of the fancy], if steadily executed, wou’d be dangerous, and attended with the most fatal consequences’ (T 1.4.7.7, SBN 267). The Pyrrhonian, says Hume in the first Enquiry, must acknowledge, if he will acknowledge any thing, that all human life must perish, were his principles universally and steadily to prevail. All discourse, all action would immediately cease; and men remain in a total lethargy, till the necessities of nature, unsatisfied, put an end to their miserable existence. (E 12.23, SBN 159–60)

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In this combination of excessive, merely temporary, ineffectual, lethargic and potentially dangerous qualities, Pyrrhonism for Hume appears congruent with what he calls the ‘total’ scepticism (T 1.4.1.7, SBN 183) that produces a ‘total extinction of belief and evidence’ (T 1.4.1.6, SBN 183). In the posthumous 1779 Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, the natural theologian Cleanthes reiterates the view of the Treatise and first Enquiry, declaring: In reality, Philo, continued he, it seems certain that though a man in a flush of humour, after intense reflection on the contradictions and imperfections of human reason, may entirely renounce all belief and opinion; it is impossible for him to persevere in this total scepticism, or make it appear in his conduct for a few hours. External objects press in upon him: Passions solicit him: His philosophical melancholy dissipates; and even the utmost violence upon his own temper will not be able during any time, to preserve the poor appearance of scepticism. (D 1.6)

Scholars and thoughtful readers of the history of Pyrrhonism will find Hume’s characterisation of it both familiar and distorted, and so it is no wonder that many commentators have concluded that Hume did not possess an accurate understanding of ancient Pyrrhonism.2 There is, however, substantially more to Hume’s Pyrrhonism than this common reading suggests. The Pyrrhonian tradition comprises an expansive and complex network of ideas and practices, developed over a long period of time, and many dimensions of Hume’s thought bear remarkable similarities to its most important formulations – so much so that it would be neglectful and misleading to describe Humean scepticism as anything but deeply Pyrrhonian. Certainly, by crafting his theories within what I have called the conceptual space of scepticism, Hume may well have nurtured ideas similar to those of the Pyrrhonians accidentally and unwittingly. That surely may have been so. There are, on the other hand, also good reasons to think that Hume suppressed in his publications a Pyrrhonian self-understanding of his work. Hume enjoyed access to Pyrrhonian texts and used them (see §4.2.1 below), and considerations of audience and reception would have led any prudent and ambitious author of Hume’s time to resist characterisation of his or her work as Pyrrhonian (see §4.2.2 below). In

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either case (accident or suppression), as a matter of philosophical interpretation, even if not biographical fact, Hume’s sceptical philosophy is reasonably and properly read as profoundly Pyrrhonian. Seeing how that is the case requires an understanding of what Pyrrhonian scepticism properly is.

3.1 Origins: From Pyrrho to Sextus Empiricus Pyrrhonism began, at least, as an outsider of sorts. Although Bayle claims that its practice preceded its namesake, Pyrrhonism is traditionally said to have originated with an older contemporary of and possible influence on Arcesilaus born around 365 BC, some forty years before Aristotle’s death, but not in cosmopolitan Athens (DL 4.32–3).3 (That possible influence may indicate an original confluence of Pyrrhonian and Academic scepticism.) While Academic scepticism took root in the Academy, just a few hundred yards outside the city walls of Athens, Pyrrhonism began to the west, hundreds of miles from the intellectual hub of Hellas, on the other side of the Peloponnesus in Elis, the small, landlocked agricultural polis under whose authority Olympia and the Olympic games were organised.

3.1.1 Pyrrho and Timon Born into a relatively poor family, Pyrrho (c. 365–c. 275 BC) became a successful painter in Elis, and an image of torch-bearers attributed to him was preserved in his home city after his death. More than many ancient philosophers of his stature, however, Pyrrho remains a shadowy figure. According to Cicero and Seneca, he was even neglected during much of antiquity.4 Nevertheless, a few provocative items to consider remain extant. We are told, for example, by the third-century BC philosophical biographer Diogenes Laërtius that Pyrrho accompanied Alexander on his 326 BC campaign into India, where he was exposed to the thought of ‘naked wise men’ or gymnosophists.5 Pyrrho returned, says Diogenes, having embraced ideas of asceticism and simplicity, as well as perhaps a distrust of ordinary experience in its presentation of reality.6 Anaxarchus of Abdera (c. 380–c. 320 BC) apparently joined Pyrrho on that journey and may also have exerted an influence upon Pyrrho’s thinking. Having studied under Diogenes of Smyrna – a student of the atomist Metrodorus of Chios (fl. 4th

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century BC), who was himself a student of Democritus of Abdera (c. 460–c. 370 BC)7 – Anaxarchus seems to have followed a line of decidedly quasi-sceptical atomists. In doing so, he established a kind of stepping stone between atomism and scepticism, though scepticism may itself in turn have influenced Epicurean atomism (DL 9.58, 9.69). (Nearly two thousand years later, Pierre Gassendi would construct a similar bridge between atomism and scepticism crucial to the development of early modern thought; see §4.1.5.3 below.) That means that the line between ancient atomism and scepticism is direct and looks like this: Democritus ã Metrodorus of Chios ã Anaxarchus ã Pyrrho [ã Arcesilaus]

The line is conceptual as well as biographical. Cicero reports that Metrodorus of Chios began his atomist treatise On Nature with the same sceptical assertions that would later be associated with Arcesilaus: ‘None of us knows anything, not even whether we know anything or not; nor do we know what to not know or to know are, nor on the whole, whether anything is or is not’ (ACD 2.23.73). As this remark suggests, atomism itself, even standard atomism as it was cultivated by Democritus, bears sceptical implications, especially for sensory perception, since the senses, according to the atomists’ ‘canonic’, do not themselves apprehend the metaphysically real atomic order directly. Atoms are entities that are directly inapprehensible by sensation and can be inferred from experience only by reasoning, specifically by what perhaps is not unjustly called speculative reasoning. Atoms themselves are, in other words, hidden from us in experience. For this reason Sextus Empiricus, who later chronicled Pyrrhonian ideas, described Anaxarchus as regarding the objects of sensory perception as a ‘scene-painting and supposed them to resemble the impressions experienced in sleep or madness’ (ADO 1.88 [M 7.88]); he seems, in fact, to have advanced dream and madness arguments for sensory scepticism well before Descartes’ Meditation 1 and the works of other early moderns.8 Hume broaches the effects of sleep and madness on our perceptions, ideas and beliefs, too, but he emphasises their discontinuity with ordinary, solid perception and belief (T 1.1.1.1, SBN 1–2; T 1.3.10.9–10, SBN 123, 630–1). The metaphor of painting, of course, calls to mind Pyrrho’s profession.

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Pyrrho wrote nothing, and much of what later thinkers learned about him came down through the so-called Silloi (or Lampoons) of his student, Timon of Phlius (c. 320–c. 230 BC) – likely the namesake of Shakespeare’s play – who carried this new, still unnamed stream of thought to Athens. Timon may have been the first to use the term ‘sceptic’ – that in a description of Arcesilaus – and Sextus reports that Timon also wrote a treatise called Against the Physicists or Against the Natural Scientists (Against the Geometers [M] 3.2).9 Timon’s Silloi, however, were not a systematic rendering of philosophical ideas but contained principally derisive caricatures of dogmatic philosophers.10 Only a few fragments of the Silloi survive. The most important trace of Timon’s portrayal of Pyrrho, however, is not a fragment of the Silloi but a summary of his account collected by the Aristotelian philosopher Aristocles of Messene (fl. 1st century BC) in his book On Philosophy, which was subsequently quoted and thereby set at yet another remove from Pyrrho by the fourth-century Bishop of Caesarea, Eusebius (c. 260–c. 339), in his Praeparatio evangelica (14.18.1–5), the source from which it is commonly quoted.11 The lineage of our understanding of Pyrrho, then, may be illustrated this way: Pyrrho ã Timon ã Aristocles ã Eusebius

The span marks three removes through three different thinkers and hundreds of tumultuous years. A measure of doubt about the veracity of Eusebius’s account is, therefore, very much in order. Aristocles’ summary, as it comes to us through Eusebius nearly four hundred years after Pyrrho’s death, has Timon framing Pyrrho’s ideas through three rhetorical questions followed by three answers, all concerned with the requirements for happiness or well-being (eudaimonia):12 Q1: What are things by nature? A1: ‘Indifferent’ [or ‘undifferentiated’ or ‘without differentia’] (adiaphora): Things seem ‘indifferent’ or beyond our ken.13 Q2: What should our disposition be in relation to things? A2: ‘Immeasurable’ [or ‘undecidable’ or ‘without judgement’] (astathmeta): As we cannot take a proper measure of the world, we should not trust our senses.

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Q3: What is the outcome of adopting that disposition? A3: ‘Indeterminate’ [or ‘unfixed’ or ‘undecided’] (anepikrita/ anepikritos): Our judgment should remain ‘indeterminate’, and we should refuse belief or opinion (doxa).

On the basis of these putative views, many philosophers seem to have repudiated or ignored Pyrrho.14

3.1.2 Aenesidemus Nearly three hundred years after Pyrrho, early in the first century BC and shortly after Cicero’s murder, a philosopher called Aenesidemus, as we saw in §1.2.1.3, set himself against the Academy, perhaps because he found its teachings to have become insufficiently sceptical, and connected doubt with aporia.15 Born a Cretan in the ancient Minoan capital of Knossos, Aenesidemus eventually settled and taught in the thriving, cosmopolitan, Ptolemaic-Egyptian city of Alexandria, home of the greatest library of antiquity and of swarms of intellectuals nesting within it. There he welded the name of Pyrrho to what would be called the sceptical movement through his best-known work, the Pyrrhoneoi logoi (Pyrrhonian Discourses, aka Pyrrhonian Principles or Pyrrhonian Arguments, sometimes just Pyrrhoneia). The text is no longer extant, but later accounts describe it as being composed of eight books that catalogued sceptical ideas and argumentative strategies. According to Photius, Aenesidemus ‘determined absolutely nothing, not even this very claim, that nothing is determined’ (Biblioteca 212.170a12–14). A little later, Favorinus (c. AD 80–160), whom Galen identifies as an Academic philosopher and probabilist, wrote ten books on Pyrrhonism, one for each of the argumentative ‘tropes’ developed by Aenesidemus. Philostratus describes those ten volumes as Favorinus’ best work. According to Philostratus, Favorinus says of the Pyrrhonians that while they were ephectic, they nevertheless made judgements.16

3.1.3 Sextus Empiricus Since they were lost through the accidents of history, it was not Aenesidemus’ foundational texts proper that would carry Pyrrhonism into modernity but a later, expansive, though perhaps more pedestrian account. Nearly two centuries after Aenesidemus’ magisterial

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Pyrrhonian Discourses, a philosopher-physician – living perhaps in Alexandria or Rome – compiled a set of books that would become the primary conduit of Pyrrhonian sceptical ideas to later generations, much as Cicero’s work would be for Academic scepticism.17 Perhaps having been inspired or provoked by controversies between what came to be known as the empirical and methodic schools of medicine (PH 1.34.236–41), Sextus Empiricus (late 2nd–early 3rd century) assembled a vast trove of sceptical ideas, rhetoric, practices and logic.18 He is the only ancient Greek sceptic whose written work, and indeed a large fraction of it, has survived. He may well have been the last major Pyrrhonist of antiquity. The order in which Sextus produced his texts is controversial, but without doubt the most influential among them was his rich though discursive Outlines of Pyrrhonism (Pyrrhôneioi hypotypôseis – commonly PH), which is divided into three books: • Book 1: on the general features of scepticism • Book 2: on dogmatic logic and method • Book 3: on ethics and physics Against the Mathematicians. The assemblage of Sextus’ other texts is complex.19 Briefly, in addition to the Outlines, the other extant text from Sextus is a collection called Adversus mathematicos (M). It has conventionally been thought of as being composed of eleven books (M 1–11). Singly or in pairs, the books composing M carry titles of their own – for example, M 1 is called Against the Grammarians. Scholars have now determined, however, that this collection of eleven books came to be regarded erroneously as a single work. Correctly understood, what has in the past been collected as M ought to be divided into two separate books. Against the Professors. The first six books of M compose a group that should alone properly be called Adversus mathematicos; this book (M 1–6) is sometimes also called Against the Learned or Against Those in the Disciplines (Pros mathêmatikous in the Greek). Against the Dogmatists and Sceptical Treatises. The remaining five books (7–11 of what has conventionally been called M) are actually not part of Adversus mathematicos. It seems that they form a distinct grouping and may or may not have been part of a larger whole, composed perhaps of ten books, called the Sceptical Commentaries or Treatises (Skeptika hûpomnêmata). The subset of five (so-called

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M 7–11) is sometimes called Against the Dogmatists (ADO). Against the Dogmatists bears a special, parallel relationship to the Outlines of Pyrrhonism: ADO 1–2 (M 7–8) presents more elaborate accounts of the material outlined in PH 2; while ADO 3–5 (M 9–11) covers material outlined in PH 3. Lost are those portions of the Sceptical Treatises that elaborate upon material appearing in PH 1. Sextus’ three major and minor titles can be fairly well schematised as follows: 1. Outlines of Pyrrhonism = PH 1–3 2. Sceptical Treatises or Sceptical Commentaries (ten? books) • Perhaps five lost books at least in part parallel to PH 1 • Against the Dogmatists = ADO 1–5 (mistakenly called M 7–11) • Against the Logicians 1–2 = ADO 1–2 (mistakenly M 7–8, corresponds to PH 2) • Against the Physicists 1–2 = ADO 3–4 (mistakenly M 9–10, corresponds to PH 3) • Against the Ethicists = ADO 5 (mistakenly M 11, corresponds to PH 3) 3. Against Those in the Disciplines or Against the Professors = M 1–6 • Against the Grammarians = M 1 • Against the Rhetoricians = M 2 • Against the Geometers = M 3 • Against the Arithmeticians = M 4 • Against the Astrologers = M 5 • Against the Musicians = M 6 Most of the complications involve commentaries and editions produced before the erroneous attribution of eleven rather than six books to Adversus mathematicos (M) had been sorted out. Many difficulties are also attributable to the persistence of the abbreviation ‘M’ for the five books that do not belong in M (but are properly Against the Dogmatists).

3.2 The Agogê of Appearances About Pyrrho, Diogenes Laërtius writes that ‘appearances prevail everywhere’ (DL 9.105), and, for Sextus, Pyrrhonian scepticism is deeply invested in an honest acknowledgement of that proposition.

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That acknowledgement is not made principally in the formulation of philosophical theory but in realising in practice a specific form of life. Sextus describes scepticism as ‘an ability’ (PH 1.4.8), and ‘the Pyrrhonean philosopher . . . is the man who participates in this “ability”’ (PH 1.4.10). Sextus links the sceptic way to the concept of ‘ability’ or agogê (PH 1.1.4, 1.8.17), deploying the same word used to name the system of disciplined training through which the Spartans educated their boys and sometimes girls. Sextus writes that, in contrast to ‘dogmatic’ philosophers such as the Aristotelians, Epicureans and stoics (who make positive assertions), as well as in contrast to the Academics such as Carneades and Clitomachus (who, according to him, make negative assertions; PH 1.33.226ff.), Pyrrhonian sceptics in some sense make no philosophical assertions at all, at least no putatively final philosophical assertions. Instead, their practice is to ‘keep on searching’ (PH 1.1.3–4). Writes Sextus: ‘our task is to outline the skeptical agogê, first premising that of none of our future statements do we positively affirm that the fact is exactly as we state it’ (PH 1.1.4). Even yielding to what is discerned as probable, persuasive or peithesthai (a word related to pithanon) by the Academics is, for Sextus, too much (PH 1.33.229–30).

3.2.1 The Fourfold Most generally, Sextus says, Pyrrhonian scepticism is a practice that adheres ‘to appearances’ (τὰ φαινόμενα; PH 1.11.21), in which one enacts a form of life ‘in accordance with appearance’ (PH 1.8.17). Living in accordance with appearances first and foremost answers the apraxia challenge (appearances are themselves sufficient to guide action), but it also explains what it means to practise philosophy in a properly sceptical way. There are four general dimensions to living in accordance with appearance, a ‘Fourfold’ set of observances that came to define Pyrrhonism: 1) nature, 2) tradition and custom, 3) the passions and 4) the technical arts.20 In Sextus’ now well-known phrasing: Adhering, then to appearances [phainomenois] we live in accordance with the normal rules of life, undogmatically [adoxatos], seeing that we cannot remain wholly inactive. And it would seem that this regulation of life is fourfold, and that one part of it lies in the guidance of nature [physeos], another in the constraint of the passions [pathōn], another in the tradition [paradosei] of laws [nomon] and customs [ethōn], another in the instruction of the arts [technōn]. (PH 1.11.23)

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To the extent that these four ways of practising scepticism describe the central features of Humean thought, Hume’s sceptical philosophy itself can be reasonably understood to be a way of practising Pyrrhonism. Sextus distinguishes the criteria used in common life from scientific and dogmatic criteria at PH 2.3.14–17ff.

3.2.2 The Teresic Practice of Common Life The Pyrrhonian acknowledgement that sceptical philosophy is enacted through ordinary observances or by holding fast to common life (biôtikê têrêsis; τήρησις) is indicated by phrases scattered across Sextus’ texts. Among the most salient are remarks about ‘the normal rules of life’ (PH 1.11.23), ‘the conduct of life’ (PH 1.11.21) and ‘common life’ (ho bios ho koinos, PH 1.34.237).21 Sextus directly appeals to the ‘non-philosophical observance’ (aphilosophon teresin) of common life as the basis of political judgement (ADO 5.165–6 [M 11.165–6]).22 In a similar way, facing down the ‘dangerous dilemma’ (T 1.4.7.6, SBN 267) that scepticism has forced upon him between trivial fancies and baseless theories, Hume finds that he ‘can only observe what is commonly done’ (T 1.4.7.7, SBN 268; emphasis mine). Having undermined theory and reasoning totally, Hume cannot at that point in the text mean ‘watch’ or ‘see’ what is commonly done, as would a disconnected theorist. For the Pyrrhonian philosopher, observant or teresic practice means reflectively culling guidance from the Fourfold of ordinary, diurnal and everyday life.23 Teresic philosophical practice means self-aware engagement – as opposed to a detached theory – with natural, customary, felt and instrumental appearances. Theory must be based in common life, not common life based in theory.

3.3 Negative Pyrrhonism: Subversion, Suspension and Silence The Fourfold describes sceptical life generally, but philosophy is a distinctive part of life composed of a special family of practices. Many conventional forms of life may be practised sceptically – medicine, the law, even politics and religion, perhaps anything. Sceptical philosophers, however, enact a distinctive set of theoretical practices. Like Sextus Empiricus and other Pyrrhonians, Hume adopts a substantial variety of those practices, and they inform his philosophical treatises, essays, letters, criticism and theory generally.

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3.3.1 Tropoi Among the most important Pyrrhonian philosophical practices that Sextus delineates is one that he draws from Aenesidemus’ Pyrrhonian Discourses. It is perhaps the central practice of Pyrrhonism – the practice of placing appearances in opposition, balancing them, to induce suspension or epochê. ‘Modes’ or ‘tropes’, tropoi, are philosophical instruments (technai) for producing that opposition, and Sextus Empiricus collects an arsenal of them.24 One might say that Pyrrhonian tropes comprise sets of therapeutic devices to be utilised in the art of philosophical medicine, administered to cure dogmatic pathologies. As Sextus says, ‘Sceptics are philanthropic and wish to cure by argument, as far as they can, the conceit and rashness of dogmatists’ (PH 3.32.280). While today the term ‘trope’ is usually used more narrowly to denote only poetic or rhetorical devices, Pyrrhonian tropes also include logical strategies and argumentative tactics. The Greek term tropos carries the sense of a ‘turning’, and so the function of sceptical tropoi may be understood as turning people away from dogmatism and towards more sceptical ways of thinking and acting. How precisely have sceptics undertaken to do that? 3.3.1.1 Aenesidemus’ ten tropes. Principal among the tropes that Sextus collects is a quiver of ten articulated by Aenesidemus (DL 9.78–88).25 Sextus enumerates these ten tropoi, briefly, thus: They are these: the first, based on the variety in animals; the second, on the differences in human beings; the third, on the different structures of the organs of sense; the fourth, on the circumstantial conditions; the fifth, on positions and intervals and locations; the sixth, on intermixtures; the seventh, on the quantities and formations of the underlying objects; the eighth, on the fact of relativity; the ninth, on the frequency or rarity of occurrence; the tenth, on the disciplines and customs and laws, the legendary beliefs and the dogmatic convictions. (PH 1.14.36–8)

Sextus also groups these ten modes more systematically into three sub-categories, as they focus on either the subject, the object, or both. They seem in part to respond to Aristotle’s anti-sceptical arguments at Metaphysics 4.4–6 (see 1009b2ff.), related to the principle

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of non-contradiction, as well as to Plato’s arguments against Protagoras’ relativism at Theaetetus 151–83. Following Sextus, we might arrange them as follows: Sextus’ Grouping of Aenesidimus’ Ten Tropes into Three 1. Aenesidemus 3-Group A: Affecting the subject who judges: • Trope 1: from differences among animals • Trope 2: from differences among human beings • Trope 3: from differences among sense organs • Trope 4: from differences among the circumstances of judgement 2. Aenesidemus 3-Group B: Affecting the object judged: • Trope 7: from differences in the composition and structures of the object of inquiry • Trope 10: from differences among customs concerning the objects of ethics 3. Aenesidemus 3-Group C: Affecting both the subject and the object: • Trope 5: from different positions, locations and circumstances • Trope 6: from different media and contexts of perception/ judgement • Trope 8: from the relativity of all things and all judgements • Trope 9: from the frequency or rarity of occurrence Many of these tropes surface across Hume’s texts. For example, in the section of the Treatise devoted to ‘scepticism with regard to the senses’, and later in the first Enquiry (E 12.6), Hume deploys a thought experiment used by Sextus and others that involves pressing on the side of one’s eyeball to distort one’s vision. The experiment is found in Aenesidemus’ trope 1, and it is used to suggest that the way the world appears to us depends upon our cognitive equipment (PH 1.14.47).26 In that same compressed passage, moreover, Hume also calls upon at least Aenesidemus’ tropes 2, 3, 5 and 6 when he writes: This opinion is confirm’d by the seeming increase and diminution of objects, according to their distance; by the apparent alterations in their figure; by the changes in their colour and other qualities from our sickness and distempers; and by an infinite number of other experiments of the same kind . . .27

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This all, for Hume, leads to one conclusion: ‘our sensible perceptions are not possesst of any distinct or independent existence’ (T 1.4.2.45, SBN 210–1). In the first Enquiry, Hume refers to this as one of the more ‘trite’ strategies ‘employed by the sceptics in all ages, against the evidence of sense’ (E 12.6). While there may also be ‘more profound arguments against the senses’, criticisms raising doubts about the veracity of the senses remain a crucial element of Hume’s sceptical philosophical vision across his career. 3.3.1.2 Agrippa’s five tropes. In some ways more important than Aenesidemus’ ten, the set of five tropes attributed by Diogenes Laërtius (DL 9.88–9) to an otherwise unknown figure of the first or second centuries called ‘Agrippa’ assembles some of the sceptical tradition’s most elegant, important and innovative strategies in criticism. Sextus introduces them thus, associating the ten tropes with ‘older’ sceptics and the five tropes with those more ‘recent’: The more recent Sceptics hand down Five Modes leading to suspension: first the mode deriving from dispute [diaphônias]; second the mode of regress ad infinitum [apeiron ekballonta]; third, the mode deriving from relativity [pros tí]; fourth the hypothetical mode; fifth the mode of circular reasoning [diallêlon]. (PH 1.15.164)28

We might more formally list Agrippa the sceptic’s five tropes thus: Trope 1: from dispute or disagreement (diaphônia) Trope 2: from infinite regress (apeiron ecptôseôs) Trope 3: from relativity or relation (pros tí) Trope 4: from hypothesis or assumption (ex hypotheseôs) Trope 5: from reciprocity or circularity (diallêlos)29 Agrippa’s tropes 2, 4 and 5 (called regressus, hypothesis and diallelus) have conventionally come to be known collectively as ‘Agrippa’s Trilemma’.30 Roughly, the Trilemma poses that because the premises of any argument to justify a conclusion themselves require justification, either: 1) justifications continue ad infinitum [trope 2], or 2) they reach purported endpoints-foundations that are no better than assumptions [trope 4], or 3) they become circular and return to earlier reasons [trope 5].31 Hume constructs Agrippa-like arguments throughout his works. For example, he cites Agrippa’s first mode (diaphônia) as one of the

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principal reasons for ‘popular’ scepticism (E 12.21, SBN 158–9), and the recognition of persistent dispute or disagreement in philosophy is also constitutive of the despair he suffers at the end of Book 1 of the Treatise: ‘When I look abroad, I foresee on every side, dispute, contradiction, anger, calumny and detraction’ (T 1.4.7.2, SBN 264–5). That observation seems a reiteration of an observation he made in the 1734 letter that he wrote to a London physician complaining about a psychological crisis and the ‘endless disputes’ of philosophical systems, ‘even in the most fundamental Articles’ (LT 1.13, #3). The uneasiness seems to suggest for Hume something about our humanness and what our humanness requires. In his essay ‘Of the Parties of Great Britain’, Hume puts the point directly: ‘the heart of man is made to reconcile contradictions’ (ES 71). Contradiction is also, in fact, for Sextus, the original condition to which scepticism responds (PH 1.6.12).32 The trope diaphônia remains effective in philosophical discourse, and contemporary epistemologists have become alive to the idea that facing deep, irresolvable ‘disagreement’ is central to the task of philosophy. Hume’s crucial argument for scepticism with regard to reason at Treatise 1.4.1, as well as his sceptical argument at T 1.2.4.23, enlists, of course, a recursive infinite regress strategy and therefore hearkens to Agrippa’s ad infinitum second mode (regressus) as well as to Pyrrhonian balance (see §3.3.2 below): I examine my judgment itself, and observing from experience, that ’tis sometimes just and sometimes erroneous, I consider it as regulated by contrary principles or causes, of which some lead to truth, and some to error; and in ballancing these contrary causes, I diminish by a new probability the assurance of my first decision. This new probability is liable to the same diminution as the foregoing, and so on, in infinitum. (T 1.4.1.9, SBN 185)33

Hume’s arguments for the relativity of secondary qualities (T 1.4.4, SBN 225ff.) and his arguments for the conclusion that we are aware only of appearances and not the real in our experience of external bodies present variants of Agrippa’s trope 3 (as well as Aenesidemus’ sixth and eighth), relativity: ‘The table, which we see, seems to diminish, as we remove farther from it: But the real table, which exists independent of us, suffers no alteration: It was, therefore, nothing but its image, which was present to the mind’ (E 12.9, SBN 152).

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Hume’s argument for scepticism about the idea that external objects exist independently of us in just the way we perceive them instantiates Agrippa’s trope 4 concerning assumptions: ‘We suppose external objects to resemble internal perceptions’ (T 1.4.2.54, SBN 216; emphasis mine). And Hume’s argument against the justification of induction and our belief in the uniformity of nature is an instance of Agrippa’s trope 5, circularity, as well as trope 4 regarding assumption: ‘To endeavour, therefore, the proof’ that the future will resemble the past must result ‘in a circle, and taking that for granted, which is the very point in question’ (E 4.19, SBN 35–6; emphasis mine; cf. T 1.3.6). Hume’s sceptical arguments involving circularity and regress may have also found precedent in another passage from Diogenes Laërtius, who writes at DL 9.91 about the problem of the criterion: And in order that we may know that an argument constitutes a demonstration [apodeixis], we require a criterion; but again, in order that we may know that it is a criterion we require a demonstration; hence both the one and the other are incomprehensible [akatalêpton], since each is referred to the other.34

3.3.1.3 Two tropes. Sextus reports, finally (PH 1.16), that the sceptical modes can be expressed simply as two: Trope 1: from nothing being apprehended by itself Trope 2: from nothing being apprehended by anything other to it

3.3.2 Epochê and Isosthenia Cicero reports that, for Arcesilaus, ‘when arguments of equal weight were found for the opposite sides of the same subject, it was easier to withhold assent from either side’ (ACD 1.12.45); and according to Arcesilaus, the wise person ‘won’t ever assent to anything’ (ACD 2.20.66).35 Carneades was renowned for arguing contrary sides of a position, and Cicero recounts the well-known story of how in Rome one day Carneades argued forcefully for justice, but then returned the next day to argue just as forcefully that injustice is preferable (De re publica 3.9–13). In the end, ‘two equally persuasive impressions, one false and one true, differ in nothing but number’ (ACD 2.15.47–9).36 According to Cicero, these considerations among Academics ‘engendered the doctrine of epochê, that is “a holding back of assent”’ (ACD 2.18.59, 2.3.7–9).37

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There is a therapeutic, even ethical, point to this practice. Carneades was admirable, says Cicero, for the ‘great actions’ of ‘fighting off opinions, and restraining one’s assent’ – that is, of heroically driving something like dogmatism ‘from our minds, as one would drive out a wild and savage monster’ (ACD 2.34.108). For this reason, Montaigne remarks, ‘That is why Clitomachus said of old that Carneades had surpassed the labours of Hercules, in having torn away from man the habit of assent – that is to say, opinion and rashness in judging’ (ACD 2.33.108).38 The Pyrrhonian tropes, with their sharp edges of difference, work towards that end, too. Instead of arguing for the sake of winning contests, Pyrrhonians dialectically deploy oppositions to induce what they call 1) isosthenia (ἰσοσθένεια), ‘equipollence’ or ‘balance’, and with it 2) epochê (ἐποχή) or ‘suspension of judgement’ – not negative judgement, and not transcendental judgement. This practice may have been influenced by the sophists, but the object was different. The sophist and rhetorician Protagoras (490–20 BC), for example, had, like Sextus, prescribed always considering both sides of an argument, developing a counter-argument to every position; but the result was for Protagoras not the restraint of assent.39 Considering both sides, Protagoras taught, would serve an arguer’s ambitions by honing the eristic skills necessary to prevail in any philosophical dispute. As suspensive, Pyrrhonian scepticism, in the terms Sextus employs, is properly called ‘ephectic’ (PH 1.3.7; DL 9.69–70): ‘the term “suspension” is derived from the fact of the mind being held up or “suspended” so that it neither affirms nor denies anything owing to the equipollence of the matters in question’ (PH 1.22.196). As if anticipating a sceptical reading of Platonic teaching (e.g., Apology 18bff.), Aristophanes in his 419 BC play The Clouds depicts Socrates suspended in a basket that enables him to ‘suspend’ (1.1.230) his judgement.40 Diogenes Laërtius reports in the third century that Philo of Larissa had said that Pyrrho admired Homer (DL 9.67) and was influenced by sceptical themes there – notably isosthenia (DL 9.71), possibly diaphônia, and what is anepikritos. Regarding Homer, Diogenes writes: ‘regarding the same questions, he sets forth different answers at different times and is not at all dogmatic in what he says’ (DL 9.73).41 Some five centuries after Aristophanes and shortly before Diogenes, Sextus writes about this balancing: ‘Equipollence we use of equality in respect of probability and improbability, to indicate that no one of the conflicting judgements takes precedence of any other

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as being more probable’ or, rather, ‘proven’ [pistis] (PH 1.4.10). Pyrrhonians advance no thesis about any claim’s epistemic standing, not even that all claims are epistemically equal in lacking justification.42 Pyrrhonian epochê suspends judgement on all dogma, positive and negative. A theist positively asserts that God exists; an atheist negatively asserts that God does not exist. A Pyrrhonian sceptic practising epochê asserts neither but instead suspends judgement on metaphysical theses about God’s existence. More generally, a positive epistemic dogmatist will assert that truth is apprehensible (or has been apprehended); a negative epistemic dogmatist will assert that knowledge is not apprehensible (or has not been apprehended). Indeed, negative dogmatism about inapprehensibility is the charge that Sextus hurls at the Academic sceptics Carneades and Clitomachus on the very first page of the Outlines of Pyrrhonism: Those who believe they have discovered it [i.e., the truth] are the ‘Dogmatists’, specially so-called – Aristotle, for example, and Epicurus and the Stoics and certain others; Cleitomachus and Carneades and other Academics treat it as inapprehensible [akataleptson]: the Sceptics keep on searching. Hence it seems reasonable to hold that the main types of philosophy are three – the Dogmatic, the Academic, and the Sceptic. (PH 1.1.3–4)

The Pyrrhonian, in contrast to positive and negative dogmatists, sets a course between the Scylla of positive dogmatism and the Charybdis of negative dogmatism. This amounts to what Photius (AD 810–91), the great Christian patriarch of Constantinople, recounts in his chronicles about Aenesidemus – namely, that Aenesidemus ‘determines nothing’, in contrast with the Academic sceptics, who had in Photius’ view become dogmatic on the basis of the ‘probable’.43 Hume, as we will see, adopts the Pyrrhonian epochê comprehensively with regard to philosophical metaphysics and epistemology and may therefore rightly be understood to be profoundly Pyrrhonian.

3.3.3 Aphasia about ta Adêla As it is with epochê, so to practise aphasia (αφασία) is to practise restraint or refusal – for Pyrrhonians the refusal of dogmatic language, more particularly the refusal to make assertions about what is metaphysically real and about ta adêla (‘the hidden’ or ‘the non-evident’):

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we say that he [the Pyrrhonian] ‘does not dogmatize’, using ‘dogma’ in the sense, which some give it, of ‘assent to one of the non-evident (adêlon) objects of scientific inquiry (epistêmas)’; for the Pyrrhonean philosopher assents to nothing that is non-evident. (PH 1.7.13)

Ta adêla (τὰ ἄδηλα) are contrasted against ta phainomena (or what ‘shows’ itself, what is ‘apparent’), and aphasia about the hidden is a central plank of Humean philosophy. Hume’s scepticism, as we saw in Chapter 1, is non-apprehensive; but in a clearly Pyrrhonian way, it is non-apprehensive about what is hidden (adêlos) behind the ‘veil’ of perception: ‘Nature has kept us at a great distance from all her secrets’ (E 4.2.16, SBN 32; H 6.71.542); and so, ‘These ultimate springs and principles are totally shut up from human curiosity and enquiry’ (E 4.1.12, SBN 30). Experience ‘is, and must be entirely silent’ (E 12.12, SBN 153) about the ultimate cause of perceptions. As we saw with regard to epochê, in PH 1.20 Sextus emphasises that aphasia is not the assertion of a negative judgement but instead: ‘Non-assertion [aphasia] . . . is avoidance of assertion in the general sense, which it is said to include both affirmation and negation . . . because of which we refuse either to affirm or to deny anything’ (PH 1.20.192–3). The opposite of a dogmatic philosophy is not a contrary dogmatic philosophy but sceptical suspension characterised by silence or aphasia. Sextus offers a host of qualifying phrases (‘maybe’, ‘perhaps’, ‘no more’ this than that) that bridle common dogmatic formulations. Speech and writing that is qualified and restricted to appearances rather than pretending to apprehend ta adêla is, for Pyrrhonians, permissible. In Hume’s case, sceptically permissible writing will include a wide range of theoretical formulations, including philosophical formulations and the formulations of the natural sciences – properly undertaken, of course, in a sceptical way. That is not to say that Humean aphasia eliminates no forms of language through his sceptical critique. Following Berkeley, Hume advances an eliminativist critique of intelligibility. Hume, for example, argues not that the language of ‘substance’ is false but that it is unintelligible and senseless (T 1.1.6.1, SBN 15–16; T 1.4.5.3, SBN 232–3). Hume’s critique of the very idea of causal power, too, enacts a variant of aphasia (T 1.4.7.5, SBN 266–7; E 7.1.15, SBN 67; see §7.3.1.2 below). More generally, Hume’s critical use of the empiricist ‘copy principle’ (that all ideas originate in impressions; T 1.1.7.5, SBN 19; E 2.9n1) is just a way of practising aphasia about ta adêla. Like the nineteenth-century philosopher of science Emil

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Duboi-Reymond, in the course of the 1872 ‘we will never know’ or ignorabimus controversy (ignorabimus Streit), Hume defines methodological-epistemological limits to what empirical natural science can even claim to know.44 Hume also seems to deny flatly that we do or can experience God directly (E 2.6, SBN 19) and that we are able to infer a divine cause for the world (E 11.30, SBN 148; cf. E 8.1, SBN 81). The implications are radical (see §6.3 below).

3.3.4 Critique of Causality: Aenesidemus’ Eight Modes Among the most important critical materials that Sextus culled from Aenesidemus is his specific critique of causality. Critiques of causality later became central to both the Pyrrhonian and Academic traditions. In a series of arguments that seem to anticipate Hume, Sextus in Adversus physicos 1.232–3 (ADO 3.232–3 [M 9.232–3]) recounts how Aenesidemus argued that there seem to be neither empirical nor a priori reasons to justify our belief in a causal connection, that instead there is only a succession of appearances. If two events occur at the same time, says Aenesidemus, there is no discernible causal relation between them, because they are simultaneous. If one event happens after another, they are not connected but distinct and separate from one another: ‘Therefore, there does not exist any cause.’45 In other words, ‘nothing is a cause’ (ADO 3.218–26 [M 9.218–26]). In the Outlines, Sextus records eight modes related to causation developed by Aenesidemus, the first of them appearing to be especially Humean.46 Aenesidemus’ Eight Tropes to Balance Against Causal Explanations Causal Trope 1: Since ‘aetiology as a whole deals with the nonapparent, it is unconfirmed by any agreed evidence derived from appearances’ (PH 1.17.181). Causal Trope 2: Often a variety of causal accounts explain an event. Causal Trope 3: The causes used to explain events are often themselves without order. Causal Trope 4: Causes may occur in a different way from effects. Causal Trope 5: The methods for attributing causes are not agreed upon by theorists.

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Causal Trope 6: Data falsifying a given causal explanation are often ignored or discounted. Causal Trope 7: Causes attributed often conflict with accepted theories and with appearances. Causal Trope 8: Causes attributed are often themselves as doubtful as the events explained. Sextus briefly also describes how Aenesidemus’ eight modes (PH 1.17.180–5) and Agrippa’s five modes (PH 1.17.185–6) may be used against causal or aetiological explanations and their claims to having apprehended ‘absolute reality’. Sextus extends this critique of causation at Outlines 3.5, where he develops arguments concerned with the incoherence of the very idea of causation, often enlisting Agrippa’s tropes. Sextus argues that the concept of cause involves a ‘circle’ (PH 3.5.22; Trope 5); that there is a ‘divergency of opinion’ about causes (PH 3.5.23; Trope 1, Causal Trope 2); that attributing causation entails an ‘ad infinitum’ regress of causes (PH 3.5.24; Trope 2); and that it is merely ‘relative to the effect’ and does not point to something real (PH 3.5.25–9; Trope 3). Hume is well known for criticising rationalistic accounts of causation and arguing that, since the necessary connection or causal power between causes and effects is never apparent in experience (only regular, resembling spatial and temporal, contiguities appear), we cannot conclude that we know the causal order of reality: ‘We have no other notion of cause and effect, but that of certain objects, which have been always conjoin’d together, and which in all past instances have been found inseparable’ (T 1.3.6.15, SBN 93). Hume’s critique of the principle of the uniformity of nature implies that we cannot know whether or not what has been observed to be ‘always conjoin’d’ will continue to be so in the future. We develop a custom (E 5.1.5, SBN 43; E 8.1.5, SBN 82), and from that custom project the subjective feelings we have about these observed regularities on to the world in generating the idea of the necessity of their causal connection: ’Tis a common observation, that the mind has a great propensity to spread itself on external objects, and to conjoin with them any internal impressions, which they occasion, and which always make their appearance at the same time that these objects discover themselves to the senses . . . [T]he same propensity is the reason, why we suppose necessity and power to lie in the objects we consider, not in our mind, that considers them . . . (T 1.3.14.25, SBN 167)

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Importantly for Pyrrhonians, the claims of this passage do not dogmatically deny that causal power and a causal order exist independently of us. They merely describe and explain our experience. Hume deploys Aenesidemus’ second mode (Causal Trope 2, Trope 1, alternative explanations and diaphônia) across the Dialogues concerning Natural Religion to subvert the anthropomorphism of the argument from design for the existence of God. If the existence of the world may be explained as an artefact of a divine mind, why not instead explain it as the progeny of some great vegetable (Dialogues, Part 7) or animal (Part 6)? Why not an artefact produced by a team of deities or a less than perfect deity (Part 5)? Many possible explanations seem to account for the causal origin of the same set of appearances that compose the world. It is unjustifiable to select just one arbitrarily. Agrippa’s third mode, regarding relativity, is writ large into Hume’s sceptical use of the principles of association, where causal inferences describe an association of ideas and not necessarily an independent reality, upon which he suspends judgement (PH 3.5.29). The idea of relativity similarly shows up in Hume’s theory of ‘relative ideas’, where he is able to make sense of the content of objects beyond our perception because we relate them to appearances (T 1.2.6.9, SBN 68; T 1.4.5.19, SBN 241). Hume seems to have adopted Sextus’ ideas about contingency and causation in extensive ways (PH 3.5.17–18; T 1.3.15.1, SBN 173; E 12.3.29n35, SBN 164n1). Hume’s ad infinitum regress argument against reason undermines a priori defences of causation, even of a Kantian transcendental variety (T 1.4.1.6, SBN 182–5), since it undermines all reason. Hume seems to deploy Agrippa’s ad infinitum argument against metaphysical speculation about hidden causal connections (T 1.3.6.10, SBN 91; T 1.3.7.6, SBN 97). Hume also uses an ad infinitum causal objection, remarkably similar to Agrippa’s, in the Dialogues, against the positing of an intelligent author of the universe (D 4.9, D 11.7).

3.4 Positive Pyrrhonism: Constructive Philosophical Theory It is essential to the task of this volume to show that Humean scepticism, including its Pyrrhonian dimensions, comprises more than simply negative philosophical labour – more than not believing, not asserting, not reflecting, and not judging or judging in

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the negative. Scepticism is more than corrosive criticism, more than undermining dogmatism, more than subverting metaphysics, and more than limiting human inquiry. Scepticism promises positive philosophical gain as well, most generally in the form of self-understanding about humanness but also more specifically in what it reveals about human capacities of reasoning, believing and living well. In this way, scepticism earns its own distinctive claim to wisdom – a non-dogmatic claim to non-dogmatic wisdom.

3.4.1 Apelletic Method and Philosophy as Painting One of the most important points in the Outlines at which positive Pyrrhonism surfaces is the curious methodological analogy that Sextus presents to describe the work of the epochê. Since the analogy concerns a painter and Alexander, and since Pyrrho was a painter who travelled with Alexander, it seems to allude to Pyrrho himself. Sextus writes that ‘The sceptic, in fact, had the same experience which is said to have befallen the painter Apelles’ of Kos and Colophon (Alexander’s court painter; c. 350–300 BC; PH 1.12.28). As the story goes, trying unsuccessfully to paint the foam on the mouth of a horse, Apelles became frustrated and hurled his sponge at the picture, producing by accident a deeply satisfying image. Several of this story’s features are important. First, note the manner in which the sceptical ‘consequence’ (PH 1.12.28) results. Arguments are discursive; they follow a chain or course or sequence of premises and ideas, where premises connect to conclusion. The conclusions of arguments are ‘reached’ as the endpoints of directed labour from which they ‘follow’ with necessity (or probability). In contrast, since the Pyrrhonian ‘neither shuns nor pursues anything eagerly’, the endpoint simply emerges on the sceptic way or path ‘as if by chance’ (tûchikos), though once having surfaced it seems inescapably proper, ‘even as a shade follows its substance’ (PH 1.12.29). There is a sense of something approaching not only fittingness but even a kind of necessity to what I wish to call the ‘Apelletic’ finding, just as a shadow is connected to the object that casts it – though logical or causal necessity would for a sceptic be improper to assert. Secondly, it is important to understand what the Apelletic path of inquiry (a root meaning of mêthodos) methodologically displaces or opposes. The Apelletic moment contrasts with the noêsis or noûs or intellectual seeing to which dogmatists appeal – whether

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Platonic noêsis of Forms or the work of Aristotelian noûs, or the Cartesian ‘natural light’ of the intellect as it apprehends the essences of thought and extension, or Spinozistic scientia intuitiva – the list goes on and on. The Apelletic moment, however, is not an achievement of epistemic apprehension. The Apelletic moment is extrarational and extra-intellectual. It emerges by neither deductive nor inductive reasoning, nor by intellection. It and its content are not rationally entailed by prior concepts or premises, nor perhaps do they even follow as a matter of intention. The path to the Apelletic moment is an event that follows a distinctively sceptical process. That is not to say, however, that reason plays no role in the Apelletic moment. Although its results are not formally entailed by prior concepts, the Apelletic moment cannot, it seems, occur in the absence of prior attempts to reason to dogmatic conclusions and undertake the work of sceptical counter-balancing (isosthenia). It emerges, flows or springs forth from frustrated singular assertions and from various appearances as they jostle in opposition, even contradiction, but find only aporia (PH 1.3.7), or blockages, and the inability to flow forward to a logical conclusion. Apelles’ discovery is a moment very much like the one that befalls Hume in the crucial climax of Treatise 1.4. There Hume offers these pregnant descriptions of the re-emergence of common life: ‘Most fortunately it happens, that since reason is incapable of dispelling these clouds, nature herself suffices to that purpose’ (T 1.4.7.9, SBN 269; emphasis mine); and ‘Here then I find myself absolutely and necessarily determin’d to live, and talk, and act like other people in the common affairs of life’ (T 1.4.7.10, SBN 269; emphasis mine). The results of the Apelletic moment are not proven or justified or even exactly discovered. They are found. We happen upon them. They happen to us, and they involve more than just shoving aside sceptical doubt.47 Tyche is Fortuna. The sudden appearance of Apelletic results as happenings and findings can strike inquirers as a moment of revelation.48 As a philosophical gain after preparatory reasoning, the Apelletic moment may seem like the Aufhebung of a sceptical dialectic or like the ‘final revelation’ of beauty itself that Plato’s Socrates says is made possible by climbing the dialectical oppositions of the ‘ladder of loves’ (Symposium, 210a–212b). The Apelletic moment, alternatively, may seem to resemble a supra-rational enlightenment of the kind Augustine attributes to Christ the teacher in De magistro in reinterpreting Platonic recollection, as well as the later epistemic

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lighting to which medieval illuminationist philosophers, such as the sceptically sensitive Henry of Ghent (c. 1217–93), appeal in explaining the work of the intellect as it apprehends universals. Call this the ‘Pyrrhonian illuminationist’ reading of the Apelletic moment. Attractive as the Pyrrhonian illuminationist reading is, however, it violates the Pyrrhonian refusal to assent to anything more than appearances. There is, indeed, a positive gain indicated by Sextus’ appeal to Apelles (whose name sounds curiously like but not like the philosophical god, Apollo); but on pain of inconsistency that gain must be figured in a way that keeps sceptical precepts of restraint intact. There is, in addition, a textual reason for thinking of the Apelletic moment as different in kind from these other illuminations and Aufhebungen – a suggestion by which Sextus seems to mark a limit to how we may conceive the gain of the Apelletic moment, or at least problematise its epistemological load. The analogy with Apelles is, after all, about painting. Sceptical philosophers were well acquainted with Platonism, and Plato is well known in Republic Book 10 for criticising the epistemic value of painting specifically. Paintings as images, writes Plato in the Republic, are ‘at a third generation from nature’ (597e), ‘third from what is’ (599a), ‘third from the truth’ (602c). As makers only of images and imitations, painters ‘know nothing’ worth mentioning about what they imitate. Sextus (Pyrrho) inverts Plato’s critical thought about images and painting, embracing it as a proper description of human life and the stuff of philosophical investigation. Perhaps honestly acknowledging the ignorance implicit in images that Plato recognises is just what Sextus in Against the Logicians means to convey by comparing the work of the Pyrrhonian sceptic to that of a painter (and appearances per se to paintings), rather than to a dogmatic philosopher or dogmatic physician (ADO 1.88 [M 7.88]). One might call this the Pyrrhonian ‘Apelletic inversion’ of First Philosophy of the Real. Hume adopts the Pyrrhonian inversion. Using a metaphor he may have drawn from the Preface of Bernard Mandeville’s 1714 Fable of the Bees or from Alexander Pope’s 1733–74 Essay on Man, Hume twice contrasts his ‘anatomy’ of the mind to the work of painters (T 3.3.6.6, SBN 620–1; E 1.8, SBN 9–10).49 His doing so immediately suggests that he wishes not to invert the Platonic critique but to embrace it, and to distance himself from

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Pyrrhonism. That conclusion, however, would be a bit too quick. Hume had antecedently to this metaphor described the world that the anatomist studies as itself a kind of painting, remarking that ‘I paint the universe in my imagination’ (T 1.3.9.4, SBN 108) and limiting cognition to that universe. For Hume, the work of sceptical anatomists is, therefore, to ‘methodize and correct’ the human world that people paint out in common life: ‘An anatomist . . . is admirably fitted to give advice to a painter; and ’tis even impracticable to excel in the latter art, without the assistance of the former’ (T 3.3.6.6, SBN 621). But Hume also understands that whatever an anatomist might apprehend for the sake of that service can be nothing more than what is available within the epistemic limits of global painting.

3.4.2 Sceptical and Platonic Recollection Writing as a Pyrrhonian philosopher presents a daunting challenge. Can a sceptic express himself or herself undogmatically? One of the possibilities of non-dogmatic positive expression to which Pyrrhonians appeal is what Sextus calls ‘recollective’ signs. Adopting the stoic semiotic distinction between ‘indicative’ and ‘recollective’ (or ‘suggestive’) signs, Sextus says that Pyrrhonians reject the former: ‘Seeing, then, that there are, as we have said, two different kinds of sign, we do not argue against every sign but only against the indicative kind as it seems to be invented by the dogmatists’ (PH 2.10.102). Recollective signs, in contrast, are those that signify something absent that once did appear and might perhaps appear again. So, smoke is a recollective sign of an unseen fire (fires producing smoke having been observed before). Indicative signs, on the other hand, indicate not only what is apparent and evident but also what is non-evident and non-apparent, even what cannot or will not be evident and apparent, ever. Bodily motions are, for some, in Sextus’ example, taken to indicate the existence of the soul (psûchê); but while bodily motions are evident, souls, for Sextus it seems, never will be (PH 2.10.101). This distinction makes possible a sceptical way of thinking about science and positive expressions generally. Science and other positive expressions can be understood sceptically as collections or systems of recollective rather than indicative signs. In the same way, Hume can be a Pyrrhonian but still develop extensive

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and positive philosophical theory – for example, his theory of the apparent real in T 1.3. Understanding science as the articulation of recollective signs (signs that help us remember, describe and predict what appears, rather than state what is) is part of the Pyrrhonian project of limiting, aligning and returning philosophy to common life. Sextus puts it this way: Recollective signs are relied upon in ordinary life [hypo tou biou]. When a man sees smoke he infers [semeioutai] fire, and when he has noticed a scar he says that a wound was received. Thus not only do we not fight against ordinary life, but we actually struggle at its side, assenting undogmatically [adoxastos] to what it relies upon and opposing the private fictions of the Dogmatists. (PH 2.10.102)50

Endorsing only the use of recollective signs is consistent with the Pyrrhonian practices of aphasia (silence) and epochê (suspension) with regard to ta adêla (the hidden). 3.4.2.1 The irony of recollection. There is, of course, an irony and an allusion (very probably understood by Sextus and his contemporaries) in Pyrrhonians adopting the term ‘recollective’ to name the type of signs proper to their forms of expression. That is so because Plato (at Meno 85d4, 85d6–7, 983–5 and Republic Book 10, for example) and the Old Academics are well known for having argued for a special kind of ‘recollection’ as the conduit of the dogmatic knowledge to which they aspire.51 Sextus’ variations of the term hûpomnema are often translated as ‘recollection’ when he discusses recollective signs. In contrast, Plato principally uses anamnesis for what is typically translated as ‘recollection’. Nevertheless, Plato does occasionally also use hûpomnema, for example at Phaedrus 249c. In fact, in an exceedingly provocative and now famous remark, at Phaedrus 275a Plato has Socrates report (notably at third hand, or, like painting, at a third remove from the real) that Thamus had said to Theuth about writing: ‘You have discovered a potion [pharmakon] not for remembering [mnemes] but for reminding [hûpomneseos].’ Plato in this passage, then, identifies hûpomnema as an act of memory that does not recall the real or serve his First Philosophy of the Real. He distinguishes hûpomnema from mnemes and anamnesis, which do so. This difference in usage suggests that dogmatic Plato differs from sceptical Sextus, because Plato rejects hûpomnema while Sextus embraces it. In place of dogmatic

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Platonic recollection (anamnesis), Sextus substitutes sceptical, nondogmatic recollection or reminding (hûpomneseos) as proper to philosophical practice. Hume’s empirical or ‘copy’ principle takes on new meaning in this Pyrrhonian light. Rooting terms and concepts back into the ‘impressions’ (appearances) from which they emerge, as Hume does, can now be understood as a modern reiteration of the Pyrrhonian practice of reminding. Hume’s critical use of the copy principle is also a modern reiteration of the Pyrrhonian therapeutic labour of using the pharmakon of recollective signs to heal the dogmatic pathologies to which philosophy had been subjected (see §7.2.3.2 below). 3.4.2.2 Theory as qualified description. Recollective signs underwrite Sextus’ recounting that sceptics only chronicle appearances and do not make claims about what lies beyond them: we ‘simply record (apangellein, report) each fact, like a [historical] chronicler (historikôs), as it appears to us at the moment’ (PH 1.1.4; cf. DL 9.78).52 Pierre Bayle, similarly, in note G of the entry on ‘Chrysippus’ in the Dictionnaire describes his Academic practice of scepticism as similar to that of descriptive ‘reporters’ (rapporteur) rather than like that of justifying lawyers or ‘advocates’ (avocats). This recollective, descriptive practice is part of what makes Bayle’s sceptical activity ‘historical’ as well as ‘critical’, and Pyrrhonian, too.53 This distinction marks off two different visions of philosophical activity. Antiquity had two sorts of philosophers; some were like the advocates, and others like those who report a cause. The former, in proving their opinions, hid the weak side of their cause, and the stronger side of their adversaries, as much as they could. The latter, to wit, the Sceptics or Academics, represented the strong and the weak arguments of the two opposite parties faithfully, and without partiality . . . Religion does not admit the character of an Academic; it requires either a negative or an affirmative.54

Sceptical philosophy is not about advocacy but about description and, as it was for Academics, intellectual integrity. There is more. Sextus’ almost offhand remark about what ‘appears to us at that moment’ in his sentence about sceptical

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chronicling (PH 1.1.4) exhibits another dimension of Pyrrhonian practice related to the kind of positive expression that Pyrrhonians can coherently make. Not only do Pyrrhonians countenance expressions that describe appearances using recollective-reminding signs. They also qualify those descriptions, emphasising the restriction of descriptions in the following ways: 1) by the individual making the description and 2) by the moment or conditions under which the description took place. These qualifications acknowledge that others might perceive things differently or describe what appears differently, using perhaps different signs; and they also acknowledge that what appears one way at this moment in these circumstances might possibly appear differently at another moment or under different circumstances – just as Hume acknowledges that we have no reason to believe that the future, at least as it appears to us, will resemble the past (E 4.21, SBN 36–7).

3.4.3 Zetetic Philosophy The Pyrrhonian acknowledgement that what appears one way now to one individual might appear differently to others at other times, and might appear different even to each of us, including the sceptic, at other times, helps underwrite a characteristic of sceptical thinking that adds nuance to epochê. The Greek word skeptikos means ‘inquiring’ or ‘searching’, just as in Greek mythology and in Plato’s Symposium cunning eros goes on searching for the objects of its desire that it does not possess.55 Sceptics are not simply to give up – as Apelles in his frustration nearly did – and go on with other occupations in life. Sceptical philosophers are persistent and resilient inquirers. Dogmatism entails what epistemologists call ‘closure’, both in the methodological sense that inquiry is complete and in the logical sense that knowledge comprehends not only any individual conclusion but also every truth that can be logically derived from that conclusion. For the dogmatist, in other words, the epistemic project must be closed; and many contemporary epistemologists have come to think that knowledge requires epistemic ‘closure’, such that to know some proposition p entails knowing everything that p entails. Sceptics argue to the contrary, by a kind of modus tollens strategy, that since it seems not possible to know all the propositions that any p entails, it seems not possible to know any p.

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Not having settled already upon some dogma – some answer, position, doctrine or ‘ism’, along with all that it entails – sceptics remain un-closed, unbiased, ‘open and active’ or ‘zetetic’ in relation to the process of inquiry. They practice zêtesis or openness: ‘The Sceptic School, then, is also called “Zetetic” from its activity in investigation and inquiry’ (PH 1.3.7). They are ready, in Foucher’s phrase, ‘to search always for new knowledge’.56 But what, more precisely, is it to be ‘open’ in relation to inquiry? 3.4.3.1 Ongoing-inquiry zêtesis and Pyrrhonian hope. In one sense, openness means remaining receptive to new evidence, novel arguments, relevant alternative theories, even to the refutation of any given apparent truth or judgement: Just as, before the birth of the founder of the School to which you belong, the theory it holds was not as yet apparent as a sound theory . . . so likewise it is possible that the opposite theory to that which you now propound is . . . not yet apparent to us, so that we ought not as yet yield assent to this theory which at the moment seems to be valid. (PH 1.13.33–4; cf. PH 2.5.40–1)57

Remaining open to the results of new, active inquiry, however, can take place in two ways. In one of its forms, Pyrrhonian zetetic inquiry goes on in a potentially endless way – exploring new theories, new arguments, new positions and new data. The real as what is not-yet-and-perhapsnever-will-be apprehended remains for the Pyrrhonian ever beyond the horizon of existing theory and perception. Pyrrhonian philosophical practice accepts this deferred condition but goes on inquiring anyway, accepting the possibility of permanent philosophical investigation and ongoing deferral, not pretending to know like Sir Hudibras, about whom Samuel Butler wrote in a poem that Hume admired: ‘Whatever sceptic could inquire for, / For ev’ry why he had a wherefore.’58 We may call philosophy as open – in this sense of ongoing inquiry towards an indefinite horizon, while acknowledging the possibility of never reaching closure – OI-zetetic (for ongoing-inquiry-zetetic). Says Hans Blumenberg: ‘for the skeptic . . . the ultimate is always still before him’.59 This zetetic openness may be thought of as a distinctively sceptical kind of hope. Oliver Cromwell wrote to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland in 1650, imploring it to reconsider its support of the Crown and Charles II with these words: ‘I beseech you, in the

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bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken.’ The Scots’ dogmatic response is legendary and indicates something of the way they understood scepticism: ‘would you have us to be sceptics in our religion?’ For the Scots, to accept even the possibility of error is to become sceptical. They were mistaken, however, since fallibilism is perfectly consistent with dogmatism. A dogmatist might without inconsistency enter a claim as more than apparently true (for example, that Charles II is the true king of Scotland) but still acknowledge that she is possibly wrong. Let us, therefore, designate the distinctively sceptical openness to revision ‘Z-revisability’ (zetetic revisability) to distinguish it from a fallibilism about dogmatic assertions. 3.4.3.2 Ongoing-critique zêtesis. There is still another sense in which the Pyrrhonian is to be open or zetetic. Let us call it critical openness. It is one thing to remain open to the possibility that inquiry will never end or will finally discover justifiable dogma, and quite another thing to open a conceptual space for new theories through sceptical scrutiny and challenge. Zetetic practice of this second kind entails the possibility of opening the space for new ideas even out of cherished beliefs. This kind of critical practice stands in sharp contrast to epistemic closure, and it serves a positive intellectual function by clearing an opening for something new. Let us call Pyrrhonism, then, OC-zetetic, for ‘ongoing-critique-zetetic’.

3.4.4 Ataraxia If a positive Pyrrhonism is manifest in Pyrrhonism’s Apelletic gain, the possibilities of philosophical expression offered by recollective signs and its zetetic openness (OI- and OC-zetetic), still the most important positive dimension of Pyrrhonism has traditionally been the promise of ataraxia – quietude or tranquillity – an end not associated specifically with Academic scepticism. Sextus calls ataraxia the ‘end’ (telos) of scepticism (PH 1.12.25), and ataraxia is the condition that Sextus immediately describes as the result of both the Apelletic moment and the isosthenia produced by the skilful use of tropoi (PH 1.13.31ff.).60 Pyrrhonian tranquillity, however, is of a very specific kind. It is tranquillity in ‘matters of belief’ or opinion (kata doxan ataraxia), as well as in passion or feeling (PH 1.12.25). One finds Hume appealing explicitly to tranquillity in both senses in a number of passages (e.g., T 2.3.9.15, SBN 442; T 2.3.8.13, SBN 437–8; AP 4, SBN 625–6).

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Ataraxia, of course, is itself a privative word, the negation of tarachê, and as such it is well translated as un-perturbedness or un-disturbedness. Pyrrhonian peace arrives analogously through the Apelletic discovery (‘as if by chance’ or fate; tûchikos, PH 1.12.29) of the empty futility of dogmatism, as inquirers find that not rest but only the perturbation of ‘contradiction’ (PH 1.6.2) and diaphônia results from philosophy’s attempt to establish one dogmatic truth to the exclusion of all others (PH 1.12.29). Epochê is a kind of stillness (stasis), and the resulting ataraxia is a serenity of soul that Sextus compares to the stillness of the sea (galene): ‘ “Suspense” [epochê] is a state of mental rest [stasis dianoias] owing to which we neither deny nor affirm anything. “Quietude” [ataraxia] is an untroubled and tranquil [galenotes] condition of soul’ (PH 1.4.10). As Sextus wrote: ‘Happy is he who lives undisturbed there and . . . finds himself in peace and becalmed on the sea’ (ADO 5.141 [M 11.141]), even upon what Hume calls ‘those immense depths’ (T 1.4.7.1, SBN 263–4).61 In cases where some disturbance is ‘unavoidable’, ‘moderate passion’ or emotion (metriopatheia) will do (PH 1.12.25), for Pyrrhonians as well as Academics. That moderation was an option attractive to Hume.62 Epicurean ataraxia is different from its sceptical kin because it relies on the atomists’ metaphysical dogmas. It is cultivated by refusing the unnatural and unnecessary kinetic pleasures so common in human society that, in the Epicurean’s opinion, agitate or disturb the body’s atoms. Stoic ataraxia is similarly produced by achieving mastery of the passions in accordance with a metaphysical rational order: the cosmic natural law. The Pyrrhonian, in contrast, refuses metaphysical dogmas such as these and the seemingly inevitable discord that the contests among them produce. Hume signals that he is motivated in his philosophical work by a hope of avoiding taractic contradictions: ‘I have always hop’d to keep clear of those contradictions, which have attended every other system’ (T 2.2.6.2, SBN 366).63 As Jonathan Barnes puts it: dogmatic ‘Taraxia is a disease, epochê is the cure.’64 Certainly, the condition to which Hume is brought by sceptical argument in T 1.4.7, with its desperate melancholy and delirium, is not terribly tranquil.65 Hume requires more than the opposition of contrary claims to produce ataraxia. The Humean sceptic achieves ataraxia not only through isosthenia and epochê but also through Apelletic gain and reflective observance of the Fourfold of appearances in common life.66

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3.5 A General Framework for Pyrrhonian Scepticism We have now collected sufficient resources to articulate a general model of Pyrrhonism, complementing the model of Academic scepticism we laid out at the end of Chapter 2. The whole can be schematised as follows: 1. Deferent to appearances: Because things seem indifferent (adiaphora), Pyrrhonism conforms in its disciplined practice (agogê) undogmatically (adoxatos) to the appearances (phainomena) of common life (ho bios ho koinos) rather than to dogma, and it does so in a Fourfold way, by accepting the guidance of a. nature (phûsis) b. custom and tradition (paradôsis, nômos, ethos) c. passions, feelings, sentiment, emotion (pathê) d technical arts (technai). 2. Ephectic: Because philosophical questions seem undecidable (astathmeta), Pyrrhonism induces suspension (epochê), especially on questions of the criterion (kriterion), through doxastic and logical balancing (isosthenia), commonly using: a. Aenesidemus’ ten modes (tropoi) of difference b. Aenesidemus’ eight modes criticising causal explanation c. Agrippa’s five modes and d. Sextus’ two modes. 3. Apelletic: Pyrrhonism accepts a method similar to that attributed to Apelles of Kos, through which one happens upon or finds philosophical understanding in the wake of sceptical scrutiny and balancing. 4. Aphasic: Consistent with the indifference and undecidability of things, Pyrrhonism refuses determinations (anepikritos) and practises non-assertion or silence (aphasia) about the non-evident or hidden (ta adêla, adêlos); it does so by a. using recollective rather than indicative signs and b. qualifying descriptions according to subject and circumstance. 5. Zetetic: Pyrrhonism cultivates openness (zêtetis) that is inquiring (skeptikos), deferring, critical and revisable. 6. Ataractic: Pyrrhonian practice finds its end in undisturbedness, peace or tranquillity (ataraxia). 7. Teresic: Observantly reads and holds to (têrêsis) common life in politics, history and morals as well as nature.

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3.6 Conclusion If scepticism is often defined as the thesis that knowledge is impossible, Pyrrhonism is commonly defined as the radical and complete elimination of belief. Assessments of whether or not Hume is a Pyrrhonian sceptic too often appeal to just these popular definitions. Neither account is correct, however. This chapter has undertaken to offer the first steps towards a more accurate, a more sophisticated and a more complete understanding of Pyrrhonian scepticism by examining the course that Pyrrhonism ran in the ancient world. Pyrrhonism, as we have seen, is critical of dogmatism. It deploys a variety of instruments for subverting dogmatic thought and practice, and those instruments have been collected in various sets of ‘tropes’ or turnings. In these terms, Pyrrhonian scepticism comprises practices (agogê) of positioning its tropes to balance out (isosthenia) dogmatic claims – and doing so in such a way as to yield suspension of judgement (epochê) as well as a silence (aphasia) about dogmatic matters, in particular dogma about what is non-apparent (ta adêla). The practices of scepticism, however, are not wholly negative, critical and destructive. Sceptical suspension, in conjunction with scepticism’s acceptance of common life (bios), results in the positive end of tranquillity (ataraxia). Whether in theorising or otherwise, Pyrrhonians positively and consciously engage common life as appearances (phainomena) and do so non-dogmatically (adoxatos) in a characteristically Fourfold way by following the guidance of 1) nature, 2) tradition and custom, 3) passions and feeling and 4) the practical possibilities available through technologies of various kinds. Scepticism remains positively open (OI-zetetic) towards future inquiry. Moreover, through acts of criticism, sceptical practices open (OC-zetetic) new possibilities of thought and action. Scepticism weaves new forms of non-dogmatic theory and practice through language and signs that are sceptically ‘recollective’ rather than dogmatically ‘indicative’. In the Apelletic moments that emerge through sceptical challenges and criticism, positive findings are gained about the human condition. In particular, sceptics gain a positive appreciation of the rootedness of human beings in the Fourfold of common life, and they practise a reflective observation (teresin) of common life that can inform distinctively sceptical scientific, moral and political practice.

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Pyrrhonism, however, is more than an ancient philosophical movement. It continued to develop and change over time, exerting an important influence on the course of early modern philosophy. If we wish to understand how Hume’s thought is Pyrrhonian, we must consider how Pyrrhonism matured across the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and early modernity, especially among thinkers likely to have had significant influence upon Hume.

Notes 1. There seems to be, as we have seen, an allusion to Bayle in the phrase ‘jeux d’esprit’. See above, §2.1.3.8. 2. Annas, ‘Hume and Ancient Scepticism’, pp. 271, 273. David Fate Norton follows a similar reading; Norton, David Hume, p. 268n48. 3. Bayle, Dictionary (1991), p. 194; ‘Although he was not the inventor of this method of philosophizing, it nevertheless goes by his name . . .’ Much of my account of Pyrrho’s life and influences is drawn from Bett, Pyrrho. I have also profited from Thorsrud, Ancient Scepticism. For Pyrrho’s possible influence on Arcesilaus, as well as reasons to doubt it, see Bett, Pyrrho, p. 190n2. See also DL 9.61–108, ch. 11. 4. Cicero, De officiis, 1.6; De finibus, 2.25; Seneca, Natural Questions, 7.32.2. See Bett, Pyrrho, pp. 102n88, 189n1. 5. The Indian philosopher Nārājuna (fl. AD 150) criticised the idea of something lying beyond appearances as incoherent, much as sceptics would criticise the idea of ‘the hidden’ (ta adêla); see Dasti, ‘Skepticism in Indian Philosophy’, p. 149. 6. DL 9.61. Hume had access to Diogenes’ Lives of Eminent Philosophers through the library of the Collège of La Flèche; Perinetti, ‘Hume at La Flèche’, p. 55. 7. Metrodorus of Chios is not to be confused with the Academic sceptic and student of Carneades, Metrodorus of Stratonikeia. Diogenes Laërtius describes Democritus as a sceptic at DL 9.72. 8. This passage in Sextus Empiricus is also cited as Against the Logicians, ADO 1.88 [M 7.88]; cf. Sextus’ use of a sceptical dream argument at PH 1.104 and 1.113, also at ADO 2.57 [M 8.57]. 9. Bett, ‘Aenesidemus the Anti-Physicist’, p. 141. For the report of Timon having referred to Arcesilaus as skeptikos, see Diels, Poetarum philosophorum fragmenta, fr. 55; cited by Zerba, ‘Penelope’, p. 297n6. The term skeptikos may also have first appeared with Aenesidemus. 10. See DL 9.109–16. Diogenes writes more generally about Pyrrho and his immediate students with this characterisation: ‘Pyrrho’s

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11. 12. 13.

14.

15. 16. 17.

18.

19.

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Hume’s Scepticism pupils included Hecataeus of Abdera, Timon of Phlius, author of the Silloi . . . and also Nausiphanes of Teos, said by some to have been a teacher of Epicurus. All these were called Pyrrhoneans after the name of their master, but Aporetics, Sceptics, Ephectics, and even Zetetics, from their principles, if we may call them such – Zetetics or seekers because they were ever seeking truth, Sceptics or inquirers because they were always looking for a solution and never finding one, Ephectics or doubters because of the state of mind which followed their inquiry, I mean, suspense of judgement, and finally Aporetics or those in perplexity, for not only they but even the dogmatic philosophers themselves in their turn were often perplexed. Pyrrhoneans, of course, they were called from Pyrrho’ (DL 9.69–70). Jerome mentions Sextus in his De viris illustribus, ch. 50. Bett, Pyrrho, pp. 18ff. Among stoics, what is adiaphora or ‘indifferent’ is what is beyond the natural moral law, outside considerations of virtue and vice, neither right nor wrong. Cf. Diogenes Laërtius 58A; and Cicero, De finibus bonorum et malorum, Book 3. Cicero, for example, in De finibus, repudiates Pyrrho, writing that ‘Ariston and Pyrrho thought all these things utterly worthless and said, for example, that there was absolutely nothing to choose between the most perfect health and the most grievous sickness; and consequently men have long ago quite rightly given up arguing against them’ (2.13.43); ‘The most mistaken, no doubt, is Pyrrho, because his conception of virtue leaves nothing as an object of desire whatever’ (4.16.43). See Mates on Sextus, Skeptic Way, p. 30. See also Marchand, ‘Doute et scepticisme’, pp. 44, 47. Lévy, ‘Middle Platonism’, pp. 120–1. Cf. Aulus Gellius, Noctes Atticae, 11.5.5. Building on the precedent of Charles B. Schmitt, Luciano Floridi’s work has best and most thoroughly chronicled this transmission; Floridi, Sextus Empiricus. For the complications in dating Sextus’ texts, see Against Those in the Disciplines, ed. Bett, pp. 1–2. Galen (AD 129–216) does not mention Sextus, and Sextus refers to Emperor Tiberius in the past tense (PH 1.84). About Sextus’ position at the end of ancient scepticism, Bett writes: ‘we hear of a pupil of his named Saturninus (Diogenes Laertius 9.116), but after that there are no identifiable Pyrrhonists in antiquity’ (Against Those in the Disciplines, p. 1). See Sextus, Against Those in the Disciplines, ed. Bett, pp. 3–5, for a recent account of the texts and their order.

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20. Julia Annas et al. also describe the Fourfold as ‘Fourfold observances’: see, for example, Annas, Morality of Happiness, p. 208. Annas and Barnes in their translation of the Outlines also use this formulation. My thanks to Harald Thorsrud for alerting me to this. 21. The whole clause reads: Toîs phainoménois oûn proséxontes katà tèn biotikèn téresin àdoxástox bioûmen . . .; ‘Adhering, then, to appearances we live in accordance with the normal rules of life, undogmatically’ (PH 1.11.23). 22. Spinelli, ‘Neither Philosophy nor Politics?’, pp. 23ff., 33n39. Spinelli translates teresin as ‘observance’, while Bett and Laursen translate it as ‘practice’ (Sextus, Against the Ethicists, p. 26; Laursen, ‘Yes, Skeptics Can Live Their Skepticism’, p. 210) and Mates as ‘regimen’ (Sextus, Skeptic Way, p. 92). 23. Barnes defends reading bios as ‘ordinary life’ in this way: ‘Bios means something like “ordinary life”, “everyday life”. Thus, hoi apo tou biou (ADO 5.49 [M 11.49]) are ordinary men, non-professionals; ta bioutika kriteria are the standards used in everyday judgements, as opposed to the technical or “logical” standards invented by philosophers (PH 2.15; ADO 1.33 [M 7.33]); bios itself is often used to mean “Everyman” (e.g., M 2.18; 9.50)’; Barnes, ‘Beliefs of a Pyrrhonist’, p. 80. For the sake of consistency, I have here and elsewhere substituted Latin alphabetical characters for the Greek. 24. Annas and Barnes, Modes, pp. 182ff. 25. See also the account of Aenesidemus’ ten tropes in Philo of Alexandria, On Drunkenness, 169–202; quoted at Castagnoli, ‘Aenesidemus’, p. 72. 26. Cicero presents the eye experiment at ACD 2.25.80. For other possible sources for Hume’s thought experiment, see Norton and Norton, ‘Editors’ Annotations’, 2.785. 27. Cf. PH 1.14.118, PH 1.14.44, PH 1.14.126, PH 1.14.101; and PH 1.29. 28. Translation mine. On relativity, compare Aristotle, Categories 6a36–7. 29. Cf. Annas and Barnes, Modes. 30. Agrippa may have been influenced by Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics (1.3) in the development of these three apparent additions to Sextus’ concern with disagreement and relativity; Striker, ‘Ancient Scepticism’, p. 83. 31. Floridi, Scepticism, p. 71, connects ‘Sextus Empiricus’ diallelus, Montaigne’s rouet, Chisholm’s Problem of the Criterion, the Cartesian Circle, Hegel’s “Scholasticus’ absurd resolution”, Fries’ trilemma, and Albert’s Münchhausen’s trilemma’ as ‘interrelated metamorphoses’ of what he calls ‘the metaepistemological problem’.

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32. Fieser, ‘Hume’s Pyrrhonism’, p. 94. 33. Cf. Fogelin, Hume’s Skepticism, pp. 19, 173. 34. Cited by Ainslie, True Scepticism, pp. 24–5. See Floridi, Scepticism, pp. 73ff. 35. Ioppolo, ‘Arcesilaus’, pp. 38–9. 36. Thorsrud, ‘Carneades’, p. 52. 37. Neto, ‘Epoche as Perfection’, p. 13. 38. Montaigne, Complete Works: Essays, ‘Of Cripples’, 3.11, p. 792. In contrast, about himself, Cicero disparagingly writes at ACD 2.20.66, ‘I am not wise, so I yield to these impressions and can’t resist them.’ Cf. Neto, ‘Academic Scepticism’, p. 19; Neto, ‘Epoche as Perfection’, pp. 19–20. 39. Sprague, Older Sophists. 40. My thanks to Brom Anderson for these links. 41. Zerba, ‘Penelope’, p. 295. 42. Meeker, Hume’s Radical Scepticism, p. 17. 43. Photius, Biblioteca, 170a11–12; Bett, Pyrrho, p. 192. 44. For more on the ignorabimus Streit, see Finkelstein, ‘Emil BoisReymond’s Reflections’; Beiser, After Hegel; and Anacker and Moro, Limits. 45. Sextus, Adversus Physicos, p. 117; quoted by Jammer, Concepts, p. 45. 46. Bett, ‘Aenesidemus the Anti-Physicist’, p. 144. 47. Weintraub, ‘Naturalistic Response’, p. 385, writes: ‘The sceptic isn’t refuted, but rather, is shoved aside, defeated by brute force.’ For Weintraub, however, this exercise in pressing force disqualifies Hume from claiming a truly naturalist response to scepticism, since for her a proper ‘naturalist’ must necessarily appeal to nature as matter of epistemic justification. 48. Livingston, Hume’s Philosophy, pp. 28, 25ff., 29, 36, 322. 49. Hume’s use of this Mandevillian metaphor also emerges tellingly in his charged response in a 17 September 1739 letter to Francis Hutcheson. In that letter, Hume uses the metaphor to respond to Hutcheson’s criticism of the Treatise for lacking ‘a certain Warmth in the Cause of Virtue’ (LT 1.32–3, #13). The formulations of anatomists, Hume says, are properly a bit cool and detached. On Pope as a possible source, see Harris, David Hume, p. 82. Consider, for example, this complex passage from Epistle 2.185–8 of the Essay on Man about not only art and reality but also elite (‘noble’) and common (‘humble’) life: ‘Poets heap virtues, painters gems at will, / And show their zeal, and hide their want of skill. / ’Tis well—but, artists!

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50.

51.

52. 53. 54.

55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60.

61.

62.

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who can paint or write, / To draw the naked is your true delight. / That robe of quality so struts and swells, / None see what parts of nature it conceals: / The exactest traits of body or of mind, / We owe to models of an humble kind.’ Here I follow Jonathan Barnes’s translation, in Barnes, ‘Beliefs of a Pyrrhonist’, pp. 86–7. Bury uses ‘suggestive’ rather than ‘recollective’ for hûpomnema; and he uses ‘living experience’ rather than ‘ordinary life’ for bios. See Derrida, ‘La Pharmacie de Platon’. My thanks to Jeffrey Turner for instructing me about Plato’s usage. Augustine would follow Plato by construing memoria as the mind’s principal conduit to an understanding of God’s providential intercession in human life (see Confessions). Diogenes Laërtius records Aenesidemus as describing Pyrrhonism as merely a ‘report on phenomena’, DL 9.78. Lessa, ‘Montaigne and Bayle’, p. 224; Neto, ‘Bayle’s Academic Skepticism’, pp. 271, 273–4. Bayle, Dictionary (1826), p. 398; Neto, Paganini and Laursen (eds), Skepticism in the Modern Age, pp. 84–5; and cf. Neto, ‘Scepticism’, p. 245. Perin, ‘Pyrrhonian Scepticism’. Foucher, Critique, p. 14. My thanks to Roger Eichorn for these references. Butler, Hudibras, Part 1, line 131. Hume remarks on ‘Hudibras’ at H 6.71.544–5. Blumenberg, Shipwreck, p. 14. Nussbaum, ‘Skeptic Purgatives’, p. 305, argues that there is something strained in calling ataraxia a telos, as sceptics should not hold beliefs or telê in any dogmatic way. Of course, like Hume, Sextus makes clear that he writes his formulations in a non-dogmatic sense. Nussbaum also worries, however, that losing dogmatism is losing something that makes us human and is liable to leave us, like eunuchs, mutilated and incomplete (‘Skeptic Purgatives’, p. 312). Perhaps sceptics purge too much. Blumenberg, Shipwreck, pp. 7, 7n1: ‘The Pyrrhonians and Epicureans had similarly made “calm on the high seas” (galenótes) into a metaphor of merely negatively (because of the exclusion of ominous factors, such as wind and storms) determined well-being.’ Cf. Rappe, ‘Intercultural Philosophy’, p. 159n108. See Immerwahr, ‘Hume on Tranquilizing’, on Hume’s various strategies to tranquillise the passions.

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63. Cavendish, David Hume, pp. 146–9, 176. 64. Barnes, ‘Beliefs of a Pyrrhonist’, p. 90. 65. Loeb, Stability and Justification, p. 9; Coleman, ‘Hume’s Alleged Pyrrhonism’. 66. Loeb, Stability and Justification, p. 9.

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4

Hume and the Legacy of Pyrrhonian Scepticism

The wise in every age conclude, What Pyrrho taught and Hume renewed, That dogmatists are fools. Thomas Blacklock

Luciano Floridi has performed yeoman’s work in carrying forward Charles Schmitt’s and Richard H. Popkin’s project and substantially advancing our understanding of the transmission of Sextus Empiricus’ texts to early modern readers. As Floridi writes, the history of scepticism is one of ‘dramatic loss of memory’, a story in which the works of one of the ancient world’s greatest philosophical movements fell into oblivion and later re-emerged through only a partial, though still influential, recovery.1 By the time Roman Emperor Constantine’s advisor Lactantius (AD c. 240–320) and the foundational Christian theologian and bishop, Augustine of Hippo, undertook to refute scepticism, only scepticism’s Academic branch counted for much. By the sixth century, Pyrrhonist thought was hardly worth the effort of refutation, as the powerful Emperor Justinian I (AD c. 482–565) acknowledged when he wrote about the Pyrrhonians, to whom he was characteristically hostile, that ‘the gods have already in their wisdom destroyed their works’.2

4.1 The Career of Pyrrhonism The gods, however, were not entirely thorough in their attempted annihilation. Among the survivors were texts by Sextus Empiricus. Sextus, along with Cicero and a few other lesser figures such as Plutarch, endured as the relatively lonely standard bearers of the sceptical movement.3 Despite the immense scale of the loss, however, the recovery of significant ancient texts on scepticism produced tectonic shifts in European philosophical consciousness, 117

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arguably playing a central role in the development not only of modern science but also of the modern mind generally.

4.1.1 The Surviving Texts Byzantine thinkers who, unlike Western European scholars, kept up the widespread use of scholarly Greek, seem at least to have maintained some substantial access, though a hostile posture, towards sceptical texts. Traces of these encounters with scepticism linger in remnants from the period. As Floridi reports, characterisations of philosophers as ‘ephectic’, ‘zetetic’ or ‘aporetic’, if not directly ‘sceptic’ persisted throughout the sixth century and later among, for example, Alexandrian and Byzantine writers such as the Alexandrian neo-Platonist Ammonius (AD c. 435–ob. post-517) and his students: Justinian’s historian Agathias (AD c. 532–c. 80), the Alexandrian grammarian and critic of Aristotelian thought John Philoponus (AD 490–570) and the Athenian neo-Platonist Simplicius (AD c. 490–c. 560). Unsurprisingly, the oldest surviving volume of Sextus, a Greek manuscript from the ninth or tenth century, was brought to Europe from the East.4 Pyrrhonian ideas circulated more widely, too, though in more limited ways. Hundreds of years later, for example, far from the Mediterranean, Sextus’ work made its way into the Kingdom of Northumbria and the important Wearmouth-Jarrow Abbey, near what is today Newcastle-upon-Tyne, England. There, in the early eighth century, perhaps drawing upon the bibliophilic abbot Benedict Biscop’s extraordinary library, Venerable Bede (c. 673–735) made a passing but positive reference to scepticism.5 Back in the East, Photius I, the magisterial ninth-century scholar and patriarch of Constantinople, also marked an early medieval acknowledgement of scepticism in the detailed account of ancient sceptical thought set out in his Biblioteca (aka Myriobiblon). In general, Floridi’s and Popkin’s bibliographic investigations reveal that texts by Aenesidemus seem to have remained accessible to scholars during the early Middle Ages. Diogenes Laërtius’ Lives received attention in both Eastern and Western Christendom, and Byzantine scholars transcribed sceptical texts in the twelfth and as early as the tenth centuries.6 Three codices of a late medieval Latin translation of Sextus’ work have been discovered: one in Paris, a translation of the Outlines of Pyrrhonism, apparently copied in the fourteenth century, erroneously attributed to Aristotle and

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recovered in the mid-nineteenth century; the second, a superior version of that same translation found in Spain nearly a century later; and the third, possibly the earliest, a manuscript housed in the Italian national library in Venice.7

4.1.2 Medieval Quasi-Sceptics Evidence shows direct medieval engagements with scepticism, but they seem to have been shallow affairs. Floridi writes, accordingly, that ‘the Middle Ages show no significant interest in sceptical arguments within the restricted philosophical and theological debates that may address issues concerning the nature and reliability of knowledge, in discussions of ethical, religious, and epistemological questions at “a scientific level,” as we would say nowadays’.8 This assessment must be qualified. The claim that the Middle Ages were little concerned with scepticism is true if one limits judgement to inquiries that address scepticism by name or in other ways head on. If, however, one accepts the idea of scepticism’s conceptual space, it also becomes possible to discern investigations that are at least analogous to those of the sceptics proper and that those selfconsciously working through sceptical problems would recognise as their own. Medieval philosophers did generally take for granted that our cognitive faculties are capable of acquiring basic knowledge of the terrestrial world, but those working in the nominalist tradition raise important questions about whether or not the concepts generated by the mind correspond to anything outside of it. Hume inherited that tradition. Quasi-sceptical nominalist theories about perception may be found in the work of fourteenth-century thinkers such as William of Ockham (1287–1347) and his competitor, Walter Chatton (1290–1343), as well as in Gregory of Rimini (c. 1300–45) and John of Mirecourt (fl. 14th century).9 The question of acquiring, at least through natural reason, knowledge of God was also deeply fraught with quasi-sceptical epistemological worries; and medieval philosophers commonly raised doubts about the extent to which the human intellect and human languages were capable of apprehending the divine. All these themes are present in Hume. Among other medieval giants, Moses Maimonides (c. 1135– 1204), the Cordoban and Egyptian Jew, argued in his Dalālat al-ḥā’irīn (Guide to the Perplexed, c. 1190) that understanding

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the divine could only be accomplished in a negative way – that is, by determining what the divine is not. The later Pyrrhonist PierreDaniel Huet, in fact, cites Maimonides as an example of medieval scepticism. Quoting from Maimonides’ De idololatria, Huet writes: ‘the capacity of our understanding is so limited, that there is not a man in the whole world that can attain to the knowledge of truth’.10 The University of Paris Dominican Thomas Aquinas (1225–74) argued that the divine exceeds human understanding and philosophical language. The apprehensions of metaphysical science, argues Aquinas, can only be expressed via poetic ‘analogical predication’ (Summa theologica Ia.13.5; written 1265–74). In the Islamic traditions, the Persian philosopher Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzi (1149–1210), in Part I of his Muḥaṣṣal afkār al-mutaqaddimīn wa-al-mutaʾakhkhirīn (Compendium of the Opinions of Ancients and Moderns), reviewed a variety of sceptical arguments. A succeeding Persian, Nasir al-Dīn Ṭūsī (1201–74), expanded al-Rāzi’s accounts and analyses in his Talkhīṣ al-Muḥaṣṣal (Paraphrase of the Compendium).11 In the Christian world, Pauline and Tertullian anti-intellectualism may have stoked quasi-sceptical thinking, especially among anti-rationalists, in the form of anti-Aristotelianism. The African Christian Tertullian (c. 160–c. 225) commonly criticised Greek philosophy, in particular Academic scepticism, as alien and threatening to Christian religious truth. He famously exclaimed in his De praescriptione: ‘What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?’ and, a bit less famously, but for our purposes more pointedly, ‘or the Academy with the Church?’ Christian Pyrrhonians, such as Montaigne, would often also cite the first ‘Letter to the Corinthians’, from Paul of Tarsus: ‘hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world?’12 Indeed, anti-rationalism among both Muslim and Christian scholars exhibits a variety of similarities with sceptical thinking. As a matter of similarity of form, anti-rationalist medievals, like the early modern sceptics who would follow them, generally deployed critiques of human epistemic capacities to advance various ideas about mantic intellection, natural theology, mysticism and fideism. As Floridi recognises: ‘the spread of logical studies and the parallel debate upon the paradoxes and insolubilia, the coming to maturity of the controversy over the nature of universals, and the discussion concerning the implications of the doctrine of the total contingency of the world’ all generated ‘protosceptical’ inquiries.13

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In addition, a genre of meditations on matters of doubt, including demonic deceivers, had developed between 1250 and 1500, most notably perhaps for Descartes in Teresa of Ávila’s well-known El Castillo Interior (1588).14 Floridi goes so far as to wonder whether logical similarities suggest a line of actual influence traversing a course from the Greek sceptics to the formidable Persian Islamic philosophical anti-philosopher al-Ghazali (1058–1111), to the Andalusian Jewish philosopher Judah Halevi (1075–1141), and finally to the French Nicholas of Autrecourt (c. 1299–1369) in the Christian-European north.15 Al-Ghazali was not himself a sceptic, but his texts develop devastating lines of sceptical argumentation that helped quash the cultural energy that many had, during his time, invested in rational philosophy, Platonic as well as Aristotelian. Al-Ghazali’s critical work Tahafut al-Falasifah (The Incoherence of the Philosophers), along with Al-Iqtisad fil-Iteqad (Moderation in Belief) and Ihya ulum-id-din (The Revival of the Religious Learnings), advance assorted critiques of causation.16 As if anticipating Hume, for example, Ghazali writes about causation in the Incoherence: The connection between what is habitually believed to be a cause and what is habitually believed to be an effect is not necessary . . . It is not a necessity of the existence of the one that the other should exist, and it is not a necessity of the nonexistence of the one that the other should not exist – for example . . . burning and contact with fire . . . Their connection is due to the prior decree of God, who creates them side by side, not to its being necessary in itself, incapable of separation.17

Ghazali’s autobiographical Al-Munquidh min al-Dalāl (The Deliverer from Error) enlists a dream argument against the evidentiary force of sensation and suggests that his sceptical crisis seems in part the result of his confronting the diaphonies of the Islamic world.18 Autrecourt, before his infamous condemnation and forced recantation in 1347, had, like Ghazali and Aenesidemus, criticised dogmatic scientific claims about causation.19 Condemning both Academic scepticism and dogmatic natural science, Autrecourt advanced his critique of causation in a particularly Pyrrhonian and Humean fashion, arguing that the causal connection (even the necessary connection in rational inference) is non-evident. Hume’s critique of causation is remarkably similar to Autrecourt’s. For this reason, Hastings Rashdall calls Autrecourt the ‘medieval Hume’.20

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Debates about heretics, wizards and marvels also raised quasisceptical questions.21 While these oblique scepticisms, quasiscepticisms and proto-scepticisms – anti-rational, nominalist and otherwise – were significant, attention to scepticism and selfidentified sceptical texts proper would have to wait. It would not be long, however, before scepticism and its central books found their way back on to the main stage of the European intellectual scene. When they did reappear, scepticism’s effects would be widespread and transformative.

4.1.3 Humanism and Fideism in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries After the relative drought of the Middle Ages, noticeable intellectual interest in scepticism re-sprouted, it seems, in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Byzantium.22 As Mehmed’s vice began to close in on Photius’ home of Constantinople and, in 1453, its fabled thousand-year-old Roman walls finally succumbed to Ottoman cannon, it seems likely, as Hume understood (D 6.9), that texts from the old Byzantine libraries migrated westward through Venice, Ravenna and Rome into Italy to join others apparently already sheltered there. Later, shortly after Constantinople’s massive intellectual hoard had been dispersed in the face of Muslim conquest, the Christian Reconquista of Iberia, completed in 1492, largely finished the deflation of the intellectually dynamic city states of Islamic al-Andalus (Andalucía). The Latin word scepticus first appears in Ambrogio Traversari’s 1433 gift to Cosimo de Medici of a Latin translation of Diogenes’ Lives. While Diogenes’ treatment of Pyrrho in the Lives remained accessible to Renaissance intellectuals, Schmitt records the first known sign of a modern reader of Sextus in a 1441 letter by Italian Francesco Filelfo, though the fifteenth-century European use of Sextus’ texts seems to have been largely bibliographic and philological.23 There is reason nevertheless to think that knowledge of Sextus’ work endured in the Renaissance West, even if it did not command the attention of humane intellectuals.24 Several Latin manuscripts of Sextus’ work were produced around the times of both Constantinople’s and Andalusia’s expirations. In 1513, Pope Julius II’s Fifth Lateran Council (1512–17) reacted vigorously and with contempt to the so-called Paduan Avërroists’ fideism (see §2.1.3.1 above), even before Luther’s 1517 Ninety-Five

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Theses. In response, the pontiff directed thinkers to ‘devote their every effort to clarify for their listeners the truth of the Christian religion’.25 The Church’s Lateran imperative, however, backfired and provoked, contrary to its intent, increasingly ferocious controversies among philosophers and theologians, paralleling the military contests that simultaneously rent the continent to shreds until the Edict of Nantes was signed in 1598 (enacting on the fields of theory, as it were, Agrippa’s trope 1 about diaphônia).26 Finally, of course, as it did with Europe’s military paroxysms, the tumult resulted in a spent fatigue and an optate tranquillitati or wish for tranquillity that helped motivate early modern fideist scepticism after all. Extensive use of Sextus’ own texts to investigate and advance philosophical questions crystallised during the sixteenth century in the context of those struggles, and that largely as part of the Catholic Reformation (or Counter-Reformation). Sixteenth-century Catholic intellectuals deployed arguments culled from the Outlines of Pyrrhonism, in the first instance, to defeat Protestant reformers’ appeals to new (or, in the Protestants’ view, recovered) criteria for religious truth – though the motive among some Catholics was probably also the longing for respite and peace.27 The Catholic reformers argued that since the purported new criteria of justified religious belief were no more defensible than the old ones, religion is best based not upon reason or personal conscience but instead upon orthopraxy – customary faith and practice consistent with the traditions of the Roman Catholic Church. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1469–1533), having been influenced by the anti-humanist religious enthusiast and Florentine Dominican friar Savonarola (ob. 1498), was one of the first to establish himself in this line of criticism, with his anti-Aristotelian Examen vanitatis doctrinae gentium of 1520. Savonarola had instructed his students to translate Sextus, and Mirandola’s remarkable book was one of the earliest modern texts to employ Pyrrhonian arguments in a philosophically critical way.28 François Rabelais in Book 3 of Gargantua and Pantagruel (1546) describes the antics of a Pyrrhonian philosopher, Trouillogan. Not long afterwards, in 1548, Francesco Robortello of Udine (1516–67) produced a comparative study of Cicero’s Academica and Sextus’ Outlines, in which he interprets both Pyrrhonian and Academic scepticism as asserting the philosophical thesis that ‘nothing can be perceived’.29 A publication some fourteen years later, however, marks the crucial moment out of which philosophical use of the Outlines and

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interest in scepticism began, like the waters at Horeb, to cascade. In 1562, roughly a thousand years after Justinian had shuttered the ancient Academy, fourteen centuries after Sextus’ birth, and twenty years after Copernicus’s heliocentric De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (1543), Henri Estienne (Henricus Stephanus) published in Paris the first Latin translation of the Outlines of Pyrrhonism. Seven years later, in 1569, the French anti-Calvinist Catholic Gentian Hervet (Hervetus) republished Estienne’s Latin Outlines along with his own Latin translation of what has been called Adversus mathematicos, in Antwerp and Paris. This is a moment in the history of scepticism, and in the history of philosophy, the importance of which is difficult to exaggerate.

4.1.4 Montaigne: The Pyrrhonian Womb of Modern Thought Hervet was no friend to scepticism, however, and he smeared the Church’s Calvinist adversaries as academiciens in his new translation. It was Hervet’s 1569 collection that nevertheless brought Pyrrhonism to the attention of a minor but brilliant French Catholic nobleman of Aquitaine, Michel de Montaigne (1533–92). Montaigne was as eloquent as he was moved by Pyrrhonism, and his 1575–6 sceptical essay ‘Apologie de Raimond Sebond’ would become, in Richard H. Popkin’s memorable phrase, ‘the womb of modern thought’.30 The ‘Apologie’ was quickly followed in 1581 by an influential sceptical work produced by Montaigne’s distant cousin, Francisco Sanches, called Quod nihil scitur (That Nothing is Known). 4.1.4.1 Montaigne: fideism and finitude. Hume enjoyed access to Montaigne’s Essais at least by the time he arrived at La Flèche in 1735.31 A suggestive example that Hume deploys in the 1739 Treatise about a man suspended in an iron cage but still afraid of falling grounds a reasonable suspicion that he read the ‘Apologie’ in particular (T 1.3.13.10, SBN 148).32 More confirmation appears when, shortly after the Treatise, Hume praises ‘the gaiety of MONTAIGNE’ in his 1742 essay ‘The Sceptic’ (ES 179n). Pascal, in a circa 1665 letter to the Jansenist Louis-Isaac Lemaistre de Sacy, called Montaigne ‘a straightforward Pyrrhonist’, and in the context of endorsing fideism, Montaigne writes: ‘There is nothing of man’s invention that has so much verisimilitude and usefulness’ as

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Pyrrhonism.33 Montaigne’s Pyrrhonism, however, goes well beyond anti-Protestant fideism and projects a more extensive humane vision. Whereas Hume famously writes that scepticism is a malady that cannot be cured (T 1.4.2.57, SBN 218), for Montaigne, in contrast, dogmatic presumption is ‘our natural and original malady’.34 Unlike original sin, however, the original failing Montaigne identifies is to be remedied not through the Church and salvation but instead with sceptical therapies. In a short essay, ‘It is Folly to Measure the True and False by Our Own Capacity’, composed between 1572 and 1574, a few years after Hervet’s edition of Sextus and a few years before the ‘Apologie’, Montaigne similarly cautions against presumption. He also slyly does so there, however, at the very same time that he sceptically undermines, as Hume would later, claims about ta adêla including miraculous causes – and with them natural theology itself. In a passage that seems to anticipate Hume’s argument against the rationality of belief in miracles, Montaigne writes: reason has taught me that to condemn a thing thus, dogmatically, as false and impossible is to assume the advantage of knowing the bounds and limits of God’s will and of the power of our mother Nature; and there is no more notable folly in the world than to reduce these things to the measure of our capacity and competence. If we call prodigies and miracles whatever our reason cannot reach, how many of these appear continually to our eyes! . . . We must judge with more reverence the infinite power of nature, and with more consciousness of our ignorance and weakness.35

Montaigne is also critical for epistemological reasons of the prosecution of witches in ‘Of Cripples’ (Essays 3.11), and he endorses a rather Hume-like empiricism there when he diagnoses accused witches as merely mentally ill. Montaigne cautions: ‘it is quite enough that a man . . . should be believed about what is human; about what is beyond his conception and of supernatural effect, he should be believed only when some supernatural approbation has sanctioned him’.36 There is also in Montaigne, of course, an appeal to customary religious orthopraxy of the sort that was characteristic of the Pyrrhonism of the Catholic Reformation.37 In a well-known and pithy remark, for example, Montaigne writes in the ‘Apologie’: ‘We are Christians by the same title that we are Perigordians or Germans.’38 But mixed with that customary orthopraxy is a deflationary and

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tempering relativism, or at least localism. In ‘Of Cannibals’, for example, Montaigne characteristically enlists the Pyrrhonian Fourfold thus: ‘it seems we have no other test of truth and reason than the example and pattern of the opinions and customs of the country we live in’.39 Montaigne, in ‘Of Custom’, more forcefully declares: ‘there is nothing that custom will not or cannot do; and with reason Pindar calls her, so I have been told, the queen and empress of the world’.40 Hume aligns himself with Montaigne when he says: ‘Custom, then, is the great guide of life’ (E 5.1.6, SBN 44; see Chapter 6 below). 4.1.4.2 Montaigne: epochê and tropoi. In the ‘Apologie’, Montaigne enlists Aenesidemus’ modes with regard to different circumstances and different people (tropes 2 and 4), including the newly encountered people of the Americas. In addition, Montaigne inverts, as Hume would later, Aenesidemus’ trope appealing to animals (trope 1). While for Aenesidemus sceptical leverage largely turns upon the differences among animal cognitive capacities and our inability to know which, if any, of those different cognitive systems presents the world as it really is, Montaigne in contrast pursues a continuity strategy. He humbles the epistemic pretension of Aristotelians by suggesting that they are wrong to posit in their tripartite theory of mind a superior human intellectual capacity able to know reality. Montaigne himself associates the levelling strategy with Pyrrhonism: ‘Of the three [Aristotelian] functions of the soul, the imaginative, the appetitive, and the consenting [intellect], they [the Pyrrhonians] accept the first two; the last they suspend and keep it ambiguous, without inclination or approbation, however slight in one direction or the other.’41 To make his case, Montaigne writes in the ‘Apologie’ about the many ways that animals share in the same kinds of activities that compose human life – for example, war and even, in the case of elephants, religious devotions.42 Montaigne also culls the equalising example of Chryssipus’ dog from Sextus (PH 1.14.69) – a dog that seems to employ a human-like disjunctive syllogism in determining which of three divergent paths his quarry has taken.43 (The example of Chryssipus’ dog shows that Sextus sometimes appeals to similarities as well as to differences between humans and other animals in advancing his scepticism.) Hume follows Montaigne in this continuity project (see §5.2.2 below), arguing not that animals are like people but, rather, that people are like other animals.44 Montaigne makes the meaning of his radical egalitarian thesis explicit when

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he provocatively declares that ‘We are neither above nor below the rest.’45 Montaigne also employs Agrippa’s modes, appealing to endless controversy or diaphônia (trope 1), infinite regress (trope 2) and arguing in a circle or rouet (trope 5).46 He raises the question of the criterion too. Furthermore, Montaigne denounces the negative dogmatism of the Academics and praises Pyrrhonian OI-zêtesis.47 Clitomachus, Carneades, and the Academics despaired of their quest, and judged that truth could not be conceived by our powers. The conclusion of these men was man’s weakness and ignorance . . . Pyrrho and the other Skeptics or Epechists . . . say that they are still in search of the truth. These men judge that those who think they have found it are infinitely mistaken; and that there is also an overbold vanity in that second class that assures us that human powers are not capable of attaining it.

Like Sextus and Hume, Montaigne rejects as too dogmatic what he finds to be the Academics’ (Metrodorian) probabilism. Against Academic probabilistic realism (MAS), Montaigne writes in favour of simple and total Pyrrhonian suspensive tranquillity: The Academics allowed some inclination of the judgment . . . The position of the pyrrhonians is bolder and at the same time more plausible [vraysemblable or true-seeming]. For that Academic inclination, and that leaning toward one proposition rather than another, what else is it but the recognition of some more apparent truth in this one than in that? . . . How can they let themselves be inclined toward the likeness of truth if they know not the truth? . . . If our intellectual and sensory faculties are without foundation and footing, if they do nothing but float and flutter, then to no purpose do we let our judgment be carried away by any part of their operation, whatever the likelihood [i.e., probabilities] it may seem to offer us; and the surest attitude of our understanding, and the happiest would be that in which it maintained itself poised, upright, inflexible, without motion, and without agitation.48

Montaigne, in short, valorises ‘judgment without leaning or inclination’ and privileges tradition over Academic probability or ‘likelihood’.49

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In another nod to the Pyrrhonian Fourfold, Montaigne writes: ‘Passion rules us much more tyrannically than reason.’50 Of course, Hume echoes Montaigne and Sextus when he reiterates: ‘Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them’ (T 2.3.3.4, SBN 415; see Chapter 8 below). In fact, in the ‘Apologie’, Montaigne practically quotes Sextus’ description of the Fourfold observances: As for the actions of life, they are of the common fashion in that. They lend and accommodate themselves to natural inclinations, to the impulsion and constraint of the passions, to the constitution of laws and customs, and to the tradition of the arts. For God wished us not to know, but only to use, those things. They let their common actions be guided by those things, without any taking sides or judgment.51

Pyrrhonism, indeed, dominates the philosophical content of Montaigne’s ‘Apologie’. 4.1.4.3 Montaigne: rhetoric and form. Pyrrhonism is evident in more than the Essays’ content. The Essays appeared in three books, the first two of which were expanded with the publication of the third. In his collection’s very first essay, ‘By Diverse Means We Arrive at the Same End’, Montaigne writes the following about human beings and about his text: ‘Truly man is a marvelously vain, divers, and undulating object. It is hard to found any constant and uniform judgment on him.’52 Bayle follows Montaigne in this rhetorical method, describing his writing as a city, the building of which is accomplished only in disjointed increments, at different times, irregularly, and is repaired in the same fashion (se bâtit en divers temps, et se répare tantôt en un lieu, tantôt une autre).53 Montaigne coined the term ‘essay’, and essaying contrasts with the single-minded ‘geometric method’ of Spinoza, as well as with the methodical treatises of Descartes, in that it incarnates what Bayle described as ‘diverse thoughts’ (pensées diverses) characteristic of scepticism.54 Sextus similarly deploys diverse instruments in diverse ways to produce sceptical doubt rather than advance singular and univocal philosophical theses. This haphazard rhetorical form not only reflects the human condition, however; it also enacts a zetetic openness and a tolerance of diversity.55 Hume turned to publishing essays in 1741, with the Essays, Moral and Political, immediately after publishing the Treatise. He published

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the first Enquiry in 1748 as a collection of essays – Philosophical Essays concerning Human Understanding. Essays are also intrinsically personal, even confessional – recalling Aenesidemus’ tropes 2 and 4. While Montaigne’s essays address various topics, he is clear in his ‘Preface to the Reader’ that through it all, ‘Je suis moy-mesmes la matiere de mon livre’ (‘I am myself the subject matter of my book’). Essays enact that qualification of speech to an individual subject and to the way things appear to that subject at a specific time and place that Sextus and the Pyrrhonians endorse. They foreground human equivocations, conflicted inclinations, vacillations and uncertainties. The famous motto that Montaigne carved into the rafter of his library, Que sçay-je? (‘What do I know?’), expresses this Pyrrhonian qualified and personalised suspension perfectly. Hume twice remarks in a similar way, apparently invoking Montaigne, ‘je-ne-sçais-quoi’ (T 1.3.8.16, SBN 106; T 3.3.4.11, SBN 612).56 If, therefore, the form appropriate to the Academic sceptic and other systematic thinkers is the treatise, the form proper to the Pyrrhonian is the essay. This background may go some distance in explaining why Hume’s Treatise exhibits more essay-like qualities than do standard philosophical treatises.57 4.1.4.4 Montaigne: the ordinary and the human. Montaigne embraces the low, the simple, the diurnal and the ordinary, just as Hume does the ‘gross earthy mixture’ of common life (T 1.4.7.14, SBN 272). Even as in roads I like to avoid the sloping and slippery sides, and cast myself into the beaten part, even the muddiest and boggiest, from which I cannot sink lower, and seek security there . . . The lowest step is the firmest.58

Warning the reader, Montaigne writes in the ‘Apologie’: ‘I advise moderation and temperance and avoidance of novelty and strangeness. All eccentric ways irritate me.’59 In this embrace of the lowly, Montaigne’s scepticism humbles the human proclivity to wish for and to pretend to philosophical transcendence. In his very last essay, ‘Of Experience’, for example, Montaigne writes: They want to get out of themselves and escape from the man. That is madness: instead of changing into angels, they change into beasts, instead of raising themselves, they lower themselves. These transcendental humors frighten me, like lofty and inaccessible places.60

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The attempt to transcend common life results in ‘madness’ and distortion. Moreover: Greatness of soul is not so much pressing upward and forward as knowing how to set oneself in order and circumscribe oneself . . . There is nothing so beautiful and legitimate as to play the man well and properly, no knowledge so hard to acquire as the knowledge of how to live this life well and naturally; and the most barbarous of our maladies is to despise our being.61

Hume delivers sceptical instruction in the first Enquiry in a similar spirit: ‘Be a philosopher; but, amidst all your philosophy, be still a man’ (E 1.6, SBN 8–9). 4.1.4.5 In the wake of Montaigne. Montaigne’s successors include the Bishop of Bellay, Jean-Pierre Camus (1584–1652), and Montaigne’s protégé, Pierre Charron (1541–1603), who transforms Montaigne’s Que sais-je? into Je ne sais, and who may have inspired Descartes’ methodological doubt as well as Pascal’s Christian fideistic antiscepticism.62 Charron claims, perhaps in a dissimulating way, not to be a Pyrrhonian because he gives consent to what ‘appears best and the most truth-seeming’ (semble meilleur et plus vraysemblable). In his influential De la Sagesse (1601/rev. 1604), Charron nevertheless advances the idea that Pyrrhonism is philosophically superior, more radical and more comprehensive than Academic probabilistic realism.63 Unlike Hume, however, these ‘new Pyrrhonians’ continue to promote fideistic deference to the Church in place of natural reason and in place of other criteria for religious truth.64 The role that Pyrrhonism played in early modernity, however, would soon change.

4.1.5 Scepticism and the New Sciences If the fifteenth century took a humane, antiquarian interest in Pyrrhonism when it tumbled on to the European intellectual scene from the East and from scholastics’ libraries, and if the sixteenth century deployed Pyrrhonism as a weapon in the Reformation’s religious contests, the seventeenth century was generally marked by a resurgence in Academic scepticism and an enlargement of the focus of Pyrrhonism so as to make possible a less critical rapprochement with topics of natural philosophy, or what we today call natural science. Academicism and Pyrrhonism both came to be

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seen as consistent and even salutary in their relationship with the sciences, and gradually scepticism was adopted as a therapy not only for dogmatism generally but also for religious dogmatism in particular. The world into which Pyrrhonism resurfaced was one in which the old order faced profound destabilisation. Without much scandal, Montaigne in the sixteenth century had famously and sceptically wondered whether perhaps, concerning the contest between Ptolemaic geocentrism and Copernican heliocentrism, ‘we should not bother which of the two is so? And who knows, whether a third opinion, a thousand years from now, will not overthrow the preceding two?’65 Copernicus (1473–1543) had, of course, relocated the centre of things from the Earth to the sun in his watershed 1543 De revolutionibus orbium coelestium. The imminent disruption of Aristotelian-Ptolemaic worldviews, indeed, seems to have been symbolised in the exploding stellar nova that Tycho Brahe observed in 1573, along with his demonstration of the extra-lunar location of the Great Comet of 1577 via parallax.66 About the same time, Bartholomé de Medina was refining a theory of moral probabilism. A close association in fact seems to have congealed over this period between those interested in the new sciences and scepticism, both Pyrrhonian and Academic. Andreas Osiander, in his anonymous Preface to Copernicus’s De revolutionibus, articulated, before Montaigne’s ‘Apologie’, the startling sceptical view that ‘astronomical hypotheses could neither be proven nor disproven’. As the intellectual historian Frederic Baumgartener reports, ‘sceptics dominate the short list of those Frenchmen who mentioned Copernicus in the period from 1560 to 1580’; and later most ‘French citations of Copernicus’ for the three decades following Montaigne’s ‘Apologie’ (written 1575–6) were ‘made by those already committed to scepticism’.67 The then still-unproven heliocentric hypotheses, it seems, licensed the sceptically inclined to attack Aristotelian celestial theory without having to affirm the alternative.68 Cardinal Jacques Davy du Peron (1556–1618) and Jean Belot exemplify this practice.69 Interest among sceptics in Copernican theory, however, may also be explained as an exhibition of what I have called Pyrrhonian zetetic practice (see §3.4.3 above). With their ongoing criticisms and ongoing inquiries, sceptics helped to prise open the European mind to a new worldview, acting as an intellectual vanguard at the difficult

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moment when a major new theory appeared on the scene to challenge others that were well established and dearly held. The cannonade trained on the old order was joined by Kepler’s Apologie for Tycho in 1600, along with his critique of Tycho’s rival, Nicolaus Reimarus Ursus (mathematician to the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II), who himself maintained a highly theoretical and conservative astronomical scepticism. Devastating, too, was Kepler’s formulation of non-Aristotelian laws of planetary motion in the Astronomia (1609).70 Kepler’s tiny treatise of 1611 on the six-sided nature of snowflakes, De nive sexangula, unwittingly opened important conceptual space in the dogmatic order for both atomism and innovative mechanical explanations. The same year that Kepler published the Astronomia, Galileo Galilei dynamited the worldview of Book 12 of Aristotle’s Metaphysics by discovering craters on the supposedly unmarred surface of the moon – craters that, like Tycho’s exploding stars and beyond-the-moon comets, Aristotelians claimed should not exist.71 Just a year after he observed the irregularities of lunar terrain, Galileo published the Sidereus nuncius (Starry Messenger) and dislocated the Aristotelian vision still further by identifying in 1610 Jupiter’s moons, thereby demonstrating that the Earth and its orbiting satellites are not the only system of the universe but just one system among many. Soon the idea of ‘system’ caught on like wildfire, and the intellectual world began to manufacture a plethora of new intellectual ‘systems’, along with systems within those systems.72 In this fecund intellectual climate, early modernity, at least through the seventeenth century, nurtured a scientific community far more diverse than the one we know today. Besides variants of Aristotelian/(neo-)Platonic/Ptolemaic explanations, inquirers would have encountered natural magics and alchemies, Hermeticism, plus a wide variety of nascent materialisms. These new systems, of course, challenged the old ones, but they also did more. They set up a mixed and sundry, churning crucible of relevant alternative explanations for natural phenomena, much like the theological cacophony that the Fifth Lateran Council had stoked in the sixteenth century – just the sort of diaphônia to be exploited by those schooled in Agrippa’s trope 1.73 In 1616 Pope Paul V, through Cardinal Bellarmino, attempted to stick his finger into the leaking dike by instructing Galileo to abandon Copernican theory. Of course, the pontiff failed, and right

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behind Galileo’s work other subversive texts streamed through the breach. Francis Bacon dislodged the Aristotelian organon (or logical and epistemological toolkit) by publishing his Novum organum scientiarum (1620) and projecting the power of scientific method as a means of overcoming the ‘idols of the mind’ (idola mentis, ‘Aphorisms’ 39–68) that produce human error. (Sceptics, like Hume, might be summarily read as explaining why these idols – human nature, individual shortcomings, language and theory – cannot be overcome.)74 Hume admired both Galileo and Bacon for having contributed to the ‘true philosophy’, but he regarded Galileo the ‘superior’ for actually practising it: ‘Bacon pointed out at a distance the road to true philosophy: Galileo both pointed it out to others, and made himself considerable advances in it’ (H 5.App 4 [To the Reign of James I].153). Remarkably, it was not until 1621, just a year after Bacon’s Novum organum and nearly one hundred years after Henri Estienne’s initial Latin edition of the Outlines (1562), that the first Greek publication of the Outlines of Pyrrhonism and Adversus mathematicos appeared on European presses. The release of the 1621 Greek edition was profoundly influential and confirms the idea that interest in Pyrrhonism had by no means been entirely eclipsed by rising Academicism in the seventeenth century. Perhaps not surprisingly, the 1621 editio princeps edited by Peter and Jacob Chouet was published in Geneva and Paris, cities central to Catholicism’s struggle with Calvinism, as in a lesser way was Edinburgh. The Chouet volume also contains Gentian Hervet’s 1569 Latin translation of Adversus mathematicos, along with Henricus Stephanus’s 1562 Latin translation of the Outlines.75 The compendium opened an important, new and more widely accessible route into Pyrrhonian thought, unleashing powerful critical instruments that helped to drive the surging tide of radical intellectual and social change. Shortly after the publication of Chouet’s translation, William Harvey helped reconstruct human self-understanding along mechanistic lines with De motu cordis, on the circulation of blood (1628), a discovery that Hume praised in particular (H 6.62.153–4). Galileo landed still another mighty blow against the old order with his worldview-shattering Dialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo (Dialogue concerning Two World Systems, 1632), a text central to fortifying the Copernican vision as an alternative to Ptolemaic-Aristotelian models. Descartes’ own organon or statement of method, Discours de la méthode, appeared in the train

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of Bacon, Chouet, Galileo and Harvey in 1637. His profoundly sceptical and anti-sceptical Meditationes de prima philosophia was issued in 1641. To the second edition in 1642, Descartes appended a collection of ‘Objections and Replies’, which included substantial and often sceptical analyses and commentary by an array of important contemporary thinkers, such as Pierre Gassendi, Marin Mersenne and Thomas Hobbes. The Meditations was translated into French six years later, in 1647, as Méditations métaphysiques. Descartes’ synthetic Principia philosophiae was also published in Latin in 1641 and then in French in 1647 as Les principes de la philosophie.76 Sections of Descartes’ previously suppressed book on modern physics, Traité du monde et de la lumière, had been incorporated into the Principles and into De homie (1662). The Traité in its entirety finally appeared in 1677, the same year as Spinoza’s controversial Ethica. Despite the radical intellectual dynamics underfoot – indeed, perhaps because of them – the seventeenth century remained an intellectual minefield. Because of the increased liberty implicit among the quickly burgeoning multitude of Christian sects, as well as the many operant sciences, the seventeenth century became a time when authorities laboured with great vigour to suppress theological and ecclesiastical heterodoxy. Accused witches were put to death across Europe and the North American colonies, not least of all in Scotland. Giordano Bruno was burned in Rome’s Campo de Fiori in 1600. Galileo was investigated, threatened with torture and successfully prosecuted not only in 1616 but also again in 1633 by the powerful Roman Catholic Church. The Thirty Years’ War (1618–48) convulsed much of the European continent in bloody religious conflict, and the anti-religious strains of scepticism that would become so prominent in the Enlightenment stalled in their infancy. Regardless of the Peace of Westphalia (1648), the preceding Edict of Nantes (1598) and the backlash against its revocation in 1685, toleration of the sort advocated by Bayle’s 1686 Commentaire philosophique and Locke’s 1689 A Letter concerning Toleration remained of limited effect. In Scotland, ardent defenders of subtle differences among shades of Calvinism, like the devout of other forms of Protestantism, sniffed out and punished perceived deviance. So it was still possible, even in 1697 and in the relatively cosmopolitan European capital of Edinburgh, to prosecute and execute a 20-year-old university student, Thomas Aikenhead, for blasphemy. The laws arrayed against

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Aikenhead remained on the statute books throughout Hume’s lifetime, and it remained at least a legal possibility that he would be prosecuted under them, too.77 It was in this tumultuous and difficult context that a new understanding of Pyrrhonism was forged. Philosophers responded to the sceptical situation in three ways that Richard H. Popkin delineates thus: 1. Extend scepticism: One response was to extend scepticism, expanding the scope of its targets to include not only the old sciences and Protestant religion but also the new sciences and any claims to religious knowledge, comprehensively. 2. Defeat scepticism: The antithetical response was to argue that the new sciences, properly understood, overcome and defeat scepticism. 3. Pursue a ‘via media’: Adopting a phrase from Gassendi, Popkin rightly names a third, more ‘constructive’ variant; this course accepts that scepticism cannot be defeated but also interprets the new sciences in a manner consistent with it.78 Influential work was produced of each type. 4.1.5.1 Hume and Hobbes. An important figure in advancing the new scientific order, Thomas Hobbes was familiar with Montaigne’s and Charron’s work (as well as the work of other French sceptics), and he developed sceptical ideas in Leviathan (1651) in the shape of an empiricist epistemology and a political theory emphasising self-preservation and glory.79 Hume was clearly influenced by Hobbes. The title of Hume’s Treatise, its overall structure and important components of its content seem, in fact, to be drawn from Hobbes.80 Hobbes referred to the first book of his 1650 Elements of Law as his ‘treatise of human nature’.81 Hume adopts the Hobbesian–Machiavellian–Mandevillian (and morally sceptical) view that justice is artificial (T 3.2).82 Still, while Hume clearly read Leviathan, there is, because of its poor circulation, some reason to think he did not read the Elements.83 Curiously, moreover, even if Hume recognised the sceptical potential of Hobbes’s texts, he nevertheless regarded the Englishman to be a dogmatist. Writing in Volume 4 of the History of England (originally 1759), Hume concludes: ‘Though an enemy to religion, [Hobbes] partakes nothing of the spirit of

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scepticism; but is as positive and dogmatical as if human reason, and his reason in particular, could attain a thorough conviction in these subjects’ (H 4.42.153).84 If this was Hume’s view of Hobbes as his philosophical vision crystallised – and given the date of the History’s publication it may not have been – then the impact of Hobbes upon Hume’s thought may not have been terribly deep. 4.1.5.2 La Mothe Le Vayer: extending scepticism. Those extending scepticism into the seventeenth century largely follow in Montaigne’s and Charron’s train, including the Sorbonne medical school rector Guy Patin, as well as Gassendi’s editor, Samuel Sorbière. Among the most noteworthy of these humane sceptics, however, must be counted the French tutor to the king’s brother and favourite of Cardinal Richelieu, François de La Mothe Le Vayer (1588–1672).85 Unlike Bacon, Gassendi and Descartes, the radical La Mothe Le Vayer aspired to a kind of pure and comprehensive Pyrrhonism.86 A member of the Académie Française, influenced by Charron, and a close friend of the playwright Molière, La Mothe Le Vayer produced a series of texts that popularised Sextus Empiricus.87 The texts were designed to advance La Mothe Le Vayer’s wholesale assault on all forms of science and history, as well as to promote a deeply anti-rational fideism. Reason is unstable, unreliable and when unconstrained leads to madness. As human inquiry amounts to no more than a ‘Saturnalia of opinion’, so too is reason just ‘un jouet à toutes mains’.88 La Mothe Le Vayer’s works include his Dialogues (early 1630s and published under the nom de plume Orosius Tubero, notably ‘De l’ignorance louable’ and ‘De la philosophy sceptique’), the satirical Opuscule ou petit traité sceptique sur cette commune façon de parler: n’avoir pas le sens commun (1646) and the ironically titled Discours pour montrer que les doutes de la philosophy sceptique sont de grand usage dans les sciences (1668). A fifteen-volume collection of La Mothe Le Vayer’s work was published in Paris in 1669. The library of the Collège of La Flèche seems to have held during Hume’s time there a 1662 La Mothe Le Vayer collection.89 Richelieu’s secretary, Leonard Marandé, argued with Pyrrhonian tropes in his Jugement des actions humaines (1624) for the same conclusion that Hume would reach a century later, that, because our senses present only images to us, and contrary images at that, we cannot achieve a realist empirical science of the external

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world. Marandé enlists the Sextan argument that Hume later also deploys, concerning the way pressing on one’s eyeball changes the perceptions of objects though not the objects themselves (T 1.4.2.45, SBN 210–11; E 12.1.6, SBN 20).90 4.1.5.3 Gassendi: the bridge. Another important but often underappreciated contributor to the resurgence of Pyrrhonian scepticism was a French priest called Pierre or Petri Gassendi (1592–1655). After a meteoric rise to principal of the College of Digne at the age of 19, Gassendi later became theological canon of the cathedral church, dean of Digne cathedral, and a professor at the Academy in Aix. Gassendi moved to the centre of French intellectual life, however, when, through the influence of Cardinal Richelieu’s brother, the Archbishop of Lyon, he secured a position with the mathematics faculty at the Collège Royal (now Collège de France) in Paris, across from the Sorbonne.91 Gassendi quickly became a member of Mersenne’s intellectual circle, and he circulated among the Parisian avant-garde of the early seventeenth century, commonly called, somewhat derisively, libertin erudits (or libertinage érudit). Gassendi joined three other freethinkers he met in that company – La Mothe Le Vayer, the Galileo-supporter Élie Diodati and the bibliographer Gabriel Naudé, conservator of the Mazarin Library – to form an intellectual group of four known as the Tétrade. The group was deeply interested in scepticism. Gassendi’s criticisms of Descartes were published in 1642, by Mersenne’s invitation, in the second edition of the Meditations as its fifth set of objections. Gassendi expanded them in his own Disquisitio metaphysica: seu duitationes et instantiae adversus Renati Cartesii metaphysicam et responsa (1644). Making clear his sceptical inclinations – and perhaps the influence of Montaigne and Charron – Gassendi announces nihil sciri (‘I know nothing’), criticising the epistemological grounds claimed not only by Aristotle (as he had in Exercitationes paradoxicae adversus aristoteleos, 1624/58) and Descartes but also those of an exceedingly wide range of dogmatic thinkers, including the deist Herbert of Cherbury and the neo-Platonic Paracelsian Robert Fludd.92 Gassendi’s critique draws heavily from Aenesidemus’ ten tropoi as well as Agrippa’s Trilemma.93 While his inclination towards Pyrrhonism began early on, in the Preface to Book 1 of his Exercitationes, after appealing to Cicero, Juan Luis Vives, Charron, Peter Ramus and

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Giovanni Pico della Mirandola to explain his decision to search beyond Aristotle, Gassendi writes: I began to seek the opinions of other sects, in order to see whether by chance they offered anything sounder. I found difficulties everywhere, but I frankly confess that I found none of these opinions as pleasing as the non-apprehension [akatalêpsia] recommended by the Academics and Pyrrhonists. In fact, after I had penetrated the great distance dividing the Spirit of Nature from the human mind, what else could I think except that the inner causes of natural effects escape completely human observation? I began to pity and be ashamed of the vanity and arrogance of dogmatic philosophers who proudly boast and so seriously declare that they have acquired the science of natural things. Yet, would they not have to remain rigid and silent like the rocks of Marpesia if someone pressed them to explain seriously by what skill and with which instruments were constituted the limbs and organs of a single mite, one of the smallest of Mother Nature’s works? Much wiser are those philosophers cited earlier who, in order to demonstrate the vanity and uncertainty of human science, make themselves able to fight for and against any position equally well.94

Here, in just this small introductory passage, Gassendi declares his alliance with scepticism against Aristotelianism and other dogmatisms and elides the differences between Academic and Pyrrhonian scepticism on akatalêpsía. He adopts characteristically Pyrrhonian aphasia and isosthenia, he refuses ta adêla, and he endorses scepticism as a way of practising theory. Bayle understood Gassendi’s importance to the sceptical movement: ‘One hardly knew the name of Sextus Empiricus in our schools. The methods he had proposed so subtly for bringing about suspense were not less known than the Terra Australis, when Gassendi gave us an abridgement of it, which opened our eyes.’95 Gassendi, however, was no anti-scientist. Unlike La Mothe Le Vayer, and despite occasional expressions of radical doubt, Gassendi, like Diodati, finally defends in a limited way the epistemic project of the new sciences.96 In this, Gassendi lands short of the radical scepticism developed by Hume. On the other hand, Hume’s radical scepticism does not follow Gassendi’s colleague, La Mothe Le Vayer, into a complete rejection of science in favour of fideistic religion. Hume, rather, stands between the two. The varying degrees to which thinkers of the time concede scepticism show

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that the distinction between defeaters, extenders and those partial defeaters pursuing the via media is better understood as a complex spectrum than Popkin’s three categories suggest.97 Like the works of La Mothe Le Vayer, volumes by Gassendi were available to Hume at the library of the Collège of La Flèche.98 Gassendi can be linked to Hume not only in his accepting the sciences but also in his articulating a science of appearances rather than a First Philosophy of the Real: Nor is there enough solidity in the customary objection to those who say that nothing is certain or can be comprehended, namely that they do not really doubt that it is daylight when the sun is shining, that fire is hot, snow white, honey sweet, and other things of that sort: and that therefore they must at least accept the criterion by which those things are determined, namely the senses. For these men, as we observed above, say that the appearances of things, or what things appear to be on the outside, is one thing and the truth, or the inner nature of things, namely what the things are in themselves, is another matter, and that when they say that nothing can be known certainly and that there is no criterion, they are not speaking of what things appear to be and what is revealed by the senses as if by some special criterion, but of what things are in themselves, which is so hidden that no criterion can disclose it.99

In these ways, Gassendi was an influential, even crucial, bridge figure. One might call him a synthetic sceptical Epicurean, which is how he describes himself. Gassendi incarnates the strange and perhaps incoherent mixture of epistemic scepticism and metaphysical dogmatism characteristic of other atomist bridge figures (recall §1.2.1.1 above). In his three works on Epicurean philosophy – De vita et moribus Epicuri (1647), Animadversiones (1649) and the posthumous Syntagma philosophicum (1658) – Gassendi spans the intellectual gap between early modern atomism/corpuscularism and modern scientific scepticism, just as Anaxarchus had served as an intellectual bridge between Metrodorus of Chios and Pyrrho. Gassendi is, indeed, well situated among the line of metaphysical corpuscularists of varying sceptical inclinations that includes Galileo (the Assayer, 1623), Descartes (Le monde, 1633), Hobbes (Leviathan, 1651), Boyle (The Sceptical Chymist, 1661), Newton (Principia, 1687) and to some extent even Locke (Essay, 1689), rather than as simply a sceptic or a dogmatist. In light of the

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extensive influence of Gassendi and other sceptically informed thinkers at work in the seventeenth century, it might not be an exaggeration to think of modern science itself as a development within the course of sceptical philosophy. 4.1.5.4 Bayle and Crousaz: post-Cartesian Pyrrhonism. Perhaps more than anyone else, Bayle showed that scepticism, not dogmatic rationalism, is the logical outcome of Cartesianism, Gassendi’s atomism and the early modern ‘Way of Ideas’.100 There are certainly, as we have seen, Academic qualities to Bayle’s texts; but by the late seventeenth century, scepticism’s Pyrrhonian and Academic currents were hardly distinct, and many of the texts that we have scrutinised exhibit elements of both Pyrrhonism and Academic thought. Bayle’s are among such texts, and he drew on both traditions, often overlaying and synthesising them.101 Hume’s memoranda seem to show that he adopted a Pyrrhonian reading of Bayle, and certainly Bayle is more significant historically in disseminating ideas thought of as Pyrrhonian than as Academic.102 That was so principally because of the power of his Dictionnaire’s article on ‘Pyrrho’ (especially Notes B and C), as well as the entry on ‘Zeno of Elea’. Pyrrhonian ideas appear in other articles without explicit reference, for example in ‘Bunel’, ‘Manicheans’ and ‘Socinus Faustus’.103 Of course, Bayle did not forthrightly acknowledge his own Pyrrhonism, since doing so would have negatively affected the reception of his work – and perhaps even his own security. To fend off charges of promoting immorality and atheism and to promote a favourable reception for his work, Bayle explicitly distanced himself from Pyrrhonism in the second edition of his Dictionnaire (1702) with a deflationary note or ‘Clarification concerning Pyrrhonism’. The defensive gesture, however, persuaded very few. A direct line, in fact, can be drawn from Bayle back to the Pyrrhonian Montaigne, since Bayle drew heavily upon Montaigne’s work, and thence from Montaigne to the roots of early modern Pyrrhonism.104 Despite this pedigree, however, Bayle was perceived widely by his readers, in contrast to the conciliatory Montaigne, to be a dangerous Pyrrhonian subversive. That was so not only in relation to matters of religious faith, and not only by those, such as his alienated mentor Pierre Jurieu, with personal axes to grind.105 Voltaire, cognisant of Bayle’s popular reputation, describes him in his poem on ‘The Lisbon Earthquake’ of 1755 in characteristic

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terms: ‘The greatest master of the art of reasoning that ever wrote, Bayle, great and wise, all systems overthrows.’106 In his own terms, Bayle describes Pyrrhonism this way: ‘the art of disputing about all things and always suspending one’s judgment is most commonly called “Pyrrhonism”’.107 While Pascal, preceding Bayle, agreed that (Pyrrhonian) scepticism is centrally a matter of suspension, it is important to note that Bayle’s definition more closely approximates Sextus’ at PH 14.8 when the Huguenot ties Pyrrhonism not only to suspensive epochê but also to the discursive practice of opposing contrary views that Hellenistic Pyrrhonists called isosthenia.108 Foregrounding these two characteristics, Bayle writes about Pyrrho that everywhere he ‘found reasons for affirming and for denying; and this is why he suspended judgment after having carefully examined all the arguments pro and con’.109 Echoing Gassendi and sceptical akatalêpsía, at the opening of the article on Pyrrho Bayle declares that ‘the Pyrrhonian principle’ is ‘that the absolute and internal nature of objects is hidden from us and that we can only be sure of how they appear to us in various respects’. He goes on, later in the entry, to say that the ‘major aim’ of Pyrrhonians ‘is to prove that the absolute nature of things is unknown to us and that we can know them only relatively’.110 Bayle was well aware of the Pyrrhonian Fourfold’s deference to ‘custom’, and he understood that Pyrrho conformed to common life.111 In Note F to the article on Pyrrho, Bayle writes: ‘Pyrrho maintained that there was not really any one thing that was this or that, and that the nature of things depended upon laws and customs; that is to say, that men by their laws and customs made some things good, laudable, ill, blameable &c.’112 As a matter of moral theory, in the Dictionnaire’s article on ‘Jonas’, Bayle writes that ‘ideas of virtue depend on education and custom’.113 Sceptics, he writes in Note B, are socially and politically safe, since they ‘do not deny that one should conform to the customs of one’s country’.114 Bayle recognises that scepticism promotes toleration in his Commentaire philosophique of 1686 – a work published three years before Locke’s Letter concerning Toleration.115 Like Hobbes and Mandeville, Bayle argues that ‘justice or injustice depend solely upon human laws and customs’ – as does Hume at Treatise 3.2. The Pensées diverses of 1682, following the great comet of 1680 that had agitated so many religious believers, argues that even atheists are morally safe, and do not require a divine foundation for their virtue.

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About the self, Bayle observes that ‘man is a small republic that often changes its magistrates’.116 In this position, he may have influenced not only Hume’s bundle theory of the self but also his sceptical remark at T 1.4.6 that ‘I cannot compare the soul more properly to any thing than to a republic or commonwealth, in which the several members are united by the reciprocal ties of government and subordination, and give rise to the other persons, who propagate the same republic in the incessant changes of its parts’ (T 1.4.6.19, SBN 261). In the Dictionnaire, Bayle also prominently and immediately highlights the zetetic or searching character of Pyrrhonism (especially OI-zetetic practice), writing about Pyrrho that he ‘always concluded that the matter should be looked into further. All his life he was searching for the truth, but he always managed things so as not to grant that he had found it.’117 In the article’s last paragraph he revisits the point: ‘the hypothesis of the Pyrrhonists’ was that ‘they were always searching’.118 In a 1673 letter, Bayle reiterates this emphasis on Pyrrhonian zêtesis when he argues that, in contrast to dogmatists, who claim to have found the truth, one may identify both philosophers ‘who think it cannot be found, and those who think they have not yet found it and keep searching’.119 Pyrrhonism is properly placed with the latter of these options. In his Note A to the article on Pyrrho, elaborating and clarifying the similarities and differences between the two strains of scepticism, Bayle denies any suggestion that Pyrrhonism is a negative dogmatism. Unlike the Academics, the Pyrrhonians do not formally suppose incomprehensibility. One calls them skeptics, zetetics, ephectics, aporetics . . . that is to say examiners, inquisitors, suspending, doubting. All this shows that they supposed it was possible to find truth and that they did not decide that truth was incomprehensible.120

Pyrrhonians will appear sometimes very much like Academics, even with regard to the principles of non-apprehension; but Pyrrhonians are strictly speaking suspensive, while Academics are to some degree actually assertive in the way they practise non-apprehension. Otherwise strikingly, ‘in everything else’ Academics and Pyrrhonians ‘were perfectly alike’.121 We may wonder whether this coy elision of Pyrrhonism with Academicism influenced Hume – especially if one approaches his texts, as we will see in §4.2.2, with a hermeneutic of suspicion.

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While for Bayle, Pyrrhonism is politically safe, it remains a threat to religion because it undermines certainty, as he says in Note B. The natural sciences and even morality properly rest upon probabilities, but religion requires more: ‘It is therefore only religion that has anything to fear from Pyrrhonism. Religion ought to be based on certainty.’122 Immediately after announcing this danger, however, Bayle deflates it in Note C, where he calls upon St Paul and the Pyrrhonian La Mothe Le Vayer to express the familiar fideistic conciliation with Pyrrhonism that scepticism is useful for leading people to ‘submit to the authority of the faith’, because it makes people ‘conscious of the darkness they are in’, a darkness that calls into question even ‘selfevident notions’ (cf. T 1.4.1).123 The extent to which he was serious about this deflation, however, seemed doubtful to many. While Bayle on the surface suggests that scepticism is valuable because it opens a space for fideism and ungrounded faith, a closer reading seems to show that the logical import of his account nevertheless seems decidedly contrary to religious dogma. In a parable that he presents about two abbés in Note B, Pyrrhonism highlights reasons to regard many of the central doctrines of Christianity as not only untenable but even false – namely the Trinity, the Incarnation, the immateriality of the soul, transubstantiation and other matters of ‘mystery’ or faith.124 Bayle, similarly, like Huet, says that sceptics may – as a matter of deference to custom and even to nature – acknowledge the existence of gods, while still refraining from theological-metaphysical claims about their essential being: It can be seen in Sextus Empiricus that they [the Pyrrhonians] admitted the existence of gods as other philosophers did, that they worshipped them in the customary manner, and that they did not deny their providence. But, in addition to the fact that they never acknowledged a first cause, which might have made them despise the idolatry of their time, it is certain that they believed nothing about the divine nature but with a suspense of judgment, nor confessed any of the things mentioned above, except in a doubtful way, and merely to accommodate themselves to the laws and customs of the age and the country in which they lived.125

Hume may have regarded not only Bayle’s logic but also Bayle’s dissimulation as a model for his own (for example, D. 2.1).126 Bayle not only implicitly raises questions about the truth of religious doctrine but also about whether the self-evidence of rational principles and demonstrations (in the form of clarity and distinctness,

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that is, the criterion of Cartesians) ought to be regarded as a proper criterion of truth. Bayle will at times appeal, like Descartes, to a ‘natural light’ to ground the authority of reason, but it is a criterion that he also problematises.127 Writing cleverly with the voice of a Christian abbé familiar with Pyrrhonism, Bayle subverts the criterion of rational self-evidence (dêlon, the opposite of adêlon) just as he argues for the irrationality of the conclusions underwritten by appeals to religious mystery. You could rightly maintain to him [the Pyrrhonist] that self-evidence [l’evidence] is the sure characteristic of truth; for if self-evidence were not, nothing else could be. ‘So be it’, he will say to you. ‘It is right here that I have been waiting for you. I will make you see that some things you reject as false are as evident as can be.’128

Bayle is radical, as he finds in the unreliability of self-evidence ‘the total extinction [l’extinction totale] not only of faith but also of reason; and nothing is more impossible than to rescue those who have carried their wild meanderings to this extent’.129 This is a terribly important moment in Bayle, as his conclusion may well be the antecedent to the shocking ‘total extinction of . . . evidence’ that Hume reaches as a result of his scepticism with regard to reason (T 1.4.1.6, SBN 183). Bayle recognises that, on purely rational grounds, Pyrrhonism is self-defeating: ‘it confounds itself; for if it were solid it would prove that it is certain that we ought to be in doubt’.130 That may not be an entirely bad outcome for sceptical dialectics, but Pyrrhonian subversion and self-subversion do lead to despair, even for Bayle: ‘How great the chaos, and how great the torment for the human mind!’ For the fideistic narrative the solution to this despair is faith: It seems therefore that this unfortunate state is the most proper one of all for convincing us that our reason is a path that leads us astray since, when it displays itself with the greatest subtlety, it plunges us into such an abyss. The natural conclusion of this ought to be to renounce this guide and to implore the cause of all things to give us a better one.

In Hume, similarly, sceptical subversion and self-subversion lead to the infamous despair of T 1.4.7. The response for Hume, however, is not the familiar fideistic appeal to faith of so many of his

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Pyrrhonian and Academic predecessors. Instead, Pyrrhonian Hume appeals merely to the Apelletic recognition of the guidance of nature and the Fourfold of common life (T 1.4.7.9ff.). Bayle seems to present a dramatic antecedent to Hume when he recognises the Pyrrhonian guidance of nature (not the divine) in Note B as, in an ironic voice, a protection from Pyrrhonism – writing there about the ‘natural inclination to reach decisions’ as ‘an impenetrable shield against the arrow of the Pyrrhonists’.131 There is a significant likelihood that Hume came to his understanding of Pyrrhonism, as we saw in §2.1.3.7, through Bayle’s own texts directly, but it is also possible that Bayle’s thoughts on Pyrrhonism found their way to Hume indirectly. Bayle was an influence upon Berkeley, for example, and therefore quite probably through Berkeley upon Hume.132 When Hume returned from France in 1737 with the Treatise, he resided in London’s Rainbow coffee house in Lancaster Court where Bayle’s official biographer, Pierre Desmaizeaux, also took lodgings. Epistolary evidence shows that Hume invited Desmaizeaux to read his manuscript Treatise and asked him for comments on it.133 Bayle’s many critics and commentators – perhaps in the periodical literature or perhaps through critical books – could easily have exposed his work to Hume. William King’s De origin mali, in its critique of Bayle, for example, was well placed to have reached Hume.134 The volume first appeared in 1702, but it was translated into English with extensive commentary by Edmund Law in 1731, an important year for Hume. In addition, the extensive and ferocious attack on Bayle by the Swiss theologian, mathematician and logician Jean-Pierre de Crousaz (1663–1750), called Examen du pyrrhonisme ancien et moderne, was published in 1733, just a year before Hume’s arrival in France. Some time between 1733 and 1740 Jean-Henri (Johann Heinrich) Samuel Formey wrote an abridgement of L’Examen that appeared in 1756 as, tellingly, Le triomphe de l’évidence. Crousaz’s popular La logique had already established his prominence earlier, in 1712 (an English edition appeared in 1724). That volume also contains descriptions and assessments of scepticism. The library at La Flèche seems to have held copies of both of Crousaz’s books.135 Crousaz may indeed have had a substantial influence upon Hume’s ideas about perception, the passions and scepticism. In La logique, Crousaz distinguished between Academics (or sceptics proper) and Pyrrhonians along the common lines of demarcation:

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Academics accept probability (vraisemblance) while Pyrrhonians do not. More importantly, however, in light of a possible relation to Hume, Crousaz distinguishes between two types of Pyrrhonians: 1) the ‘obstinate’ (entêtés) or those who abandon their doubts in common life and 2) those afflicted with an enduring pathology that generates a condition similar to that suffered by the ‘mad and melancholic’.136 This last suggests that Crousaz may be the source of Hume’s description of a kind of ‘melancholy and delirium’ and feeling of ‘forlorn solitude’ characteristic of total scepticism (T 1.4.7.9, SBN 269; T 1.4.7.1–2, SBN 264). Perhaps it also informs Hume’s discussion of madness at T 1.3.10. Crousaz may have suggested to Hume the common life cure – that is, of overcoming scepticism by returning to daily activities.137 One could go on. Indeed, throughout the philosophical literature of Hume’s day, Bayle and critiques of Bayle were ubiquitous.138 4.1.5.5 Huet: Socratic coherence. We saw in §2.1.3.6 that PierreDaniel Huet was a potential source of Hume’s understanding of Academic scepticism and that, importantly, Huet understood Academic scepticism to be consistent with Pyrrhonism. Huet writes that, in fact, ‘there is little or no Difference between his [Pyrrho’s] own sect, which is that of the Scepticks; and the Sect of Arcesilas [sic], which is that of the middle Academy’.139 After arguing that the Old and New Academies are continuous because they are both based upon Socrates’ profession of ignorance, Huet maintains that Arcesilaus, Carneades and Philo hold congruent views: As for the Corrective which was afterwards brought by Carneades and Philo, it ought not to be esteem’d of any Weight, for it is an easy Matter to reconcile what was said by Arcesilas, viz. that there is no Truth to be found in any Thing; with what was affirm’d by Carneades, who did not deny but that there might be some Truth in Things, but that we had no Rule to discover it.140

Academics, according to Huet, whose Traité appeared before Crousaz’s Examen, distinguish themselves from Pyrrhonians only for reasons of prudence. Hume nevertheless associates Huet’s Traité in Note 3 of the Dialogues with Pyrrhonism, perhaps because of the positive regard Huet gives it. What, then, counts as Pyrrhonism for Huet? He offers an extensive definition:

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Pyrrhonians never admitted of any Rule of Truth, or any Reasoning, nor of any Mark whereby Truth might be known; that they never affirm’d, defin’d, nor judged of any Thing; that they did not believe that any Thing was one Thing rather than another; that what new Arguments were alleged on one Side, they still brought others of equal Force and Weight to prove the contrary; that they did not prefer one Argument before another; that they maintain’d that there was nothing true; that every Thing was done through Custom; and that even then when they advnc’d all these Propositions, they did not affirm them but did it only out of a Spirit of Contradiction. For Pyrrho did oppose all the Doctrines of the other Sects, and when he affirm’d that they were all to be rejected, he was far from exempting his own Notions out of that Law; for he never pretended that they were either surer or more allowable than the rest; and when he affirm’d that we could comprehend nothing, he did not pretend to comprehend even that, which in his Opinion was equally incomprehensible; and therefore out of his universal Proposition, that nothing can be known, he did not even exempt that very Proposition, but compared it to a Dose of Physick, which not only carries off all pecant Humours, but doth likewise drive it self out of our Bodies along with them. Nevertheless, as he ceas’d to hope for the Knowledge of Truth, he kept to the Appearance of Things, which he would have us to admit, instead of a Criterion, or Rule of Truth, in the Affairs of Life, and that we should follow the Laws, Customs and Sentiments of Nature, but without forming a Judgment or Opinion from them. By this Means he attain’d to that Peace and Tranquility of Mind, which he had been seeking for . . .141

It is a familiar set of characteristics to those familiar with the sceptical tradition, and many of these characteristics can be found in Hume. Even the self-eliminating quality of sceptical arguments is evident when Hume writes that they, along with dogmatism, ‘both vanish’ (T 1.4.1.12, SBN 187). Huet goes on to characterise Pyrrhonism with familiar adjectives: The Followers of Pyrrho were call’d after his Name, Pyrrhonians; they were likewise call’d Scepticks, because they consider’d and examin’d the Weight of the Proofs that were alleg’d for and against any Matter; they were also call’d Zereticks, because they apply’d themselves to the Search of Truth. Lastly, They had the Name of Aporeticks given them, because they made a Profession of doubting of every Thing.142

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Huet argues that scepticism does not preclude learning, and, just as Bayle had observed, sceptics are to be preferred to dogmatists because sceptics consider different sides of an issue.143 There are, in addition, a raft of at least seven superficial differences that Huet takes pains to oppose that bear some likelihood of having informed Hume’s view of the two schools. The principal differences that Huet reconciles involve the Academics appealing to probabilities and making relatively positive assertions, while the Pyrrhonians are thought to appeal only to appearances in a more restrained way. 1. Though Academics write more affirmatively, while Pyrrhonians more ‘doubtfully’, their expressions are logically the same.144 2. Though Academics advance assertions in terms of probability, while Pyrrhonians ‘follow the common Uses of Life without Opinion or Persuasion’, their practices are not meaningfully different. When the Academics, in fact, write about ‘opinion’ or ‘persuasion’, they mean much the same as what Pyrrhonians mean by having ideas ‘imprinted in their Minds’ (a phrasing which may inform Hume’s use of ‘impression’).145 3. Similarly, while in a strict sense Pyrrhonians ‘pretend’ to a kind of doxastic egalitarianism (that is, that all ideas ‘are equal with respect to the Credit we give to them’), the Pyrrhonian preference to ‘the common Offices of Life’ results in a position very much the same as Academic probability.146 4. Academics claim to be drawn to a proposition by the probable truth of its content, whereas Pyrrhonians deny this but nonetheless accept that they ‘suffer’d themselves to be led to it’. 5. In what may be an important insight for Hume, Huet argues that Academics following probabilities is the same as the Pyrrhonian Fourfold observances, or at least Threefold: obeying ‘the Laws, Customs and Inclinations of Nature’. Huet writes about the two kinds of sceptics that in ‘this, as well as in other Things, their language is different, tho’ their Notions are not’.147 6. Huet argues that the characterisation of the Academics as more positively assertive is erroneous. 7. Erroneous, too, is the claim that the Academics are more epistemically ‘comprehensive’ (or what we have called ‘apprehensive’). Elsewhere, Huet provocatively argues that the Pyrrhonian refusal of ta adêla or the hidden means the same as accepting appearances as

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‘uncertain’, which gives further backing to the idea that T 1.4.1 and Humean probabilism (or the degrading of certainty into probability) may be read as consistent with Pyrrhonian scepticism.148 Huet develops the view, possibly influential with Hume, that our minds are limited by their being able to perceive only through the restrictions imposed on our cognitive faculties by the bodies in which we are, as Socrates maintained, ‘imprisoned’ (Phaedo 82d–85b).149 That limitation undermines the logical capacities of natural theology to prove the truths of religion.150 Unlike Hume, however, Huet accepts divine illumination in place of natural theology. He legitimates religious authority by the Pyrrhonian appeal to custom.151 Also contrary to the radical Hume, Huet regards the probabilistic realism of Metrodorian Academic scepticism to be congruent with Pyrrhonian limiting to appearances: Though I don’t deny that whilst we are ty’d to this mortal Body, our Understanding may attain to the high Degree of human Certitude, which though surrounded with the Darkness of Sin, and obscur’d with the Clouds of Humanity . . . may nevertheless cast, if not a fixed intent, yet at least a lively and piercing Eye towards that supreme Truth . . . [A]nd though I cannot with my naked Eye behold the glorious Sun, yet I can look upon the Moon and the Stars.152

In short, while Huet may have conveyed to Hume a positive view of Pyrrhonism, Hume drives its sceptical import deeper. Huet rebuffs the apraxia criticism of Pyrrhonism by defining a ‘vast’, clear, albeit condescending distinction between people thinking as philosophers and people engaging the practices of common life. In ordinary conduct, simply put, ‘we cease to be Philosophers, to be Opponents, doubtful or uncertain; and become poor, simple credulous Idiots’.153 Huet’s language in this passage is suggestively similar to Hume’s famous remarks about how he dispels his sceptical ‘melancholy and delirium’ (T 1.4.7.9, SBN 269). While Hume writes there that ‘I dine, I play a game of back-gammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends’, Huet says: I eat and drink, I visit my Friends, I show my Respects to them, and entertain them: I affirm and deny that this is true, or that is false; for as Cicero tells us, (Offic. Lib. ii.) There is a vast Difference between the Subtlety with which Men seek after Truth in their Disputes, and that with which a Man adapts his Discourse to the common Opinion.154

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Does the ‘vast difference’ Huet describes support a Metrodorian position, such that the return to common life by means of nature is a return to realism? Not if as ‘poor, simple credulous Idiots’ humans are non-dogmatic. I will make just that case for Hume’s scepticism in Chapter 8. 4.1.5.6 Sceptical minor notes: Glanvill, Newton, Dryden, Shaftesbury, Bosc. There are, of course, other sources from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries from which Hume may have received his views on scepticism. A number deserve mention. Hume may have culled ideas from the sceptical theories of Joseph Glanvill’s The Vanity of Dogmatizing (1661), whose second edition was retitled Scepsis scientifica; or, Confest ignorance the way to science (1665; presented to the Royal Society in 1664). Glanvill’s text criticises Aristotelianism as a form of dogmatism and promotes modern empirical science instead, though it acknowledges sceptically that even the methods of modern empirical science are insufficient to the task of acquiring proper knowledge of natural laws. The Common Sense philosopher Dugald Stewart (1753–1828) and the influential historian of philosophy Wilhelm Windelband (1848–1915) both read as a precursor to Hume’s critique of causal power Glanvill’s sceptical critique of claims to having apprehended a causal connection.155 Glanvill (1636–80) not only criticises the idea that we can have knowledge of causes because the causal power is ‘insensible’; he also distinguishes, much as Hume does initially, between the certainty of mathematical reasoning and the uncertainty of empirical knowledge about matters of fact. Drawing from Sextus Empiricus in his critique of the epistemic capacities of sensation, Glanvill argues that humans are unable to know souls, bodies and the way the soul and body affect one another through perception and memory.156 Glanvill is perhaps noteworthy not only because of these theoretical similarities between his and Hume’s texts but also because the 1665 edition of Scepsis scientifica was held in the private library of the University of Edinburgh’s Newtonian Professor of Natural Philosophy, Robert Stewart, with whom Hume probably studied. Hume bought a subscription to Stewart’s library in 1724 while still a student. Newtonian science, of course, informs both the rhetorical framing of Hume’s ‘Attempt to Introduce the Experimental Method of Reasoning in Moral Subjects’ (the subtitle of the Treatise) and the philosophical content of his naturalism (see §5.1 below). The work,

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moreover, of Isaac Newton himself – symbolic figurehead of mature modern natural science – may be positioned within the sceptical via media potentially influencing Hume. Newton, who was born in 1642, the year of Galileo’s death, signals in his Principia a kind of scepticism about what remain merely hypothetical explanations of mechanism, despite our best efforts of inquiry. That gesture towards a quasi-scepticism in Newton has come to be known as his non fingo principle. Newton articulated the principle in methodological Rule 3 as well as in the ‘General Scholium’ that he appended to the second (1713) and third (1726) editions of the Principia in response to criticisms that he had made claim to apprehending ta adêla in the form of ‘occult’ or hidden qualities, especially in his theory of gravitational force.157 Science, says Newton to make clear his reply, is strictly about ‘phenomena’ or appearances. I have not as yet been able to discover the reason for these properties of gravity from phenomena, and I do not feign hypotheses [hypotheses non fingo]. For whatever is not deduced from the phenomena must be called a hypothesis; and hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical, or based on occult qualities [i.e., ta adêla], or mechanical [again, ta adêla], have no place in experimental philosophy. In this philosophy particular propositions are inferred from the phenomena [i.e., appearances], and afterwards rendered general by induction.158

These passages appeared at an important phase of Hume’s intellectual development, and they present a recognisably Pyrrhonian moment in Newton’s text when one recalls that Sextus’ account of Agrippa’s fourth of five tropes similarly refuses dogmatists’ appeal to unjustified hypotheses (what in this context means assumptions, speculations or ungrounded posits), especially in their efforts to avoid scepticism (PH 1.15.168). Hume’s rhetoric about bringing experimental philosophy into moral subjects (frontispiece; T 0.7, SBN xvi-vii) is commonly understood to mark his appropriation of Newtonianism. Hume acknowledges the sceptical qualities of Newton’s work in the History of England, writing that Newton was a critic of the epistemic pretences of modern empirical science while also an inquirer (sceptic) who accepted the ultimate hiddenness of the natural world: ‘While Newton seemed to draw off the veil from some of the mysteries of nature, he showed at the same time the imperfections of the mechanical philosophy; and thereby restored her ultimate secrets to that obscurity,

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in which they ever did and ever will remain’ (H 6.71.542). In the first Enquiry, Hume approvingly writes about Newton’s Academic modesty regarding his ether theory of gravity: ‘he was so cautious and modest as to allow, that it was a mere hypothesis, not to be insisted on, without more experiments’ (E 7.25n16, SBN 73).159 Of course, Pyrrhonism and Academicism may be discerned among many besides the natural philosophers of the period. Hume characterised the influential English poet John Dryden (1621–1700), at work at just this time, as a genius ‘perverted by indecency and bad taste’ (H 6.71.543). This perverse genius, however, praised the Academic qualities of the Royal Society and admired natural science, while also ultimately embracing a more thoroughgoing Pyrrhonism about the epistemic prospects of scientific systems. Echoing Montaigne in his acceptance of the fideism of common life, Dryden writes in the Preface to Religio laici, Or a Layman’s Faith (1682): ‘Being naturally inclined to scepticism in philosophy, I have no reason to impose my opinions in a subject which is above it.’ Dryden’s Pyrrhonism, however, was sober compared to that of the sceptical English satirist Lord Rochester (1647–80), who advanced radically sceptical ideas and whom Hume also recognised as a ‘licentious’ and ‘offensive’ man, as well as a ‘genius’ (H 6.71.543).160 Locke’s patron, the moral philosopher Anthony Cooper, the 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury, discusses epistemological scepticism in his Sensus Communis 2.2 (1709), Moralists 1.2 (1709), Miscellaneous Reflections 2.2 (1711) and in the description of these texts appearing in the Index to vol. 3 of Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711). Hume seems to have acquired a threevolume set of the 1723 edition of Shaftesbury’s Characteristicks as early as 1726.161 The Norman Franciscan thinker Jacques du Bosc (ob. 1660) wrote one of the most important proto-feminist works of the early modern era (La femme heroique, 1645). Prior to that, in his Le philosophie indifférent (1643), Bosc, like Mersenne and like Hume at T 1.4, argues that Pyrrhonian logic seems invincible. Also like Hume, Bosc maintains that the conclusions that Pyrrhonians draw are, in any case, too extreme. Echoing Montaigne, Bosc regards humans as standing midway between beasts and angels epistemically; and the impossibility of humans acquiring the sort of absolute knowledge characteristic of the divine does not entail the complete ignorance of the merely animal but rather something in the middle.

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4.2 Pyrrhonism in Hume In his 1734 letter to an anonymous physician, Hume describes how when he was 18 years old (in 1729) he happened in his reading upon a ‘new scene of Thought’, which he said ‘transported me beyond Measure, and made me, with an Ardor natural to young men, throw up every other Pleasure of Business to apply entirely to it’. It was a scene he believed would free him from the ‘endless Disputes’ (or diaphônia) of established philosophy and criticism (LT 1.13, #3). Could the ‘new scene’ Hume encountered have been informed by scepticism? We are now in a position to offer some answer to that question, as well as to see more clearly why it is sensible to read Hume’s texts as substantially Pyrrhonian, despite his disavowals. I will lay down the following three planks for my case: 1) the exposure plank, that Hume had access to Pyrrhonian texts, used them, and was otherwise exposed to Pyrrhonian ideas; 2) the suspicion plank, that it makes sense to approach the question of Hume’s Pyrrhonism with a hermeneutic of suspicion; and 3) the similarities plank, or that there are sufficiently strong similarities between central features of Hume’s theories and texts and those of the recognised Pyrrhonian tradition to infer influence. More generally, the case for Hume’s Pyrrhonism is made by the extent to which reading Hume as a Pyrrhonian sceptic brings coherence to interpretations of his thought and resolves persistent interpretive controversies. This last reason, similarity with Pyrrhonian texts and interpretive power, of course, can be compelling even if Hume did not consciously appropriate Pyrrhonian ideas. Hume may well have hit upon Pyrrhonian-like ideas on his own in an accidental way; he might have been led to them unwittingly by the logical space of sceptical philosophical topics that he had entered; and he could have simply assimilated sceptical ideas by osmosis, as it were, given his immersion in the intellectual culture of his time, a milieu ‘infested with Pyrrhonism’.162 While acknowledging these possible alternatives, a compelling case can nevertheless still be made that Humean Pyrrhonism was thoughtfully and intentionally crafted. I have already begun to set out the interpretive advantages to a sceptical reading, and I have begun chronicling the similarities between Hume’s texts and those of the Pyrrhonian (and Academic) traditions. I will continue to do so in the course of the rest of this volume. Here, though, before continuing with

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that project, we must face head on questions related to access, as well as the interpretive possibilities opened up by a hermeneutic of suspicion.

4.2.1 First Plank: Hume’s Access and Exposure to the Outlines Almost a century after the 1621 Chouet edition appeared on the scene, another important edition of the Outlines was produced by the Hamburg professor Johannes Albertus Fabricius in Leipzig in 1718. Fabricius placed the Greek text in this volume side-byside with critical annotations and a revised Latin translation of the Outlines. The text includes Stephanus’s preface, as well as Hervet’s dedication and preface; Fabricius’s Outlines are followed by a republication of Hervet’s Adversus mathematicos. The Fabricius volume also provides readers with a useful list of completed and promised editions of Sextus’ work, along with a compendium of Testimonia about Sextus and Pyrrhonism. Fabricius’s edition has served as the basis of editions published ever since, and because the Fabricius edition was the one produced closest to the time of Hume’s philosophical labour, most scholars have concluded that this is the edition he always used. However, it was probably not so.163 4.2.1.1 Five misleading citations. Hume makes five direct references to Sextus’ texts, the first, curiously, not appearing until 1751, with the Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals. Hume refers there both to Adversus mathematicos and to the Outlines of Pyrrhonism. Malebranche refers to the same passage of Adversus mathematicos, raising the possibility that Hume drew at least that quotation from Malebranche, whom of course Hume had read, rather than from Sextus directly.164 Hume also refers to Adversus mathematicos in sections 4 and 12 of ‘The Natural History of Religion’ (first published in Four Dissertations, 1757) and in his important essay ‘On the Populousness of Ancient Nations’ (ES 399n58; first published in 1752 among Hume’s Political Discourses, the essay seems in large measure to have been completed by 1750).165 These citations can and have in the past misled editors of Hume’s texts for two reasons: 1) editions of Sextus Empiricus after Fabricius did not follow his chapter divisions in a consistent way; and 2) Hume’s citations correspond in every case precisely to the editorial divisions produced by the Chouet brothers’

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edition of Sextus’ work, while only those to the Outlines correspond to Fabricius. It is likely, therefore, that Hume’s citations were to the then-outdated Chouet brothers edition of 1621 and not to the 1718 Fabricius edition.166 Perhaps explaining this oddity, Dario Perinetti has recently discovered through examination of what he calls the ‘Riboutet Catalogue’ (1777) that the library at La Flèche seems to have held a copy of the 1621 Chouet edition while Hume was at work there.167 Library ex libris marks also suggest that the library held a binding that contained the 1596 Hervet edition, along with the 1562 Estienne editions, as well.168 Perinetti’s discovery, in conjunction with Hume’s later citations, strengthens the claim that Hume was reading Sextus directly early on, while he was composing the Treatise in France. Hume’s citations, indexed both to Chouet and to Fabricius, are as follows: 1. ‘SEXT. EMP. adversus mathem. lib. viii.’169 Cited in the Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals, section 2, ‘Of Benevolence’ (1751); EM 2.2.15, SBN 180. • (ADO 3.18 [M 9.18]) To a quotation from Prodicus of Ceos (460–395 BC) presenting his explanation of the origin of religious worship: ‘The ancients accounted as Gods the sun and moon and rivers and springs and in general all the things that are of benefit for our life, because of the benefit derived from them, even as the Egyptians deify the Nile.’ • Chouet: Adversus mathematicos, Book 8170 • Fabricius: Adversus mathematicos, 9.18171 2. ‘SEXT. EMP. lib iii. cap. 20.’ Cited in the Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals 4, ‘Of Political Society’ (1751): EM 4.5n15, SBN 207n1. • (PH 3.22.169–70) To the stoics on good and utility: ‘The Stoics, then, assert that good is “utility or not other than utility,” meaning by “utility” virtue and right action.’ • Chouet: Outlines of Pyrrhonism, Book 3, chapter 20 • Fabricius: Outlines of Pyrrhonism, Book 3, chapter 20 3. ‘SEXT. EMP. lib. iii. cap. 24.’ Cited in ‘On the Populousness of Ancient Nations’ (1752): ES 399n58. • (PH 3.24.211) To Solon’s permitting parents to kill their children172 • Chouet: Outlines of Pyrrhonism, Book 3, chapter 24 • Fabricius: Outlines of Pyrrhonism, Book 3, chapter 24

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4. ‘Adversus Mathem. lib. ix.’ Cited in ‘The Natural History of Religion’ (1757), section 4, ‘Deities Not Considered as Creators or Formers of the World’; N 4.11 (p. 47n28). • (ADO 4.18–19 [M 10.18–19]) To Epicurus about the beginning of the world173 • Chouet: Adversus mathematicos, Book 9 • Fabricius: Adversus mathematicos, 10.18–19174 5. ‘Sext. Empir. advers. Mathem. lib.viii.’ Cited in ‘The Natural History of Religion’, section 12 (1757); N 12.25 (p. 75n82). • (ADO 3.182–90 [M 9.182–90]) To sorites-like arguments in Carneades and Clitomachus showing ‘that there was no more foundation’ for marginal than core religious doctrines, and similarly in Cicero’s De natura deorum in the voice of Cotta175 • Chouet: Adversus mathematicos, Book 8 • Fabricius: Adversus mathematicos, 9.182–90176 Hume also had access to many other texts containing accounts, translations and selections from Sextus in the University Library and in the Library of the Faculty of Advocates, Edinburgh’s most extensive library, where he worked from 1752 to 1757 and to which he would have had access in any case through friends, relatives and associates all his life.177 Hume’s family library at their estate, Ninewells, near Chirnside, may have held copies of Sextus’ work; and Hume may have also enjoyed access to the fabulous library collected by Sir David Dalrymple (1726–92) and his grandfather, also called Sir David (c. 1665–1721), at Newhailes House, just east of Edinburgh. 4.2.1.2 Vernacular translations and other sceptical texts. Among the other possible textual sources of Hume’s understanding of Pyrrhonism are several vernacular translations and summaries of Sextus’ work potentially available to him. Note G, for example, of the article on ‘Pyrrho’ in Bayle’s Dictionnaire points to Gassendi’s De fine logicae, which contains a section, ‘Modi epoches scepticorum circa veritatem’ (1658), summarising Pyrrhonism’s ten modes drawn from Aenesidemus.178 One of the most prominent vernacular translations of Sextus was Swiss mathematician Claude Huart’s 1725 French translation of the Outlines, entitled Les Hipotiposes ou institutions Pirroniennes de Sextus Empiricus en trois livres, Traduites du grec, Avec des Notes

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qui expliquent le Text en plusieurs endroits.179 The text contains a 22-page preface on Pyrrhonism. According to the press-mark, this text was acquired by the Faculty of Advocates some time between 1725, just when Hume probably left university, and 1776, the year of Hume’s death. Two important reviews of the text, in 1726 and 1727, were available to Hume.180 An English translation of Sextus appears in Part IV, ‘Containing the Sceptick Sect’, of Thomas Stanley’s (1625–78) History of Philosophy, Containing Those on whom the Attribute of Wise was Conferred.181 Offering its reader brief accounts of the lives and works of Pyrrho of Elis and Timon of Phlius, Stanley’s 1655 volume also published an English translation of all three books of Sextus’ Outlines in their entirety. Stanley’s History was exceedingly popular and reissued many times over the course of the next century. Both the University Library and the Library of the Faculty of Advocates held the 1687 edition, and the University Library held the first edition as well.182 The text was used as a source book for undergraduates under Professor Charles Mackie during Hume’s time at the University of Edinburgh, which he attended between February of 1723 and some time in 1725, when his family’s ‘land’ or apartment in the Lawnmarket burned down. (He never graduated.) Jean LeClerc’s popular 1688 French summary of Locke’s Essay in his journal, Bibliotèque universelle, also contains a summary of Sextus’ arguments along with LeClerc’s refutations. Among less important texts, John Wolley (c. 1530–96), Latin secretary to Queen Elizabeth I, seems to have produced a Latin manuscript of at least part of Adversus mathematicos (Adversus Logicos 1) in sixteenth-century England.183 Indications of another Elizabethan English translation of Sextus appear in the Preface by Thomas Nashe to Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella (1591), where Nashe refers to an English text of the Outlines.184 Sir Walter Raleigh may have read this translation, and it seems that some English translation informed his essay ‘Scepticke’, collected in The Remains of Sir Walter Raleigh (1651).185 Scepticism, in any case, was a common topic of conversation among Edinburgh intellectuals, scientific and otherwise, and Hume may have been exposed to sceptical texts and conversations in Scotland’s intellectual capital in a variety of ways. In the absence of London’s Royal Society and the aristocratic salons of Paris, Caledonia’s intellectual scene flourished in the more public and middle-class oyster bars, restaurants and coffee houses, as

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well as in the many clubs and societies that popped up like mushrooms across Edinburgh in the eighteenth century. Hume later in life joined and founded a number of these societies, including the Poker Club, the Select Society and the Philosophical Society. As a student he may have been influenced by the Rankenian Club, which had engaged in correspondence with Bishop Berkeley. Allan Ramsay the elder’s progressive bookshop in the Luckenbooths in the High Street near St Giles’s Kirk was also a popular place for intellectual exchange. These early potential influences are not insignificant, since in the ‘Advertisement’ to Volume 2 of the 1777 edition of Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects, Hume remarks that in some fashion the Treatise had already been ‘projected before he left College’ (E p. 1, SBN 2).186 That means it was projected by the time he was just 14 years old. In sum, these citations, this context and this availability together, in addition to the connections we have already charted, give a strong indication that Hume, by the time he composed the Treatise, had probably been exposed to the texts of Sextus Empiricus and Pyrrhonism, and indeed had acquired some familiarity with them.187 It is perhaps no surprise therefore that Pyrrhonism appears well before Academic scepticism in Hume’s published work. We must now turn to the question of whether it is proper to read Hume on Pyrrhonism with a hermeneutic of suspicion.

4.2.2 Second Plank: Radicalism, Religion and a Hermeneutic of Suspicion By a ‘hermeneutic of suspicion’, I mean in part not taking Hume’s remarks at face value but looking instead for clues that suggest an alternative reading and perhaps a Pyrrhonian palimpsest all but concealed within Hume’s texts. I also mean formulating an interpretation that does not ignore what plausible reasons Hume might have had to dissimulate and mask his Pyrrhonism. Hume published A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40) and his other works up until Three Essays, Moral and Political in 1748 anonymously. The practice was not uncommon, but it was certainly prudential, as may have been his decision to publish the Treatise in London (with John Noon) rather than in Edinburgh (unlike the 1741–42 Essays, published with Scotland’s prominent Alexander Kincaid). A sign, moreover, that Hume may not have been entirely

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forthcoming about his philosophical commitments can be found on the title page of his very first publication in the epigraph that he selected to announce his entrance into the world of published letters: Rara temporum felicitas, ubi sentire, quae velis; & quae sentias, dicere licet.188 Hume drew the remark that opens the Treatise, according to his citation, from chapter 1 of Tacitus’ secondcentury Historiæ, a work advocating Vespasian’s political prudence and realism. Tacitus, however, may not have been Hume’s immediate or his only source. Spinoza – who was commonly understood in Hume’s time as an atheist associated with political and religious liberalism – also quotes Tacitus’ remark both at the beginning of the final chapter and in the preface of his Tractatus theologicopoliticus, published posthumously in 1677 for prudential reasons. More provocatively, the remark appears in the entry on Tacitus in Bayle’s Dictionnaire, a provenance that would have raised suspicions that scepticism lurks in what follows to the more erudite and sensitive among Hume’s readers.189 We cannot know exactly what Hume meant by deploying this ambiguous quote. Given the circumstances under which he wrote, however, it would not be unreasonable to read it as a stealthy signal, an ironic remark that alerts the close reader to read between the lines. Irony is often, after all, closely allied with scepticism.190 Other readings are, of course, possible.191 Given the reasonable alternative meanings of the quote, Hume’s evoking Tacitus offers grounds for reading his texts in a suspicious light. But what about motive? Why might Hume dissimulate and mask the Pyrrhonian strains of his thought and categorise his scepticism as simply and moderately Academic? One reason may have been the complicated confluence of ambition and radicalism that animated Hume’s intellectual life. His autobiographical essay, ‘My Own Life’, makes it clear that he was ambitious and aspired to popular success for his work. Similarly, in the ‘Advertisement’ for the Treatise, Hume writes that ‘The approbation of the public I consider as the greatest reward of my labors’ (T p. 2, SBN xii). As a second son (third child) of a relatively wealthy family of the middling ranks, Hume was afforded only a relatively meagre allowance, and popular success would bring a welcome financial reward. Hume was disappointed when in 1739–40 the Treatise fell, as he famously observed, ‘dead-born from the press’ upon its initial publication (MOL xxxiv). In the face of that disappointment, Hume turned to more popular and more easily digestible literary

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forms in the Essays. He launched a second effort to attain philosophical reputation by refashioning in a more felicitous and safer form Book 1 of the Treatise in the Philosophical Essays concerning Human Understanding (1748), hitching it to his Essays with the subtitle, ‘By the Author of the Essays Moral and Political’.192 Hume also reworked Books 2 and 3 of the Treatise, of course, to a similar purpose with the Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals (1751). Real fame, however, would come to him only in 1752, thirteen years after Books 1 and 2 of the Treatise, with his fourth collection of essays (called Political Discourses) and, later, his History of England, an attempt to reach an audience through yet another popular genre.193 Despite his persistent ambition, Hume also nurtured philosophical ideas that in his own estimation were radical, even revolutionary. Just after the publication of the Treatise he wrote excitedly and hopefully to his friend and kinsman, Henry Home, later Lord Kames, in the year Books 1 and 2 of the Treatise would be published, that the text’s ‘principles’ are ‘so remote from the vulgar Sentiments on this Subject, that were they to take place, they wou’d produce almost a total Alteration in Philosophy; and you know, revolutions of this kind are not easily brought about’ (13 February 1739; NLT 3, #2). A year later, in the Preface to the Abstract of the Treatise, he claims that his thought is ‘bold’ and characterised by an ‘air of singularity’ and ‘novelty’, and that ‘were his philosophy receiv’d, we must alter from the foundation the greatest part of the sciences’ (A 405, SBN 643–4). Advancing a radical doctrine and simultaneously aspiring to literary success required in eighteenth-century Britain a delicate touch, especially if one’s central philosophical inspiration was anathema to many among one’s audience and regarded by those wielding power as absurd, irreligious and effectively dangerous. Hume certainly understood these circumstances; and, as we saw, Augustine, Bayle and Huet offered him lessons in dissimulation that had been enlisted by earlier sceptics.194 As a maturing thinker, the young Hume would have been aware of the Presbyterian attacks on his neighbour near Chirnside, William Dudgeon, in 1732–33. He was also probably aware of the suspension in 1729 of the University of Glasgow’s divinity professor, John Simson, for heterodoxy.195 Confirmation that Hume was aware of the delicacy of the circumstances he faced and the sensitivity of his readers to issues of scepticism is suggested by his suppressing and modifying his early

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work in order to avoid condemnation. Before the publication of the Treatise, Hume excised text from it that would later become ‘Of Miracles’ (E 10), writing to Kames on 2 December 1737 that [I] accordingly inclose some Reasonings concerning Miracles, which I once thought of publishing with the rest, but which I am afraid will give too much offence, even as the world is disposed at present . . . I am at present castrating my work, that is, cutting off its nobler parts: that is, endeavouring it shall give as little offence as possible. (LT 1.25, #6)196

Still, some of Hume’s readers saw through his disguise. Despite the cloaking strategies of the Treatise, for example, the text nevertheless exhibited for an early reviewer at Bibliothèque raisonnée (1740–41) Hume’s ‘taste for Pyrrhonism’. Recent archival research has confirmed that many of Hume’s contemporary readers found his work, even in its pruned presentation, to be deeply threatening and irreligious.197 Perhaps the ease with which this was discerned in part explains Hume’s subsequently emphasising his Academicism in the first Enquiry.198 He suffered from the negative reception of his work nonetheless. Perhaps most stinging, Hume was twice rejected from professorial appointments because of the objectionable content of his writings. The first rejection came from his alma mater, and it landed at the moment when he probably hoped that his philosophical masterpiece would carry him to a weighty appointment. Hume wrote an apologetic epistle, ‘A Letter from a Gentleman’, in defence and explanation of his work, just as his opponents solidified their case against his candidacy for the chair in Ethics and Pneumatic Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, vacated in 1742 by John Pringle. The letter, though perhaps not intended for public consumption, was published by Kames in 1745 together with a list of furious charges related to scepticism and atheism that had been compiled and distributed by the Revd William Wishart (the younger), principal of the university, who regarded Hume’s potential appointment as posing ‘a great danger’. Hume singles out issues of scepticism and irreligion in a different letter that he wrote to Matthew Sharpe on 25 April 1745 about the storm that his ideas precipitated. The Sharpe letter centrally features scepticism and complains that ‘a popular Clamour has been raised against me in Edinburgh, on account of scepticism, heterodoxy, and other hard names’ (LT 1.59, #25).

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This defensive pleading offers evidence not only of the seriousness of the objections raised against Hume but also, and perhaps most importantly, of Hume’s awareness of the implications for his career of those objections, as well as the intensity of the passions behind them. Those problematic implications would harry him for the rest of his life. In 1752, ten years after Pringle stepped down and seven years after the rancorous circumstances in which he wrote the ‘Letter from a Gentleman’, Hume would be denied another university professorship, this time the chair of Logic at Glasgow University. University politics, however, was not Hume’s only problem. In the context of matters ecclesiastical, George Anderson criticised Hume in An Estimate of the Profit and Loss of Religion (1753). Hume also faced a direct attack in the censure to which the Kirk nearly subjected him and Kames in 1755 on charges of religious infidelity.199 The furies launched an opening salvo on 23 May 1755, just as the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland convened in Edinburgh, when the Revd John Bonar published An Analysis of the Moral and Religious Sentiments contained in the Writings of Sopho [i.e., Kames], and David Hume, Esq. The pamphlet assailed Hume and Kames as corrupting and irreligious, implicitly calling upon the Kirk to act against the miscreants. Bonar charged Hume with six remonstrances: Prop. I. All distinction betwixt virtue and vice is merely imaginary. [. . .] Prop. II. Justice has no foundation further than it contributes to public advantage. [. . .] Prop. III. Adultery is very lawful, but sometimes not expedient. [. . .] Prop. IV. Religion and its ministers are prejudicial to mankind, and will always be found either to run into the heights of superstition or enthusiasm. [. . .] Prop. V. Christianity has no evidence of its being a divine revelation. [. . .] Prop. VI. Of all the modes of Christianity Popery is the best, and the reformation from thence was only the work of madmen and enthusiasts.200

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Hume’s liberal friends in the Kirk, such as the Revd Hugh Blair, succeeded in shielding him, and his relief is palpable in the sardonic remark that he conveyed to his friend Allan Ramsay: The last Assembly sat on me. They did not propose to burn me, because they cannot. But they intend to give me over to Satan, which they think they have the power of doing. My friends, however, prevailed, and my damnation is postponed for a twelvemonth. But the next Assembly will surely be upon me.201

Hume’s reference to being burned was not quite as flippant as it may seem today. Scotland had put to death its last witch, a woman at least popularly called Janet Horne, not quite thirty years beforehand, in 1727 (the year Hume reached the formative age of 16) in Dornoch, Sutherland, where she was stripped naked and rolled in tar before being stuffed into a barrel and burned alive. Scotland’s witchcraft laws were still on the statute books, in fact, until the Parliament at Westminster repealed them in 1736, just when Hume was hard at work on the Treatise in France, where witches were still being executed until 1745 with the burning of Fr Louis Debaraz in Lyon. The repeal of the law making witchcraft a capital offence ignited religious dogmatists in Scotland, and Hume mocked their fury in a 1742 letter to his close friend, the newly elected Member of Parliament and later Lord Rector of Glasgow University, William Mure (1718–76): ‘I entreat you to get the Bill about Witches repeal’d, & to move for some new Bill to secure the Christian Religion, by burning Deists, Socinians, Moralists, & Hutchinsonians’ (LT 1.44, #18). Socrates, of course, had also been prosecuted for impiety and for corrupting others, and Hume was very much right that the year following the General Assembly’s relatively innocuous threats of 1755 would bring yet more persecution. It would come at him in that next round from the divines, however, through different and more powerful conduits – the civil authorities and the press, rather than the Kirk proper or the universities. Threats by means of civil law were in 1756 levied against Hume via an attack on his publisher in London, Andrew Millar, by the powerful Bishop of Gloucester, William Warburton (1698–1779). Considering their powerful source, the threats were a serious form of intimidation. Rather than pursuing his menacing legal action, however, Warburton elected

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instead to prosecute Hume in the court of public opinion, heaping opprobrium upon him in a strident pamphlet, Remarks on Mr. David Hume’s Essay on The Natural History of Religion (1757). Hume’s response was characteristically prudent. Three years earlier, in 1754, with the first publication of a volume of Hume’s History (since 1762 known as volume 5), a ruckus had been raised about the irreligious quality of those texts by both lay and clerical readers. Warburton, for example, shortly after the release of the volume, described Hume in private correspondence as ‘an atheistical Jacobite, a monster as rare with us as a hippogriff’ (H 1.xiv).202 After learning about the hostile reaction to two passages in particular, attributing enthusiasm and superstition to the Catholic Church, Hume excised them along with a number of others.203 It is unsurprising, therefore, that when Warburton announced his intention to unleash a legal assault in 1756, and with the memory of the near-excommunication of 1755 still afresh, Hume followed a similar course. In addition, although he refused to suppress entirely ‘The Natural History of Religion’, Hume did alter two passages in it (at 6.8 and 6.12), explaining to Adam Smith in March 1757 that the ‘Natural History’ had been ‘emended in point of prudence’.204 The essays ‘Of Suicide’ and ‘Of the Immortality of the Soul’, in contrast, Hume smothered entirely in 1756. Having already submitted them to Millar for publication in 1755, Hume ‘repented’ and decided that they posed too great a risk to him and perhaps even to Millar, according to his 1772 recounting of those events to William Strahan.205 They were for Hume, in his own words, texts ‘which from my abundant Prudence I suppress’d’ (LT 2.253, #465). Hume perceived the danger to be so acute that the offensive essays were cut physically out of volumes that Millar had already printed, volumes that would have become a publication entitled Five Dissertations.206 After compensating and consulting with Millar, Hume had a stub inserted into the pruned books at page 200, where a new and magnificent essay he produced just for this occasion, ‘Of the Standard of Taste’, was installed.207 The collection was released, finally, as Four Dissertations in 1757, though a number of unexpurgated copies of the Five Dissertations circulated anyway, much to Hume’s chagrin.208 Among those who acquired original, uncut copies, it seems, were Allan Ramsay and John Wilkes. The tumult was all deeply troubling to Hume, and some indication of his contempt for the censorious divines behind it might

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be gleaned from the unusual dedication in Four Dissertations to his cousin, the Revd John Home. Home had himself been so ferociously hounded by the devout after staging his controversial play – Douglas, a Tragedy – in 1756 that in 1758 he resigned from the ministry altogether. The content of the dedication says a great deal about Hume’s self-understanding of the audience he faced. I own too, that I have the ambition to be the first who shall in public express his admiration of your noble tragedy of Douglas; one of the most interesting and pathetic pieces, that was ever exhibited on any theatre . . . My enemies, you know, and, I own, even sometimes my friends, have reproached me with the love of paradoxes and singular opinions; and I expect to be exposed to the same imputation, on account of the character, which I have here given of your Douglas.209

In short, the events surrounding the publication of Four Dissertations exhibit a long-standing and ruling prudential-though-frustrated animus motivating Hume’s editorial decisions, an animus informed by an understanding that a significant portion of his audience was profoundly hostile to several of his central ideas. Perhaps in part for that reason, Four Dissertations would be the last original, strictly philosophical work that Hume would publish in his lifetime. Neither Millar’s self-censorship nor Hume’s, however, was sufficient to still the raging clerics. Hume would encounter yet more religious friction in 1757 when the Revd John Brown published An Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times in which he accused Hume of having cultivated, for the sake of ‘Popularity and Gain’, anti-religious sentiments in the History of England. In the second volume of An Estimate the next year, Brown reproached Hume because through his Essays he ‘not only misrepresented, abused, and insulted the most essential Principles of Christianity, but, to the utmost of his Power, [had] shaken the Foundations of all Religion’.210 Hume’s sense of insecurity remains evident when a few years later (on 22 January 1763), writing about Rousseau to Marie-Charlotte Hippolyte de Campet de Saujon, the Comtesse de Boufflers-Rouverel, he complains that ‘The liberty of the press is not so secured in any country, scarce even this, as not to render such an open attack of popular prejudices somewhat dangerous’ (LT 1.374, #200). Perhaps, however, in addition to a confession of his fears, the remark also contains an oblique confession. Perhaps Hume means to imply that

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less-than-open attacks (the kind he will still advance) can be reasonably safe. Hume’s persistent anxiety is evident, too, in his continuing to worry about the ‘danger’ of the wayward copies of Five Dissertations falling into the wrong hands, even eight years after their aborted publication (LT 1.444, #240). In 1763, after persistent invitations from the Earl of Hertford that summer, Hume travelled to Paris where he, like his work, was warmly received. In France, Hume served first as the de facto secretary to the British Embassy and then, later, as Chargé d’affaires. (He would return to Britain in 1766, with Rousseau in tow.) The hostilities he had faced back home, however, continued to haunt him. Hume wrote to Millar from Paris on 23 May 1764, following a chance meeting with Wilkes at the Hôtel de Grimbergh, to scold him about sending Wilkes the volatile dissertations: ‘it was imprudent in you to intrust him with that copy’ (LT 1.444, #240).211 In that same letter, Hume also demands from Millar reassurance that the copy had been retrieved and the troublesome essays removed.212 With penitent dispatch, Millar replied on 5 June 1764, accepting the impropriety of his conduct and assuring Hume that he had recovered the Wilkes copy. About the fate of the essays, Millar tellingly reported back that as ‘soon as I got home’ after repossessing them, ‘I tore them out and burnt them that I might not lend them to any for the future’ (LT 1.444–5n3, #240). (That Hume’s own texts, rather than those of metaphysicians or divinity schools, were actually burned at his behest presents a curious irony, considering his instructions at E 12.34.) It is pertinent to recall, furthermore, as a measure of Hume’s clear-eyed view of the insecurity that authors then faced, that he withheld publication of the Dialogues concerning Natural Religion (first drafted by the summer of 1751) until after his death in 1776. The Dialogues were at first entrusted to his literary executor, Adam Smith, and published only in 1779, through the agency of Hume’s nephew and namesake, a professor of Scots Law at the University of Edinburgh. Hume’s youthful claim to being revolutionary, of course, had dropped out of his publications long beforehand and appears nowhere in the Enquiries. Across the course of his career, Hume had, in short, become increasingly chastened and schooled. Another sign of the depth of the persistent hostility generated towards Hume on religious grounds is that opposition followed his texts across the Atlantic. When Hume finally published his

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worrisome argument against rational justification for belief in miracles as Part 10 of the first Enquiry in 1748, his critics flew into a purple rage, and it was not long before he became the notorious subject of scores of hostile pamphlets on both sides of the ocean. For example, one of Hume’s principal opponents in the Edinburgh Kirk, the Revd John Witherspoon, migrated to the North American colonies and became not only the sole clerical signatory to the 1776 Declaration of Independence of the United States but also, in 1768, president of the College of New Jersey, now Princeton University. From his eyrie there, Witherspoon transplanted his scorn for Hume, so far as it was in his power, into the American mind.213 Colonial contempt centred, as Hume might have expected, on ‘Of Miracles’. Hume’s assailants did not let up. The professor of Marischal College at Aberdeen University and Hume antagonist James Beattie (1735–1803), to whom Hume refers in an unusual venting of vitriol as ‘that bigotted and silly Fellow’, established his name largely by attacking Hume (LT 2.301, #509). Beattie excoriated Hume’s scepticism directly in an unpublished but widely circulated allegory, ‘The Castle of Scepticism’ (1767), a narrative that depicts Hume as the lord of a forbidding castle who lured unsuspecting victims into his dungeons only to subject them to hideous, sceptical tortures. Beattie subsequently published in 1770 the sharply anti-Humean treatise An Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth in Opposition to Sophistry and Scepticism to such hungry demand that it ran through an immediate and substantial cascade of editions. Beattie’s Essay became a text that would even influence Kant. The Archbishop of Canterbury reported to Beattie that no less than King George III had been impressed by the work. Admirers told Beattie that he had ‘cut Mr. Hume up by the roots’; and in London, ‘Beattie received the adulation of many who were pleased with the buffeting that he had administered Hume’.214 Hume, who avoided controversy and typically suppressed his ire, could not contain himself on the subject of Beattie, and is reported to have exclaimed about Beattie’s Essay into the nature of truth: ‘Truth! there is no truth in it; it is a horrible large lie in octavo.’215 As Hume’s health finally failed him during the summer of 1776, crowds gathered to see whether the notorious sceptic and supposed atheist would convert on his deathbed. That drama – especially Hume’s steadfast refusal – became fresh meat for frenzied and aggressive pamphleteers. The Scottish literary luminary

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James Boswell even infamously imposed himself on the philosopher to test his irreligious convictions.216 Boswell found them, despite his confronting the dying man with the threat of imminent damnation, intact and unwavering. Hume was still a sceptic and tranquil.217 This torrent of assaults establishes grounds for suspecting that Hume may have crafted his texts in a dissimulating way, with an eye towards his immediate audience as well as towards the larger society that would judge them. Would an ambitious but radical young author in the eighteenth century struggling against powerful and threatening critics mask or soften some of the most incendiary and provocative dimensions of his work in order to advance it? Would a sceptic, an atheist, or even a heterodox theist do so? Surely. It is reasonable, therefore, to suspect that Hume did. Presentation is conditioned by audience, and considerations of audience are, in circumstances of the hostile sort that Hume faced, reasonably guided by, as he repeatedly puts it, ‘prudence’.

4.2.3 Pyrrhonism as a Path to Academic Scepticism and as Prophylaxis The similarities between Humean philosophy and what I have called the general framework of Pyrrhonism ground the claim that Hume’s thought is substantially Pyrrhonian, and the evidence that our hermeneutic of suspicion highlights suggests that Hume may well have understood this. My argument, however, is not for the conclusion that Hume’s philosophy is simply Pyrrhonian but rather that it is a hybrid and admixture of both Pyrrhonian and Academic scepticism. There is, accordingly, one more dimension of Hume’s Pyrrhonism, not characteristic of the ancient version, that argues for this conclusion and so must be mentioned. Hume maintains that Pyrrhonism, or at least the caricature of Pyrrhonism that he deploys, leads to certain Academic ideas and practices. Defining his ‘mitigated’ or Academical scepticism in the first Enquiry, Hume writes about an advantageous type of scepticism that naturally results from correcting the excesses of Pyrrhonism: ‘There is, indeed’, says Hume, ‘a more mitigated scepticism or academical philosophy, which may be both durable and useful, and which may, in part, be the result of this Pyrrhonism’ (E 12.3.24, SBN 161).

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Part of what Hume means by that mitigated scepticism is a limitation upon the scope of philosophical and scientific investigations: ‘Another species of mitigated scepticism, which may be of advantage to mankind, and which may be the natural result of the PYRRHONIAN doubts and scruples, is the limitation of our enquiries to such subjects as are best adapted to the narrow capacity of human understanding’ (E 12.3.25, SBN 162). Pyrrhonian doubt, properly administered, also serves as a kind of useful, therapeutic medicine to produce Academic modesty: ‘a small tincture of Pyrrhonism might abate’ the ‘pride’ of thinkers and attenuate their ‘haughtiness and obstinacy’ – their inclination to dogmatism. It can help them acquire the sceptical integrity and self-understanding of their limits and of that ‘universal perplexity and confusion’ to which human beings as inquirers are naturally prone. Post-Pyrrhonian Academicism of this sort is, indeed, for Hume appropriate to good philosophical-scientific practice: ‘there is a degree of doubt, and caution, and modesty which, in all kinds of scrutiny and decision, ought for ever to accompany a just reasoner’ (E 12.3.24, SBN 161–2).218 This is not to say, however, that Pyrrhonism is merely a means to Academic ends for Hume.219 The positive Pyrrhonian dimensions of Humean thought, as we have begun to unfold them, extend well past the propaedeutic aspect of Pyrrhonian philosophy. For Hume, rather, on substantial matters of philosophical practice, Pyrrhonism and Academicism are neither contraries nor competitors but instead overlap, extend, complement and reinforce one another in the distinctive formulation of scepticism he advances, just as Bayle and Huet suggest they can.

4.2.4 Third Plank: Hume’s Pyrrhonism and a Complete Sceptical Framework In Chapter 2, drawing from the work of José Maia Neto, we formulated five characteristics of Academic scepticism. We are now in a position to distill similarly salient characteristics of Pyrrhonism. There are seven. Combined, the two sets make it possible to build a general framework with twelve typical characteristics of sceptical philosophy as it has operated across the Western philosophical traditions. This model should not be taken to imply that the Academic and Pyrrhonian frameworks are utterly and consistently distinct. Our survey of the history of sceptical philosophy shows

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clearly that they are not. Still, as a heuristic organising device, a general model may be articulated as follows (with modifications relevant to modern variants in brackets): A Combined General Model of Scepticism A General Framework for Pyrrhonian Scepticism 1. Deferent to appearances: Conforms in its practice (agogê) undogmatically (adoxatos) to the appearances (phainomena) of common life (ho bios ho koinos) rather than to dogma, and it does so in a Fourfold way, accepting the guidance of a. nature [and naturalism] b. custom, habit and tradition c. passions [sentiment, feeling, emotion] d. technical arts [and instrumental reason] e. [fideism or guidance by the divine through faith]. 2. Ephectic: Induces suspension (epochê), especially on questions of the criterion (kriterion), through doxastic balancing (isosthenia) using a. Aenesidemus’ ten modes of difference b. Aenesidemus’ eight modes criticising causal explanation c. Agrippa’s five modes [including Agrippa’s Trilemma] d. Sextus’ two modes. 3. Apelletic: Follows a path or method similar to that attributed to Apelles of Kos. 4. Aphasic: Practises non-assertion (aphasia) about the non-evident or hidden (adêla): a. uses recollective rather than indicative signs [nominalism and reportage] b. qualifies descriptions by individual subject and circumstance [often in essays]. 5. Zetetic: Remains open (zêtesis) – that is, inquiring (skeptikos), critical and revisable. 6. Ataractic: Its practices end in undisturbedness, peace or tranquillity (ataraxia). 7. Teresic: Observantly reads and holds to (têrêsis) common life in politics, history and morals as well as nature. Plus a General Framework for Academic Scepticism 8. Akataleptic: Non-apprehensive such that it neither affirms nor denies that reality, truths about reality, or criteria (kriteria) for those truths actually exist but either a) refuses or b) denies the claim that they can be apprehended (either because i) they are hidden (adêlos) or because ii) human epistemic powers are too weak).

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9. Doxastically moderate: Stakes out a doxastic middle ground between a) dogmatic belief and b) extreme sceptical doubt understood as the utter extinguishing of belief (commonly called ‘Pyrrhonian’ doubt), often through the use of probabilistic criteria and usually in ways consistent with religious belief. 10. Limited: Inquires but also limits inquiry to what lies within humanity’s finite reach, in contrast to metaphysical speculation, often in ways that support modern science. 11. Integrous: Prioritises intellectual integrity ahead of the acquisition of truth. 12. Modest: Criticises dogmatism morally as immodest, arrogant, and prone to political enthusiasm, sectarianism, faction and discord. The remainder of this book will continue to unpack how Hume’s thought fits this general model.

4.3 Conclusion To make the case that Hume is a radical, hybrid sceptic, it must be shown that his thought is in substantial ways both Academic and Pyrrhonian. The first two chapters of this book were not only devoted to explicating what Academic philosophy comprised as it unfolded across time; they also explained which Academic texts may have influenced Hume and how his thought is congruent with Academic philosophy in numerous ways. Perhaps most importantly, Chapters 1 and 2 laid the conceptual groundwork for the claim that I will fully elaborate in Chapter 8: that Hume adopts a Clitomachian, non-epistemic Academic scepticism, in particular a doxastic scepticism. The second pair of chapters composing Part I of this volume focused upon the more difficult and controversial task of showing how Hume is a Pyrrhonian thinker; they produced a lens for seeing how Hume’s thought enacts the Pyrrhonian Fourfold. Chapter 3 unfolded the sophisticated web of ideas developed by ancient Pyrrhonian thinkers and the texts by which those ideas were transmitted to the modern world. Chapter 4 explained the modern development of Pyrrhonian ideas, the defining subtleties and characteristics of modern Pyrrhonism, the texts from which Hume may have drawn Pyrrhonian ideas, and some of the most obvious ways in which Hume’s texts exhibit Pyrrhonian traits. We saw how Pyrrhonism survived the medieval era, as well as how proto-sceptical thinking could be found scattered across the

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Middle Ages. We saw how Pyrrhonism changed from a topic of scholarly interest among fifteenth-century Renaissance humanists to an important weapon in the struggles associated with fideism and the Reformation. Finally, we examined the way Pyrrhonism was bound up with the contested emergence and validation of modern empirical natural science in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Across all this history, we explored the way Pyrrhonism appears in many important thinkers, including Montaigne, La Mothe le Vayer, Bayle and Huet. This sceptical backstory informed three argumentative planks supporting the claim that Hume may be properly read as a deeply Pyrrhonian thinker, despite his explicit claims to the contrary: 1) Hume had access to Pyrrhonian texts and used them; 2) it is reasonable to read Hume’s denials with a hermeneutic of suspicion, that is, under suspicion that they are insincere; and 3) Hume’s theories and texts are in substantial ways congruent with the characteristic Pyrrhonian ideas and practices we collected in our twelve-point Combined General Framework.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

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Floridi, ‘Rediscovery’, p. 267. Floridi, Sextus Empiricus, p. 13. Ibid., p. 267. Ibid., p. 22. Ibid., pp. 17–18. Dorandi, Laertiana, pp. 185–94. My thanks to Jorge Ornelas for this reference. Popkin, History of Scepticism, p. 19 Floridi, Sextus Empiricus, p. 15. See Perler, ‘Can We Trust?’ Huet, Treatise, p. 125; ch. 14, §63. Huet quotes from ch. 11, §§4–6 of Maimonides’ De idolol. Fatoorchi, ‘Intellectual Skepticism’, pp. 213ff. More completely, Paul writes: ‘For the preaching of the cross is to them that perish foolishness; but unto us which are saved it is the power of God. For it is written, I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and will bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent. Where is the wise? where is the scribe? where is the disputer of this world? hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world? For after that in the wisdom of God the world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased

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13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21.

22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

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God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe. For the Jews require a sign, and the Greeks seek after wisdom: But we preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumbling block, and unto the Greeks foolishness; But unto them which are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God, and the wisdom of God. Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men; and the weakness of God is stronger than men. For ye see your calling, brethren, how that not many wise men after the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble, are called: But God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty; And base things of the world, and things which are despised, hath God chosen, yea, and things which are not, to bring to nought things that are: That no flesh should glory in his presence’ (1 Corinthians 1: 18–29; King James Bible). Montaigne, Complete Works: Essays, ‘Apology’, 2.12, p. 370. Floridi, Sextus Empiricus, p. 23. Mercer, ‘Descartes’ Debt to Teresa’. Floridi, Sextus Empiricus, p. 22. On causation, see the Incoherence of the Philosophers, ‘On Natural Science’, Question 1ff. Quoted by Lagerlund, ‘A History’, p. 12. Cf. T 1.4.7.11, SBN 270; LG 30, 1.427–8; LG 6, 1.420–1; and E 12.25, SBN 162. Lagerlund, ‘A History’, pp. 11–12. Heck, ‘Skepticism in Classical Islam’, p. 200. Rashdall, ‘Nicholas de Ultricuria’, pp. 1–27. For a reading of Autrecourt as anti-sceptical, see Thijssen, ‘Quest for Certain Knowledge’, pp. 199–223; see also Thijssen, ‘Nicholas of Autrecourt’, in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. On wizards and marvels, see Sullivan, ‘On Recognizing the Limits’. On heresies and scepticism, see the remainder of the volume in which this essay appears. Floridi, Sextus Empiricus, pp. 24–5; Nicol, ‘Byzantine Church’, pp. 23–47. Popkin, History of Scepticism, p. 19; Schmitt, Gianfrancesco Pico, pp. 245–6; Naya, ‘Renaissance Pyrrhonism’, p. 21. Floridi, ‘Diffusion’, p. 65. Matytsin, Specter, pp. 95, 289n4; Transcript of the Fifth Lateran Council, 8th set, 19 December 1513. Ibid., pp. 95–6. Ibid., p. 96. Matytsin also at p. 289n6 points to Kors, Orthodox Sources, pp. 368–72.

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28. Popkin, History of Scepticism, pp. 19–27. 29. Schmitt, Cicero Scepticus, p. 69. Not long after Filelfo, the humanist Francesco Patrizi (1413–94) mentions Sextus in a political text of 1471. 30. Popkin, History of Scepticism, p. 56. 31. Perinetti, ‘Hume at La Flèche’, p. 59. 32. Montaigne, Complete Works: Essays, ‘Apology’, 2.12, p. 449. See also Pascal, Pensées §191 [44]; §183 [166]; cf. §460 [933]; Malebranche, Search, 2.1.5.2; Seneca, Moral Epistles 57.4–5; all cited at Norton and Norton, ‘Editors’ Annotations’, 2.760. 33. Pascal, Pensées and Other Writings, p. 184; Montaigne, Complete Works: Essays, ‘Apology’, 2.12, p. 375. 34. Curley, Descartes, p. 16. 35. Montaigne, Complete Works: Essays, ‘Folly to Measure the True and False’, 1.27, pp. 132–3. 36. Montaigne, Complete Works: Essays, ‘Cripples’, 3.11, p. 789; Ribeiro, ‘Montaigne on Witches’. 37. Ribeiro, ‘Sextus, Montaigne, Hume’, pp. 14–16. Cf. Montaigne, Complete Works: Essays, ‘Apology’, 2.12, pp. 386–7. 38. Montaigne, Complete Works: Essays, ‘Apology’, 2.12, p. 325. 39. Montaigne, Complete Works: Essays, ‘Cannibals’, 1.31, p. 152. 40. Montaigne, Complete Works: Essays, ‘Custom’, 2.23, p. 83. 41. Montaigne, Complete Works: Essays, ‘Apology’, 2.12, p. 372. 42. Ibid., 2.12, p. 343. 43. Ibid., 2.12, p. 339. 44. Kail, ‘Leibniz’s Dog’, p. 42. 45. Montaigne, Complete Works: Essays, ‘Apology’, 2.12, p. 336. Cf. Hume’s essay, ‘On the Dignity or Meanness of Human Nature’; Kail, ‘Sceptical Beast’, p. 225. 46. Montaigne, Complete Works: Essays, ‘Apology’, 2.12, p. 454. Montaigne’s rouet seems to fold together both the circle (diallelus) and the regress (regressus). Examined by Floridi, Scepticism; Floridi, ‘Problem of Justification: Part I’; and Chisholm, ‘Problem of the Criterion’. 47. Montaigne, Complete Works: Essays, ‘Apology’, 2.12, p. 371. 48. Ibid., 2.12, pp. 421–2; quoted by Neto, ‘Epoche as Perfection’, p. 20. Montaigne, Complete Works: Essays, ‘Apology’, 2.12, p. 374. Cf. Neto, ‘Epoche as Perfection’, p. 13. 49. Neto, ‘Epoche as Perfection’, pp. 21–2. 50. Montaigne, Complete Works: Essays, ‘Caesar’s Methods of Making War’, 2.34, p. 562. 51. Montaigne, Complete Works: Essays, ‘Apology’, 2.12, p. 374.

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52. Montaigne, Complete Works: Essays, ‘By Diverse Means’, 1.1, p. 5. 53. A city which ‘is built at different times, and is repaired sometimes in one place, sometimes another’. Brahami, Travail, p. 48; Malherbe, ‘Art of Dialogue’, pp. 211, 217. 54. Cf. Bayle’s 1682 essay, ‘Pensées diverses sur la comète’; Lessa, ‘Montaigne and Bayle’. 55. Hartle, Montaigne, pp. 78–86; cited by Merrill, Hume and Politics, p. 133n8. 56. The library at La Flèche seems to have contained the Jesuit philosopher Dominique Bouhours’s Entretiens d’Ariste et d’Eugene (first published in Paris, 1671), which discusses the ‘je-ne-sçai-quoi’. At some time Hume acquired a copy of this text; DHL 77, #168; Perinetti, ‘Hume at La Flèche’, p. 66. 57. Michaud, ‘How to Become’, p. 36. 58. Montaigne, Complete Works: Essays, ‘Presumption’, 2.17, pp. 488–9. 59. Montaigne, Complete Works: Essays, ‘Apology’, 2.12, p. 419. 60. Montaigne, Complete Works: Essays, ‘Experience’, 3.13, p. 856. 61. Ibid., 3.13, p. 852. 62. Eichorn, review of Academic Skepticism, pp. 176–7; Neto, ‘Charron’s Epochē’, pp. 81–114; Neto, Academic Skepticism, pp. 36, 122, 136. 63. Kogel, Pierre Charron, p. 119. For the appeal to the truth-seeming in Montaigne’s essays, see again Montaigne, Complete Works: Essays, ‘Apology’, 2.12, pp. 421–2. 64. Popkin, History of Scepticism, p. 67. 65. Montaigne, Complete Works: Essays, ‘Apology’, 2.12, p. 429. 66. Casson, Liberating Judgment, p. 66. 67. Baumgartener, ‘Scepticism’, pp. 81–2. 68. Ibid., p. 77. 69. Lewis, Galileo in France, p. 79. 70. Jardine, Birth of History, pp. 211ff. 71. On Kepler and scepticism, see Jardine, ‘Forging’. 72. See Siskin, System; see also Siskin with William Warner, Enlightenment; Pears, Hume’s System; Rohault, Rohault’s System. 73. Cf. §3.3.1.2 on Agrippa the sceptic’s tropes. 74. I thank Stephen Buckle for recommending this way of reading Bacon and Hume. 75. The editio princeps of Diogenes Laërtius’ Opera appeared in 1533. Ptolemy’s Peri Kriterion, another important source of sceptical ideas, came into Latin print in Paris in 1663. 76. On scepticism and Hobbes, see Paganini, ‘Hobbes and Continental Skepticism’, pp. 65–105. Cf. Paganini, Skepsis.

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176 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82.

83. 84. 85. 86.

87.

88.

89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94.

95. 96. 97. 98. 99.

100.

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Hume’s Scepticism Emerson, ‘Hume and Ecclesiastical History’, p. 34n15. Popkin, History of Scepticism, pp. 91, 112, 123, 192, 301. Paganini, ‘Hobbes and the French Skeptics’. Russell, Riddle, pp. 61–9. Ibid., pp. 61–9. Hume engages Machiavelli positively though not uncritically in a number of essays, for example, ‘That Politics May Be Reduced to a Science’ (ES 23–6) and ‘Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth’ (ES 516). Harris, David Hume, p. 83. Quoted by Susato, Hume’s Sceptical Enlightenment, p. 12. Popkin, History of Scepticism, pp. 79, 84–5; Matytsin, Specter, pp. 29–30. Popkin, History of Scepticism, p. 85. See Paganini, Skepsis, pp. 61ff. who picks up on Le Mothe’s ‘Pyrrhonisme tout pur’. See also Matytsin, Specter, p. 29. Neto, Academic Skepticism, pp. 67–9. Neto suggests that La Mothe Le Vayer may also be placed in the Academic tradition (p. 80); cited by Eichorn, review of Academic Skepticism, p. 177. A ‘jouet à toutes mains’ is a ‘toy’ with which many can play in various ways. Quoted and discussed by Giocanti, ‘La Mothe Le Vayer’, pp. 284–5. Perinetti, ‘Hume at La Flèche’, p. 62. Popkin, History of Scepticism, p. 97. Ariew et al., Descartes’ Meditations: Source Materials, p. 166. Neto, Academic Skepticism, p. 51. Lolordo, ‘Gassendi’, pp. 296–9. Ariew et al., Descartes’ Meditations: Source Materials, pp. 167–8. I have replaced ‘suspension of judgment’ with ‘non-apprehension’ in Ariew, Cottingham and Sorrell’s text, as it seems wrong to translate akatalêpsía as ‘suspension’. Bayle, Dictionary (1991), ‘Pyrrho’, p. 197. Lolordo, ‘Gassendi’, pp. 302–3. Popkin, History of Scepticism, p. 123. Perinetti, ‘Hume at La Flèche’, p. 55. Quoted in Burnyeat, ‘Sceptic in his Place and Time’, p. 99; Gassendi, Selected Works, p. 294. Montaigne draws upon the same example towards a similarly sceptical end; Montaigne, Complete Works: Essays, ‘Apology’, 2.12, p. 453. Cf. Sextus’ use of the apparent whiteness of snow: PH 1.13.33, PH 2.22.244, and PH 3.21.179. Laursen, ‘Skepticism against Reason’, p. 137; McKenna, ‘Bayle et le scepticisme’.

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101. Neto, ‘Bayle’s Academic Skepticism’, p. 273. 102. Pittion, ‘Hume’s Reading of Bayle’, pp. 383–4. Memoranda from Section 2 related to Bayle include numbers 4, 5, 8, 10, 14, 15, 28, 29, 33, 34. 103. Laursen, ‘Pierre Bayle’, pp. 356–7. 104. Brush, Montaigne and Bayle, pp. 180–8; quoted by Stunkel, ‘Montaigne, Bayle, and Hume’, p. 61n42. Shaftesbury and Mandeville (who studied with Bayle in Rotterdam) may have brought Bayle’s thought on other matters to Hume; Popkin, ‘Bayle and Hume’, p. 151. See Matytsin, Specter, chs 2–3. 105. Bost, Bayle et la Religion. 106. Quoted by Popkin, ‘Bayle and Hume’, p. 158. 107. Bayle, Dictionary (1991), ‘Pyrrho’, p. 194. 108. Pascal, Pensées, §131 [434]. Cf. Smith, ‘Hume’s Academic Scepticism’, pp. 19ff. 109. Bayle, Dictionary (1991), ‘Pyrrho’, p. 194. See McKenna, ‘Bayle et le scepticisme’. 110. Bayle, Dictionary (1991), ‘Pyrrho’, p. 202. 111. Ibid., p. 196; Harris, David Hume, p. 64. 112. Quoted by Laursen, ‘Skepticism against Reason’, p. 138. 113. Bayle, Correspondence, 1.106; Laursen, ‘Skepticism against Reason’, p. 138. 114. Bayle, Dictionary (1991), ‘Pyrrho’, p. 195. 115. Laursen, ‘Skepticism against Reason’, pp. 137ff.; Lennon, Reading Bayle. 116. Bayle, Dictionary (1991), ‘Pyrrho’, p. 209. 117. Ibid., p. 194. 118. Ibid., p. 209. 119. Bayle, Correspondence, 1.185; quoted by Laursen, ‘Skepticism against Reason’, p. 137. 120. Bayle, Dictionnaire, p. 731. 121. Laursen, ‘Skepticism against Reason’, p. 138. Again, Bayle writes in note A to the article, ‘Pyrrhon’: ‘en tout le reste ils se ressembloient parfaitement’; Bayle, Dictionnaire, p. 731. 122. Bayle, Dictionary (1991), ‘Pyrrho’, p. 195; emphasis mine. 123. Ibid., pp. 194, 202. 124. Ibid., p. 202. 125. Bayle, Dictionary (1991), pp. 208, 208n31; Note C of the article on ‘Pyrrho’. Bayle quotes there from La Mothe Le Vayer’s De la virtue des païens (p. 226). At Hume’s Dialogues 2.1, Hume’s character, the faithful Demea, proclaims: ‘next to the impiety of denying

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126. 127. 128. 129.

130. 131. 132. 133.

134. 135.

136.

137. 138. 139. 140. 141. 142.

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Hume’s Scepticism his [God’s] existence, is the temerity of prying into his nature and essence, decrees and attributes’. The Dialogues’ more sceptical character, Philo, will across later parts of the Dialogues argue against the rationality of supposed proofs of God’s existence, but he will not from the absence of proof succumb to an ignoratio elenchi and assert the metaphysical conclusion that God does not exist. See Fosl, ‘Doubt and Divinity’. See Matytsin, Specter, chs 2–5; Israel, ‘Bayle’s Double Image’. Bayle, Commentary, pp. 65, 70; Laursen, ‘Skepticism against Reason’, p. 132. Bayle, Dictionary (1991), ‘Pyrrho’, p. 199. Ibid., p. 207. In French, the passage reads: ‘C’est l’extinction totale, non seulement de la foi, mais de la raison, & rien n’est plus impossible que de ramener ceux qui ont porté leur égarement jusqu’à cet excés’; Bayle, Dictionnaire, ‘Pyrrhon’, p. 734. Bayle, Dictionary (1991), Note C of article on ‘Pyrrho’, p. 205. Ibid., p. 196; emphasis mine. Bracken, Berkeley, pp. 24ff.; Luce, Dialectic of Immaterialism, pp. 68–78; both cited by Pittion, ‘Hume’s Reading of Bayle’, p. 374n5. Popkin, ‘Bayle and Hume’, p. 151; Desmaizeaux would go on to write one of the first reviews of Hume’s Treatise. See Hume’s 6 April 1739 letter to Desmaizeaux (LT 1.29, #10). Pittion, ‘Hume’s Reading of Bayle’, p. 383. See Pittion, ‘Hume’s Reading of Bayle’, for more of the periodical literature from which Hume may have drawn ideas related to Bayle. Pittion suggests the Bibliotèque angloise, the Journal littèraire or Mémoires pour l’histoire des sciences et les beaux arts; Pittion, ‘Hume’s Reading of Bayle’, p. 383; Perinetti , ‘Hume at La Flèche’, pp. 50, 59–61; Matytsin, Specter, pp. 122–30. Perinetti, ‘Hume at La Flèche’, p. 61; Crousaz, Logique, 3.1000, trans. Perinetti. Cf. Sextus M 8.57 (ADO, Against the Logicians 2.57) and M 7.88 (ADO, Against the Logicians 1.88), where Sextus argues against the idea that an ultimate distinction can be made on epistemic grounds between veracious appearances and the illusory appearances produced by madness. Perinetti, ‘Hume at La Flèche’, p. 61; Crousaz, Logique, 3.1004–5. Pittion, ‘Hume’s Reading of Bayle’, p. 383. Huet, Treatise, 1.14.29, p. 99. Ibid., 1.14.29, p. 101. Ibid., 1.14.29, pp. 95–6. Ibid., 1.14.29, p. 99.

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147. 148. 149. 150. 151. 152. 153. 154. 155. 156. 157. 158. 159.

160. 161. 162. 163. 164.

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179

Ibid., 3.10, p. 187; Shelford, Transforming, p. 10. Huet, Treatise, 1.14.32ff., pp. 105ff. Ibid., 1.14.33, p. 107. Meeker’s reading of Hume as an epistemic egalitarian may therefore be understood as reading Hume as a Pyrrhonian. Meeker, Hume’s Radical Scepticism, p. 16. Huet, Treatise, 1.14.36, p. 108. Ibid., 1.14.36, p. 102. Ibid., 1.15, p. 128. Cf. 1.2, p. 18; 1.2, p. 22; 1.2, p. 24; and 2.3, p. 151. Ibid., 1.3, pp. 30–40; and 1.5, pp. 45–8. Ibid., 3.14–15, pp. 204–19. Ibid., 2.3, p. 151. Ibid., 3.9, p. 183. Ibid., 3.9, p. 183. Popkin, ‘Joseph Glanvill’, p. 182. Ibid., pp. 186–7. De Pierris, Ideas, Evidence and Method, p. 151. Newton, Principia, p. 943; Willis, True Religion, p. 60n82. Cf. Susato, Hume’s Sceptical Enlightenment, pp. 275–6; Gaukroger, Collapse of Mechanism, p. 186; Shank, Newton Wars, p. 313, quoted by Matytsin, Specter, p. 225. Cope, Criteria, pp. 78, 208n24, 208n31; Chiasson, ‘Dryden’s Apparent Scepticism’; Griffin, Satires, ch. 1, ‘The Mind of a Skeptic’. Norton and Norton, ‘Editors’ Annotations’, 2.773–4; Mossner, Life, p. 31. Popkin, ‘Skeptical Precursors’, p. 69; Stunkel, ‘Montaigne, Bayle, and Hume’, p. 61n42. Cavendish, David Hume, p. 175n1; Groarke and Solomon, ‘Some Sources’, p. 650. I wish to express my thanks to Tom L. Beauchamp for informing me that Malebranche refers to precisely the same passage of Adversus mathematicos in the Eclaircissements sur la recherche de la vérité accompanying the third edition of his De la recherche de la vérité (1674–75; 3rd edn, 1678). In the same footnote, Malebranche refers to both Cicero’s account of the Egyptian deification of the sun and moon (‘c. liv. I. De natura Deorum.’) and to Sextus’ discussion of the same phenomenon (‘Voyez Sextus Empiricus, l, 8. ch. 2.’); see ‘Elucidation Fifteen’, ‘Seventh Proof’, ‘Reply’, in Malebranche, Search, 3rd edn, p. 684n‘a’. Hume also refers to Cicero’s De natura deorum (‘De Nat. Deor. lib. i’) at EM 2.2.14, SBN, 180n1. The

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165.

166. 167.

168. 169. 170. 171.

172.

173.

Hume’s Scepticism likelihood of Hume’s culling these references from Malebranche is increased by Hume having apparently owned a copy of the third edition of De la recherche with the accompanying Eclaircissements; DHL 18. Malebranche addresses scepticism in the Recherche at 2.3.5; see Treatise, ed. Norton and Norton, 2.774. Insignificant though it may be, for some reason Hume’s reference in the first edition of the Political Discourses appears in Arabic rather than Roman numerals. For more detail on the differences between the editions of the Outlines, see Fosl, ‘Bibliographic Bases’, pp. 269ff. Perinetti, ‘Hume at La Flèche’, pp. 47ff. The catalogue unearthed by Perinetti was produced by Ignace-François Riboutet. The Riboutet catalogue post-dates Hume’s period of study and writing in La Flèche by thirty-nine years, so we cannot be absolutely sure that it accurately reflects the resources available to Hume. Nevertheless, the temporal proximity together with the stability of the institution and the indications of extant ex libris marks lend considerable probability to that idea. For the catalogue, see Perinetti et al., La bibliothèque. Perinetti, ‘Hume at La Flèche’, p. 58. Hume’s abbreviations may be translated as follows: ‘lib.’ for liber (book) and ‘cap.’ for capitulum (heading or chapter). The Chouet edition does not divide the books of Adversus mathematicos into chapters; thence Hume does not cite chapters. Tom L. Beauchamp’s 1998 Clarendon critical edition of the Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals rightly attributes the references at EM Section 2 and EM Section 4 in this way, respectively: ‘Sextus Empiricus, Against the Physicists 1.18 (Adversus mathematicos 9.18; Adversus dogmaticos 3.18).’ ‘Again, Cronus decided to destroy his own children, [211] and Solon laid down for the Athenians the law of immunity, according to which he permitted every man to kill his own child. But among us the laws forbid killing children’ (PH 3.24.211); Sextus, Outlines of Scepticism, trans. Annas and Barnes, p. 199. See Fosl, ‘Bibliographic Bases’. Hume writes there: ‘We are told by SEXTUS EMPIRICUS, that EPICURUS, when a boy, reading with his preceptor these verses of HESIOD, Eldest of beings, chaos first arose; Next earth, wide-stretch’d, the seat of all; the young scholar first betrayed his inquisitive genius, by asking, And chaos whence? But was told by his preceptor, that he must

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have recourse to the philosophers for a solution of such questions. And from this hint EPICURUS left philology and all other studies, in order to betake himself to that science, whence alone he expected satisfaction with regard to these sublime subjects’ (ADO 4.18–19 [M 10.18–19]). 174. This passage (erroneous M 10.18–19) may appear variously in modern editions as Adversus mathematicos 10.18–19, Adversus dogmaticos ADO 4.18–19, or Against the Physicists 2.18–19. 175. In Bett’s 2012 translation: ‘[182] But some sorites arguments were put forward by Carneades, which his associate Clitomachus wrote up as being most excellent and effective, and which have the following character . . . So that if Zeus is a god, Poseidon too, being his brother will also be a god. [183] But if Poseidon is a god, Achelous too will be a god; and if Achelous, the Nile too; and if the Nile, every river; and if every river, streams too would be gods; and if streams, mountain runoffs. But streams are not; therefore neither is Zeus a god. But if there were gods, Zeus would be a god. Therefore there are not gods. [184] Then again, if the sun is a god, day too would be a god; for day is none other than the sun above the earth. But if day is a god, the month too will be a god; for it is a composite of days. And if the month is a god, the year too would be a god; for the year is a composite of months. But this is not so; therefore neither is the original point (along with the absurdity, they say, of stating that day is god, but not dawn, midday and afternoon). [185] Further, if Artemis is a god, On-the-Road too would be a god; for she too has been thought to be a god equally with her – On-the-Road and Before-the-Door and At-the-Mill and At-theOver. But this is not so; therefore neither is the original point. [186] Further, if we say that Aphrodite is a god, Eros too, being Aphrodite’s son, will be a god. [187] But if Eros is a god, Pity too will be a god; for both are the effects on the soul, and Pity has been worshipped like Eros; at any rate there are some altars to Pity among the Athenians. [188] But if Pity is a god, Fear is too . . . But if Fear is, so are the rest of the effects on the soul. But this is not so; therefore Aphrodite is not a god either. But if there were gods, Aphrodite would be a god; therefore there are not gods. [189] Further, if Demeter is a god, Earth too is a god; for Demeter, they say, is none other than Earth-Mother. If Earth is a god, mountains and cliffs and every stone will be a god. But this is not so; so nor is the original point. [190] And Carneades puts forward other such sorites arguments for there not being gods; their character has become clear enough from the preceding remarks’ (Against the Physicists 1.182–90, ADO 3.182–90 [M 9.182–90]).

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176. This passage (erroneous M 9.182–90) may appear variously in modern editions as Adversus mathematicos 9.182–90, Adversus dogmaticos ADO 3.182–90, or Against the Physicists 1.182–90. 177. Fosl, ‘Bibliographic Bases’, p. 274n37; Fosl, ‘David Hume’, pp. 216ff. 178. Passmore, Intentions, p. 140n1. See Gassendi, Opera omnia 1.72. 179. Probably Amsterdam, 1725; Londres, Aux dépens de la Compagnie, 1735. 180. Popkin, ‘Sources of Knowledge’, p. 138. 181. London: Moseley and Ding, 1655. 182. Groarke and Solomon, ‘Some Sources’, p. 651. 183. Schmitt, ‘John Wolley’, pp. 61–2. 184. Nashe, Works, 3.254ff., 3.332, 4.428–31, 5.120; see Popkin, History of Scepticism, p. 253n10. 185. Popkin, History of Scepticism, p. 253n10; Strathmann, Sir Walter Raleigh, pp. 224–6; and Sprott, ‘Raleigh’s Sceptic’, pp. 166–75. 186. See Broadie, Scottish Enlightenment; Broadie, Cambridge Companion; and McLean, Young and Simpson, Scottish Enlightenment and Literary Culture. 187. Popkin, ‘Sources of Knowledge’, p. 140. 188. Tacitus, Histories, Bk 1, ch. 1: ‘Seldom are men blessed with times in which they may think what they like, and say what they think.’ 189. The quote appears in the [A] subtext of the entry on ‘Tacitus (Caius (a) Cornelius)’ in Bayle’s Dictionnaire, though Bayle seems to have punctuated it differently. In Bayle’s rendering, it reads: ‘rara temporum felicitate, ubi senitre quæ velis; & quæ sentias dicere licet’; Bayle, Dictionary (1738), 5.279. My thanks to Aaron Garrett for informing me about Bayle’s use of this quote. 190. Price, Ironic Hume, p. 7. 191. E.g., Russell, Riddle. 192. Immerwahr, ‘A Skeptic’s Progress’. 193. While Hume’s Treatise may not have fared well initially, his essays and histories proliferated during and after his life. Some sixteen editions of Hume’s variously collected essays appeared during his lifetime. After his death, at least sixteen editions and reprintings of his 1777 collection appeared between then and 1894, with more than fifty editions and reprintings of the History appearing over the same period; Miller, ‘Foreword’, p. xvi. By the 1760s Hume was able to boast that ‘the copy-money given me by the booksellers, much exceeded any thing formerly known in England; I was become not only independent, but opulent’ (MOL xxxviii). 194. Huet, Treatise, 1.23.38, p. 113.

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195. Harris, David Hume, pp. 67–9. 196. Hume did, of course, include ‘Of Miracles’ in the Enquiry concerning Human Understanding in 1748, nine years after publishing Treatise Books 1–2. 197. Cf. Towsey, Reading, ch. 8; Towsey, ‘Philosophically Playing’; see Susato, Hume’s Sceptical Enlightenment, p. 280; Stewart, Kirk and Infidel, p. 13. 198. Quoted by Russell, ‘Skepticism and Natural Religion’, p. 257. 199. Mossner, Life, p. 336. Cf. Harris, David Hume, p. 355. 200. Fieser, Early Responses, 9.38–48; Rassmussen, Infidel and Professor, p. 78. 201. Quoted by Mossner, Life, p. 343. 202. Warburton, Selection, p. 257. Letter of 8 January 1755, shortly after the publication of the first volume of Hume’s History in late 1754. 203. Epistolary evidence also indicates that Hume was sensitive to the response he might face in making negative remarks about revelation; see Mossner, Life, p. 304. 204. Mossner, Life, p. 326. 205. The two essays on suicide and immortality were themselves substitutions for a now lost essay on geometry that Hume had earlier submitted to publisher Andrew Millar, but then decided was flawed. See Hume’s letter to William Strahan, 25 January 1772 (LT 2.253, #465). See Immerwahr, ‘God and Morality’. 206. See Hume’s letter to William Strahan, 25 January 1772 (LT 2.253, #465). 207. Mossner, Life, p. 328. 208. Ibid., pp. 322ff. ‘Of the Standard of Taste’ was first published in Hume’s Four Dissertations in 1757, along with ‘The Natural History of Religion’, ‘Of the Passions’ and ‘Of Tragedy’. 209. The text is dated 3 January 1757. 210. Mossner, Life, p. 308. 211. The Hôtel de Grimbergh was then the site of the British ambassador’s chapel, which served not only as a place of worship but also for social interaction among subjects of the United Kingdom living abroad. 212. Mossner, ‘Hume’s Four Dissertations’, pp. 49ff. Hume refers to a copy given to Andrew Millar in a 27 May 1756 letter to Millar (LT 1.232, #117) and to a copy given to John Wilkes in a 23 May 1764 letter also to Millar (LT 1.444, #240); see Beauchamp’s ‘Introduction’ to his 2007 Clarendon critical edition of the ‘Natural History of Religion’ (1757), p. xxiii.

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213. Mossner, Life, p. 336. 214. Mossner, ‘Beattie’s Castle’, p. 108. 215. Mossner, Life, p. 581. Reported by a writer in the Gentleman’s Magazine (1777), p. 159. 216. Boswell, ‘An Account’, pp. 227–32. 217. Guimarães, ‘Skeptical Tranquility’. 218. Cf. Garrett, ‘Small Tincture’, for a different interpretation of this passage in Hume. 219. Russell, Riddle, p. 210.

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Part II

Hume’s True Sceptical Philosophy

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5

Phûsis: The Fatalities of Appearance

What stays with you latest and deepest? of curious panics, Of hard-fought engagements or sieges tremendous, what deepest remains? Walt Whitman, ‘The Wound Dresser’

Yielding to the ‘guidance of nature’ is the first dimension of Pyrrhonism’s Fourfold observances, and reading Hume as a substantially Pyrrhonian thinker opens up resources for understanding how his naturalism is an expression of this sceptical practice, not a refutation of scepticism or an antidote to it. Understanding Humean naturalism as sceptical, however, also clarifies what it means for Hume to be an Academic sceptic, since, as we saw in Chapter 2, seventeenth-century Academic sceptics embraced the new natural sciences, and Hume’s naturalism is meant to underwrite the sciences, too. Hans Blumenberg criticises the sceptic for being one who ‘falls back on “nature” without wanting to admit it and without wanting to give content to this concept’.1 That charge certainly has no purchase in Hume, who gives substantial and original content to the concept, though his distinctively sceptical idea of nature is not quickly and easily digestible. Hume cannily remarks in the Treatise about ‘the word, Nature’ that ‘there is none more ambiguous and equivocal’ (T 3.1.2.7, SBN 473–4) and later in the Dialogues that it is a ‘vague, undeterminate word’ (D 7.11). At Treatise 3.1.2, he distinguishes three senses of nature: 1. Nature as what is not miraculous; nature is the empirical causal order. 2. Nature as what is not unusual; nature is what is common and ordinary. 187

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3. Nature as what is not artificial; nature is original, given, and not the product of human art. In this chapter, I wish to articulate the specific and distinctively sceptical meaning of ‘nature’ that Hume develops. The University of Edinburgh professor Norman Kemp Smith re-established Hume as a philosophical force in the early twentieth century and set the interpretive coordinates through which much subsequent scholarship on his naturalism has since then pursued its inquiries.2 Central to Kemp Smith’s reading of Hume is the idea that the reassertion of natural belief in Book 1 Part 4 of the Treatise defeats the sceptical conclusions that Hume had determined through his preceding squadron of arguments, especially those in T 1.4.1 (‘Scepticism with Regard to Reason’) and T 1.4.2 (‘Scepticism with Regard to the Senses’). Scepticism, according to Kemp Smith and those who followed him, entails the utter extinction of belief, and so nature’s restorative doxastic compulsion can only be, on his rendering, contrary to scepticism. Nature, moreover, for Kemp Smith not only negatively defeats sceptical doubt; it also positively establishes a dogmatic foundation for the legitimation of reason, the sciences and other epistemic projects. We have already seen, however, that scepticism’s traditional relationship to ‘nature’ and to belief is more complicated than that. Had Kemp Smith understood that yielding to nature is consistent with deep currents of both Hellenistic scepticism and the way scepticism was practised by early modern philosophers before Hume, he would have understood that the premise around which he had built his interpretation (that scepticism entails the cessation of belief) is false and that therefore his argument is unsound. Kemp Smith reads ‘nature’ in Hume in a specifically non-sceptical way, and as a result generations of Hume interpreters have navigated his texts under the guidance of a profound distortion. H. O. Mounce, for example, is typical of this errancy when he writes of the putative contrariety between Hume’s scepticism and his naturalism that ‘there is a conflict in his whole philosophy’ and that the despair he suffers in Treatise 1.4 ‘has its source in Hume’s empiricism, not his naturalism’, which for Mounce overcomes scepticism.3 This is not so. I wish to argue that the kind of naturalism that Hume advances is different from metaphysically and epistemologically realist forms

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of naturalism. Nature in Hume is nature as it appears, tout court. Humean sceptical nature expresses what I wish to call ‘fatalities’ of appearance discerned through sceptical inquiry – they are part of the positive result, even the truth, of sceptical reflection.

5.1 The Fluvial and the Necessary: The ‘Current of Nature’ How can scepticism accept a proper naturalism as consistent with its programme? Alternatively, if the ‘nature’ of Hume’s naturalism makes no appeal to the real, what else can the referent of his philosophical theory be such that it warrants the title ‘nature’ or ‘naturalism’? Can there be a sense of ‘nature’ that does not entail or require metaphysically positing an independent real? Following Sextus Empiricus, one must ask, ‘What kind of Nature? . . . seeing that there is so much unresolved controversy amongst the Dogmatists concerning the reality which belongs to Nature’ (PH 1.14.98).

5.1.1 Sceptical Necessity: ‘A Wonderful and Unintelligible Instinct’ Hume refuses the ancient project of apprehending (epistemically) the real (metaphysically) and limits philosophy to appearances in a project of methodising and correcting the thought and practices of common life. Much of that methodising-and-correcting project turns upon an analysis of human thought as a matter of natural association. Hume foregrounds this explanatory theory, when he writes about his philosophy in the 1740 Abstract to the Treatise that Thro’ this whole book, there are great pretensions to new discoveries in philosophy; but if any thing can intitle the author to so glorious a name as that of an inventor, ’tis the use he makes of the principle of the association of ideas, which enters into most of his philosophy. (A 35, SBN 661–2)

The idea of ‘association’ itself was not entirely novel. Hobbes, in Leviathan (1651), had written before Hume about ‘trains of thoughts’.4 Malebranche had already described association.5 Locke had appended to the fourth edition of his 1689 Essay a

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short chapter 33, ‘Of the Association of Ideas’, and he addressed the topic of association in his 1697 essay ‘Of the Conduct of the Understanding’. Associative thinking had been discussed by Shaftesbury, Mandeville and William Law, too. It was ‘the use’ to which Hume put association that was inventive. The assessment of association among those preceding Hume was commonly negative, understood even as a kind of madness. In Hume, by contrast, association would become basic. Hume defines the association of ideas in the 1757 ‘Dissertation on the Passions’ thus: The first of these [principles commonly overlooked by philosophers] is the association of ideas, or that principle, by which we make an easy transition from one idea to another. However uncertain and changeable our thoughts may be, they are not entirely without rule and method in their changes. They usually pass with regularity, from one object, to what resembles it, is contiguous to it, or produced by it. (DP 2.6)

In a footnote to this passage, Hume refers the reader to the first Enquiry (E.3). Hume refuses explanations of the relations among ideas through any ‘internal’ and logical relations of content, proposing instead an extensively naturalistic, but nevertheless sceptical, explanatory theory. It is, in fact, the scope of Hume’s naturalistic and sceptical account of associative thinking rather than his empiricist account of the origin of ideas that marks the deepest difference in philosophy of mind between Hume and so-called rationalists, who in contrast aspire to reduce all relations of ideas to internal, logical connections. For philosophers such as Descartes, Leibniz and Spinoza, if our minds were well enough informed, all knowledge would be a priori and all conclusions necessary. The connections between causes and effects, for example, would be known in the same way that mathematical equations are, so that effects would be understood to follow from their causes just as conclusions deductively follow from premises. As Hume explains the rationalist principle: ‘But were the power or energy of any cause discoverable by the mind, we could foresee the effect, even without experience; and might, at first, pronounce with certainty concerning it, by the mere dint of thought and reasoning’ (E 7.1.7, SBN 63).6

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In the rationalists’ view, that epistemological fact flows from the metaphysical fact that the components of reality are themselves connected by logical and mathematical relations. These are facts, moreover, for the rationalists that fall well within the orbit of human capacities to apprehend. Just as it is in the order of external being, no ideas bearing epistemic import are, for rationalists, connected to one another as a matter of brute, merely contingent fact or happenstance; and even resemblances can be specified in set theoretic ways. Accordingly, Leibniz explains in his 1704 Nouveaux essais sur l’entendement humain – a chapter-by-chapter refutation of Locke’s 1689 Essay – the rationalist principle thus: A cause in the realm of things corresponds to a reason in the realm of truths, which is why causes themselves – especially final causes – are often called ‘reasons.’ The faculty which is aware of this connection among truths is also called reason . . . and here on Earth this faculty really is exclusive to man alone and does not appear in any animal on earth.7

Hume’s profound sceptical challenge inverts this order of things. For him, reasons connect to conclusions just by natural, nonrational means, because humans are not categorically different in their capacities from (other) animals. Throwing down the gauntlet, Hume writes, ‘reason is nothing but a wonderful and unintelligible instinct’ (T 1.3.16.9, SBN 179; cf. E 9.6, SBN 108), and causes, so far as we can tell, have no intrinsic necessary connection to one another: ‘In a word, then, every effect is a distinct event from its cause. It could not, therefore, be discovered in the cause, and the first invention or conception of it, à priori, must be entirely arbitrary’ (E 4.11, SBN 30; cf. E 4.9, SBN 29).8 It is true that there is a kind of naturalism in Descartes when he writes about a ‘natural light’, a concept rooted in medieval illuminationist ideas; but the lumen naturale is a far cry from the ‘unintelligible instinct’ of Hume’s causal, probable and demonstrable reasonings. Rationalists, unlike sceptics, must pretend to a metaphysical guarantee for natural cognitive capacities, evoking a kind of providential naturalism or even revelation, as Descartes does when he certifies the natural light by appeal to divine goodness. For rationalists, the ultimate distinctions among intuitive knowledge,

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deductive truth and divine assistance or revelation cannot be entirely clear. In contrast, the order of ideas, for the sceptical Hume, makes no intrinsic claim upon the order of being and so requires no certification by a metaphysical guarantor of the human capacity to know it (T 1.3.14.13, SBN 161–2; T 1.4.5.5, SBN 233; E 7.1.7, SBN 63).9 For our purposes, what is important to see is that Hume’s naturalistic, associative theory of reason is itself, in this sense, sceptical. It is a way of theoretically practising epochê and aphasia about the metaphysically real order of being. Natural association is not unreasonable. Association is, rather, simply non-rational and nonepistemic. This becomes even clearer when considering the way in which Hume reconstructs the very idea of human nature so that the Treatise of Human Nature is in fact a treatise of animal nature. 5.1.1.1 Undermining categorical human superiority. Peter Millican writes that if the central theme of Hume’s attack on rationalism were to be encapsulated in one sentence it might be something like this: Hume, unlike Descartes and most of the other philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, sees man as just a part of the natural world, rather than as a semi-divine being quite different in kind from the animal.10

Quite so. Hume ‘argues that human reason is like animal reason rather than vice versa’.11 This is a position deeply antithetical to those of Leibniz, Aristotle and other rationalists. It is a rejection, too, of the Lockean view that even probable reasoning is grounded in a distinct intellectual faculty.12 Human beings may have ceased being the ‘barbarous, necessitous’ animals that Hume postulates they were at the dawn of society (N 1.6), and there may be ‘considerable’ differences in intellectual powers between humans and non-humans (ES 82); but humans never stopped, for Hume, being no more than animals. Hume’s having advanced this position is one of the distinguishing and most original characteristics of his theory of reasoning, even after the levelling projects advanced by Bayle and Montaigne.13 Hume maintains, more precisely, that the reasoning capacity of non-human animals is ‘not in itself different, nor founded on different principles, from that which appears in human nature’ (T 1.3.16.16, SBN 177). As if to make the point of this equalising gesture utterly clear, Hume enters what appears to be a mocking

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parody of Descartes when he writes: ‘no truth appears to me more evident, than that beasts are endow’d with thought and reason as well as men. The arguments are in this case so obvious, that they never escape the most stupid and ignorant’ (T 1.3.16.1, SBN 176).14 While Hume observes in the first Enquiry, at E 9.5, that – like children and most humans – non-human animals are different enough from the most intelligent humans that they cannot engage in ‘abstruse’ thinking and lack ‘philosophic genius’, Hume nevertheless clearly holds that the kinds of thinking in which non-humans engage are continuous with those of even the most capable human beings. Humans are different from nonhuman animals, but the difference is one of degree rather than kind – just as it is among humans: ‘Men are superior to beasts principally by the superiority of their reason; and they are the degrees of the same faculty, which set such an infinite difference betwixt one man and another’ (T 3.3.4.5, SBN 610).15 We saw in §4.1.4.2 that Montaigne, in contrast to Aenesidemus (trope 1; PH 1.14.59–60) argues for continuity rather than difference between humans and other animals in order to raise sceptical doubts.16 We saw, too, that Montaigne associates the move with Pyrrhonism and that he follows Sextus’ appeal to continuity (PH 1.14.69) by deploying the story of Chryssipus’ dog to sceptical purpose. The continuity strategy also has ancient Academic roots, as it repeats Arcesilaus’ turning of the stoics’ account of non-rational animal cognition and action back against them.17 Bayle’s articles ‘Rorarius’, ‘Pereira’ and ‘Sennertus’ in the Dictionnaire also precede Hume in arguing that a clear distinction cannot be drawn between human and non-human animals. Bayle writes, for example, in Note E of the article on Rorarius that ‘There is nothing more diverting, than to see with what authority, the schoolmen take upon themselves to set bounds to the knowledge of beasts.’18 More complicated than the story of Chrysippus’ dog is the fable that sceptics tell about ‘Pyrrho’s pig’. In his biographical tale about Pyrrho, Diogenes Laërtius tells of how the ur-sceptic points, as an exemplar, to the behaviour of a pig on a ship in the midst of a storm. Despite the maelstrom around her, the pig goes on tranquilly eating, even while the humans panic (DL 9:68; cf. 9:66). It is a parable aimed not at showing that non-humans are like humans but rather at instructing humans to adopt a sort of porcine wisdom. That is, it is a parable about difference overcome. In Montaigne’s words: ‘We must become like the animals in order to become wise, and be blinded in order to be guided.’19 In this, Diogenes’ story offers a

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moral lesson that John Stuart Mill later re-inverts (as does so much of the philosophical canon), perhaps in defiance of Pyrrhonism, when he argues in Utilitarianism that ‘it is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied’.20 The sceptical challenge to human distinction and privilege is not just a matter of epistemology. Scepticism also challenges traditional theology and religion, as Bayle observes. Sceptical criticism muddles the boundary between humans and other animals and thereby makes it difficult to maintain the idea that humans alone possess souls while non-humans do not. Adam, it seems to the sceptics, cannot be distinguished from animal. Confirming that implication, Hume provocatively concludes in ‘Of Suicide’ that ‘the life of man is of no greater importance to the universe than that of an oyster’ (ES 583). The sceptical gesture advances deeply subversive ideas, and Hume’s line of argument in the Treatise about animals marks one of his most radical attacks upon Abrahamic religion.21 There is, however, a more positive dimension to Hume’s sceptical tactic. While the anti-metaphysical, anti-epistemic and anti-theological account of humans as animals limits reasoning, it nevertheless also entails a kind of philosophical expansion. By expanding the referential extension of his ‘attempt to introduce the experimental method of reasoning into moral subjects’ so that it includes non-human animals, Hume enlarges the scope of its explanatory power – though he does so at the expense of speculation into the supernatural.22 Hume goes so far as to make a methodological point about the congruence of humans with other animals: When any hypothesis, therefore, is advanced to explain a mental operation, which is common to men and beasts, we must apply the same hypothesis to both; and as every true hypothesis will abide this trial, so I may venture to affirm, that no false one will ever be able to endure it. (T 1.3.16.3, SBN 177–8)

Montaigne had similarly, before Hume, maintained in the ‘Apologie’ that in drawing conclusions about the mental operations of humans and other animals, ‘We must infer from like results like faculties.’23 5.1.1.2 Animality and causal necessity. Among the most significantly sceptical elements of this levelling elision of the boundary between human and non-human animal rationality, with its appeals to natural relations in the association of ideas, is Hume’s rendering of causal necessity.24 Perhaps inspired by the critiques of

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causation typical of the Pyrrhonian and Academic traditions, Hume famously shows that there are neither intuitive nor demonstrativedeductive grounds for inferring that anything at all has a cause. We only think that there are causes through the regularities and contiguities of appearances in conjunction with projective experience and our natural capacity to form associative habits (T 1.3.3, SBN 76ff.): ‘’Tis therefore by EXPERIENCE only, that we can infer the existence of one object from that of another’ (T 1.3.6.2, SBN 87). By empirical observation we can find no objective necessity in the relationship between what we come to call causes and what we call effects. Moreover, it is central to Hume’s scepticism of the external world that we have no experience of external objects causing our perceptions (E 12.11–12, SBN 152–3). All we observe externally are resembling regular conjunctions of successive phenomena that are spatially and temporally contiguous, followed by the habits of thinking and feeling that those conjunctions generate in us. Unsurprisingly, Hume’s theory of causation was received as clearly Pyrrhonian by a contemporary reviewer who wrote: ‘This is pretty close to the manner in which Sextus Empiricus formerly reasoned in his Hypotyposes, Book III, Chap. III.’25 The custom or habit of associating resembling and constantly conjoined impressions and ideas results in an ‘impression . . . or determination, which affords’ us our ‘idea of necessity’ (T 1.3.14.1, SBN 156). We ‘draw the idea’ of necessity ‘from what we feel internally in contemplating’ regular phenomena (T 1.3.14.28, SBN 169). It is from this ‘impression of reflexion’ or ‘internal impression of mind’ (T 1.3.14.20, SBN 165) that our ideas of ‘necessity’ are derived (T 1.3.14.19, SBN 164) – all of them. In Hume’s naturalism, the natural origin of ‘the idea of necessity’ in the experience of what he names ‘determination’ is the same for all kinds of necessity – those of mathematics, of deduction, of physics, and of all the empirical, probable and formal sciences. Hume finds in his analysis that ‘the terms of efficacy, agency, power, force, energy, necessity, connexion, and productive quality, are all nearly synonimous; and therefore ’tis an absurdity to employ any of them in defining the rest’ (T 1.3.14.4, SBN 157). He, moreover, specifically links these ideas to each other through their common root in ‘the act’ of our ‘understanding’: Thus as the necessity, which makes two times two equal to four, or three angles of a triangle equal to two right ones, lies only in the act of the understanding, by which we consider and compare these ideas;

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in like manner the necessity or power, which unites causes and effects, lies in the determination of the mind to pass from the one to the other. (T 1.3.14.23, SBN 166)

Custom generates the idea of necessity. Then, guided by custom, the mind projects the idea back on to the constant conjunctions of the apparent world. The mind, says Hume, has ‘a great tendency to spread itself on external objects’ (T 1.3.14.25, SBN 167), that is, to ‘transfer the determination’ (T 1.3.14.27, SBN 168) that we experience in our own natural thinking to the world. In the first Enquiry, Hume writes that ‘as we feel a customary connexion between the ideas, we transfer that feeling to the objects; as nothing is more usual than to apply to external bodies every internal sensation, which they occasion’ (E 7.29n17, SBN 78). There is an akataleptic implication to this. The efficacy or energy of causes is neither plac’d in the causes themselves, nor in the deity, nor in the concurrences of these two principles; but belongs entirely to the soul, which considers the union of two or more objects in all past instances. ’Tis here that the real power of causes is plac’d, along with their connexion and necessity. (T 1.3.14.23, SBN 166)

Hume’s analysis dislocates what humans experience as ‘real’ powers and necessities of the world and places their source within us. This is a crucial moment in Hume’s naturalistic theorising and a moment that exhibits how, in Pyrrhonian terms, the guidance of nature figures so centrally in his thought. That moment of ‘determination’, of feeling the force of movement that carries thought from one perception to another, of experiencing what we try to express when we use words such as ‘force of movement’, is, as we will see, the root of Hume’s sceptical naturalism. 5.1.1.3 Sceptical and Kantian necessity. The ‘ties of thoughts’ – the relations among all ideas and impressions – are, for Hume, figured as natural and external. That is to say, they are theorised as profoundly contingent. Hume writes that ‘every effect is a distinct event from its cause’, and ‘it could not, therefore, be discovered in the cause, and the first invention or conception of it, a priori, must be entirely arbitrary’ (E 4.11, SBN 30).26 Unlike rationalistic

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readings of the natural order, causal relations – as well as other relations among ideas – must, for Hume, be brought to perceptions from the outside, as it were, naturally, through something exterior to the contents of ideas. That is, causation is brought to perceptions through relations that are nothing more than what we find to be the case in our natural condition. For this reason, there is no logical contradiction in rearranging ideas: ‘all ideas’, writes Hume, ‘which are different, are separable’ (T 1.1.7.17, SBN 24).27 Or, more expansively, and with a clearly subversive implication for cosmological arguments: all distinct ideas are separable from each other, and as the ideas of cause and effect are evidently distinct, ’twill be easy for us to conceive any object to be non-existent this moment, and existent the next, without conjoining to it the distinct idea of a cause or productive principle. The separation, therefore, of the idea of a cause from that of a beginning of existence, is plainly possible for the imagination; and consequently the actual separation of these objects is so far possible, that it implies no contradiction nor absurdity; and is therefore incapable of being refuted by any reasoning from mere ideas; without which ’tis impossible to demonstrate the necessity of a cause. (T 1.3.3.3, SBN 79)

Hume calls this his principle ‘of the liberty of the imagination’, and, by it, ‘Where-ever the imagination perceives a difference among ideas, it can easily produce a separation’ (T 1.1.3.4, SBN 10). Now, Hume’s separating and binding different ideas together in this way can seem unacceptably ‘arbitrary’. His account seems to describe the networks of ideas that compose our theories and reasonings as merely matters of raw happenstance, whimsy or chance. Hume’s naturalistic and sceptical account of thinking seemed objectionable in just that way to Kant, no less than to Cartesians and other rationalists. Still compelled by the metaphysical naturalism that preceded him, Kant found intolerable and philosophically inadequate sceptical naturalism and its theory that relations among ideas are merely natural. Kant’s theory of the synthetic a priori does accept that relations may be exterior to ideas and perceptions (for example, causation). It accepts that those relations may not be grounded in the contents of ideas and may not correspond to a metaphysical, noumenal order of things in themselves.

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But those relations, for all that, cannot, in Kant’s view, be simply given or contingent matters of nature as we find it. They cannot, for Kant, be independent of a supra-natural order of logical possibility and its objective, universal logical necessities.28 Kant wants something stronger than Hume’s natural relations but different from metaphysical and epistemic rationalism. He writes accordingly in §27 of the 1783 Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics that he intends to ‘remove the Humean doubt from the ground up’ and produce a ‘complete solution of the Humean problem’.29 For Kant, Hume’s explanatory sceptical naturalism is simply not explanatory enough. Since Hume, Kant writes, could not explain how it can be possible that the understanding must think concepts [e.g., causation], which are not in themselves connected in the understanding, as being necessarily connected in the object, and since it never occurred to him that the understanding might itself, perhaps, through these concepts, be the author of the experience in which its objects are found, he was constrained to derive them from experience, namely, from a subjective necessity (that is, from custom) . . . which comes mistakenly to be regarded as objective. But from these premisses he argued quite consistently. It is impossible, he declared, with these concepts and the principles to which they give rise, to pass beyond the limits of experience. Now this empirical derivation, in which both philosophers [i.e., Locke and Hume] agree, cannot be reconciled with the scientific a priori knowledge which we do actually possess, namely, pure mathematics and general science of nature; and this fact therefore suffices to disprove such derivation.30

That kind of custom-based necessity and that absence of explanation – an absence Hume is willing to accept as a matter of epochê and aphasia – Kant finds intolerable.

5.1.2 Sceptical Contingency: The ‘Loose and Unconnected’ Epicureanism regards the arrangement of atoms that compose the natural world as ultimately contingent, and Hume’s ferocious contemporary critic, James Beattie, read Hume as a philosopher of radical contingency. Beattie excoriated Hume for rendering causal inferences, and with them attributions of moral responsibility, matters of mere ‘fancy’, where, as Beattie writes, ‘what we call the power, or necessary connection . . . is merely a determination of

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my fancy, or your fancy, or any body’s fancy, to associate the idea or impression of my volition with the impression or idea of the motion of my arm’.31 Beattie accuses Hume of rendering determinations of fact as nothing more than a matter of simple choice, as trivial as where to lay the silverware at a place-setting. For Hume, natural association is not a matter of mere fancy. Even so, he does write: That impious maxim of the ancient philosophy, Ex nihilo, nihil fit, by which the creation of matter was excluded, ceases to be a maxim, according to this philosophy. Not only the will of the supreme Being may create matter; but, for aught we know à priori, the will of any other being might create it, or any other cause that the most whimsical imagination can assign. (E 12.3.29n35, SBN 164n1)

So far as we know, in fact, ‘any thing may produce any thing’ (T 1.3.15.1, SBN 173). There is no apparent logical contradiction in attributing or denying the power of creation to any thing: ‘Creation, annihilation, motion, reason, volition; all these may arise from one another, or from any other object we can imagine’ (T 1.3.15.1, SBN 173), and without the creative act of a deity (T 1.3.3, SBN 78–9). Hume simply finds no warrant for the Parmenidean metaphysical principle that ‘what-is’ (esti) or ‘being’ cannot become out of ‘whatis-not’ (ouk esti) or ‘nothingness’. In Part 9 of the Dialogues, Hume is clear: ‘“Any particle of matter,” ’tis said, “may be conceived to be annihilated; and any form may be conceived to be altered. Such an annihilation or alteration, therefore, is not impossible”’ (D 9.7). This contingency follows from Hume’s theory of ideas and his theory of causation as a principle of association. It is also, more importantly, an expression of his Pyrrhonism, since Sextus raises just this point about what we must accept if we give up on the project of apprehending real causes (PH 3.5.17–18).32 Hume’s point about the ex nihilo principle is, it is important to see, epistemological but not at all metaphysical, as it was for medieval Christians. Hume’s purpose is not to establish an antiParmenidean metaphysics. With the phrase, ‘for aught we know’ (E 12.3.29n35, SBN 164n1), and with his restriction to what-weconceive rather than to what-is, Hume removes the principle from the discourse of metaphysical assertion and reformulates it as a gesture of isosthenia in the service of epochê. As a sceptic, Hume refuses assertions about the nature of the world’s ultimate reality, including whether it is ultimately contingent or necessary. Hume

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limits philosophy to the universe of our imagination (T 1.2.6.8, SBN 67–8). To argue for a real, independent and pervasive contingency is just as dogmatic as arguing for a real, independent and pervasive necessity. Hume makes it clear, in an illuminating remark to John Stewart in 1754, that he does not enter the metaphysical claim that there are no causes or even that an event might in reality possibly occur without a cause: I never asserted so absurd a Proposition as that any thing might arise without a Cause: I only maintain’d, that our Certainty of the Falshood of that Proposition proceeded neither from Intuition or Demonstration; but from another Source. That Caesar existed, that there is such an Island as Sicily; for these propositions, I affirm, we have no demonstrative nor intuitive Proof. Woud you infer that I deny their Truth, or even their Certainty? There are many different kinds of Certainty; and some of them as satisfactory to the Mind, tho perhaps not so regular, as the demonstrative kind. (LT 1.187; #91)

What, then, is the other source of that other kind of certainty to which Hume refers – a source different from intellectual or rational intuition and different from deductive or demonstrative certainty? How is it consistent with sceptical limits and the kind of contingency Hume has described in his theories about the apparent relations of human ideas? Although relations among impressions and ideas are, for Hume, contingent, in experience he finds that contingency to be limited, just as the extent of its necessities is ultimately both unknown and demonstrably and intuitively uncertain. The naturalness of relations among appearances also lends human ways of thinking and acting a countervailing stability and apparent necessity. Hume signals as much when he associates his work with Newtonian physics and its principles of gravity and inertia, which relate contingent material objects via necessary laws. While the mind’s relating ideas with one another in just some ways but not others is apparently nothing more than contingently given (for aught we know), those patterns of relation do assert themselves and do endure with a kind of durability and strength – the strength of natural fact. Hume identifies three basic natural relations of ideas (resemblance, contiguity and causation) that mirror Newton’s three laws of motion. He finds in these three relations a kind of limit he describes as a natural ‘cement’ that resists alteration. The cement places a brake

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on what would otherwise be radical happenstance. Just as there are limits to what natural bodies can and cannot do, despite the ultimate contingency of the natural order, so it is with ideas. ‘Nature’ in this sense, for Hume, refers to what is ‘permanent’ and ‘irresistible’ in experience (T 1.4.4.1, SBN 225–6). It is a conception of nature that pointedly defines no rationalist limit, no boundary, as Kant would have it, determined by a priori reason or a rational transcendental ego. Rather, it demarcates a limit that can be discerned only through a sensitive sounding of the fatalities of human experience. Hume famously writes about the contingencies of the ‘empire of imagination’ and the necessities of the ‘cement of the universe’ that Our imagination has a great authority over our ideas; and there are no ideas that are different from each other, which it cannot separate, and join, and compose into all the varieties of fiction. But notwithstanding the empire of the imagination there is a secret tie or union among particular ideas, which causes the mind to conjoin them more frequently together, and makes the one, upon its appearance, introduce the other. Hence arises what we call the apropos of discourse: hence the connection of writing: and hence that thread, or chain of thought, which a man naturally supports even in the loosest reverie . . . ’Twill be easy to conceive of what vast consequence these principles must be in the science of human nature, if we consider, that so far as regards the mind, these are the only links that bind the parts of the universe together, or connect us with any person or object exterior to ourselves. For as it is by means of thought only that any thing operates upon our passions, and as these are the only ties of our thoughts, they are really to us the cement of the universe, and all the operations of the mind must, in a great measure, depend on them. (A 35, SBN 661–2)

Nature links us to the world and to others, but not in a way that fully expels contingency or sceptical doubt about the external world and other minds. Echoing that ‘secret’ union that subversively resists the arbitrary, contingent power and ‘loose’ reveries characteristic of the ‘empire of imagination’, Hume, in a Newtonian voice, writes less militantly and more sensitively about a ‘gentle force’ and the universal principles that underwrite it. As all simple ideas may be separated by the imagination, and may be united again in what form it pleases, nothing wou’d be more unaccountable than the operations of that faculty, were it not guided by

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some universal principles, which render it, in some measure, uniform with itself in all times and places. Were ideas entirely loose and unconnected, chance alone wou’d join them; and ’tis impossible the same simple ideas should fall regularly into complex ones (as they commonly do) without some bond of union among them, some associating quality, by which one idea naturally introduces another. (T 1.1.1.5, SBN 3–4)

Like gravity, the natural relations of ideas or principles of association correlate and organise the otherwise ‘loose and unconnected’ atoms of perception through what is experienced as an ‘inseparable’ or necessary ‘connexion’. Hume writes that these ‘principles of union or cohesion’ act like ‘a kind of ATTRACTION, which in the mental world will be found to have as extraordinary effects as in the natural, and to show itself in as many and as various forms’ (T 1.1.4.6, SBN 12–13). Hume’s mental atomism was, however, not specifically Epicurean or, perhaps, even Newtonian since it bears no metaphysical implications, materialist or otherwise.33 This subtle play of contingency and necessity – of the way in which ideas can be fractured and reassembled but also stable, inseparably connected, and shared in unbidden ways – locates much of both the power and the difficulty of Hume’s thought. It positions the necessities of his sceptical naturalism between the utter contingency of existentialists and post-structuralists on the one hand and the rational necessity of Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz and Kant on the other. That subtlety is a mark not only of Hume’s enduring genius but also of his honest, sceptical integrity and intellectual maturity. Released from First Philosophy’s epistemic project as well as from the pretensions of metaphysical dogmatism, Parmenidean and otherwise, Hume advances a nuanced and revolutionary approach to necessity and nature through a sceptical conceptual framework.

5.2 Apelletic Empiricism and the Priority of Hume’s Sceptical Naturalism Quickly reading Hume’s accounts of the ‘natural’ quality of the principles of association – that ‘secret union’ resisting contingency, the ‘only links’ that cement the universe ‘together’, and that ‘connect’ both ‘writing’ and each of us with any other ‘person or object exterior to ourselves’ – one might be forgiven for interpreting Humean

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naturalism as simply psychologising epistemological matters.34 One might similarly be tempted, as many have been, to read Hume as constructing a naturalised epistemology by enlisting a naturalism that conceives of ‘nature’ as a causal order that determines the dynamics of perception, thought, feeling and conduct.35 Hume himself does often use the concept of nature like this – in contrast to miracles, for example (T 3.1.2.7, SBN 474; E 16n1, SBN 22n1). But these readings are fundamentally mistaken. The natural ‘gravity’ Hume discerns that binds the parts of the universe, different minds and human language together runs deeper. It is prior to any theory of an independent causal order, and it bears philosophical weight that is more basic than any naturalistic psychological theory of mind. Just as the ‘science of man’ is prior to the empirical sciences, ‘nature’, in this Humean context, is what psychological theories and metaphors of ‘gravity’ and ‘cement’ are about, what they presuppose, what makes them meaningful and possible. Just as Hume roots the idea of ‘necessity’ in the felt experience of ‘determination’ as the mind moves from the perception of cause to that of effect, when Hume confronts ‘nature’ in those desperate sceptical moments of Treatise 1.4.7, he similarly roots the idea of ‘nature’ in something different from a theory of the causal order. The course of T 1.4 makes it clear that philosophical systems of every kind are at that important moment in Hume’s narrative without credibility. So, when Hume writes, ‘I find myself absolutely and necessarily determin’d to live, and talk, and act like other people’ (T 1.4.7.10, SBN 269), he does not call upon an independent causal order compelling him. (Causal orders have fallen away, along with the realism of T 1.1–3.)

5.2.1 Nature as Press What Hume instead finds and calls ‘nature’ in that clarified moment of T 1.4.7’s sceptical phenomenology is rather an unbidden, resistant, irresistible and non-rational press – the press of impressions, the pressure to conceptualise experiences discursively and to act. Hume’s famous remark about nature’s reassertion in light of this reading takes on a different valence: ‘Nature, by an absolute and uncontroulable necessity has determin’d us to judge as well as to breathe and feel’ (T 1.4.1.7, SBN 183).36 The ‘nature’ and ‘necessity’ that Hume confronts here is neither rationalistic necessity nor the necessity of causal realism. It is rather the pressing, propelling quality

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of the current of experience that makes possible thinking, perceiving and doing, despite sceptical arguments or fantasies to the contrary. It is a press that we might deny (or wish to deny) but that will not be denied. Nature, as this press, is the human fate. It is not, therefore, theories of causal reasoning nor a priori concepts that underwrite the press of human existence; it is rather, in the brilliance of Hume’s insight, the press that underwrites theories of causal reasoning and conceptual necessity.37 Hume does not launch a transcendental deduction, nor does he appeal to demonstration, induction, illumination, intuition, catalepsis or revelation. Rather, in his own words, Hume just finds this absolutely crucial philosophical discovery at the heart of his sceptical crisis. Contra so many interpreters in the wake of Kemp Smith, this finding marks not the abandonment of philosophical scepticism but a key moment of its progress. The natural, for Hume, impresses itself upon us without reason, prior to reason, in reasoning, with more or less ‘force and vivacity’. Accordingly, Hume’s terminology is not simply, as John P. Wright argues, an appropriation of early modern anatomists’ mechanical theories of human cognition – the kind, for example, that one finds in Descartes’ empirical research into the operation of the nervous system using a pneumatic-hydraulic model of perception much like those of the atomist tradition. In theories of that sort, when one’s finger presses against an object, pressure is increased inside a system of tubes containing ‘animal spirits’ connected to the brain. When these spirits (volatile liquids or vapours) press on the brain’s material organ of imagination, they cause images (impressions) to appear in the mind. Language reflecting Hume’s familiarity with this theory is scattered throughout his texts.38 But Hume’s sceptical naturalism does not presume or require that model; rather, that pneumatic model presumes and requires the natural press that Hume’s Pyrrhonian naturalism discloses. In short, Hume reads ‘perceptions’ as ‘impressions’ and ‘impressions’ as ‘appearances’; and it should strike us with no surprise when he remarks in the Dialogues that ‘External objects press in upon’ us (D 1.6). Along similar lines, as if reworking Hume’s insight, Crispin Wright describes perception as an ‘impingement on awareness’.39 Impinging, impressing and appearing in unbidden ways, the natural moves easily along when we yield to it and resists us when we oppose it by the internal countercurrent or ‘animal nisus’ (effort, striving or desire) that, in Hume’s analysis, informs the

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vulgar idea of power in common life (E 7.1.15n13, SBN 67).40 The press of nature is what Dr Johnson pointed towards, confusedly and desperately, when he kicked a stone in an attempt to refute Berkeley, a stone standing for the apparent world no less than Descartes’ ball of wax or Cavell’s tomato.41 The press is that sweep and push that carries not only Hume’s ‘leaky and weather-beaten vessel along’ (T 1.4.7.1, SBN 263), but also in fact the world as a whole in its forward motion upon what Hume calls the ‘current of nature’ (T 1.4.7.10, SBN 269) and ‘the most natural course of things’ (ES, ‘Of commerce’, 260). This press is what Ralph Waldo Emerson calls the ‘onward trick of nature’ that ‘is too strong for us’, that is ‘difficult to resist’ (E 12.2.22, SBN 159) – or at least to resist meaningfully.42

5.2.2 Moving Nature Emerson notably expresses his scepticism and his acknowledgement of contingency in the midst of nature by finding, not nothing, but instead ‘quicksand’ at the bottom of the flowing river of experience upon which we sail. Milton finds something worse when, in Paradise Lost, he recounts the possibility of mistaking the top of Satan’s pate, broken through the surface of Hell’s lake, for an island on which to land safely.43 Emerson’s quicksand contrasts against the secure, grounding ‘anchorage’ of external objects that Kant transcendentally argues is the condition of the possibility of phenomenal succession.44 Quicksand is an image that also distances Emerson, like Hume, from the secure rocks upon which philosophical dogmatists would depend. Moreover, Emerson’s quicksand, like Hume’s immense depths, is an image radically different from the Archimedean point upon which Descartes hoped to lever philosophical thought and indeed the whole world.45 As if in recognition of the Humean insight, even Wittgenstein presents in On Certainty a curiously similar sceptical and fluvial gesture when he writes about the riverbed of thought that had seemed so stable and secure nevertheless shifting contingently: ‘It might be imagined’, writes Wittgenstein, that some propositions, of the form of empirical propositions, were hardened and functioned as channels for such empirical propositions as were not hardened but fluid; and that this relation altered with

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time, in that fluid propositions hardened and hard ones became fluid. The mythology may change back into a state of flux, the river-bed of thoughts may shift. (OC §§96–7)46

As Hume acknowledges in the Abstract, for aught we know, ‘’tis possible the course of nature may change’ (A 14, SBN 651). Montaigne had certainly acknowledged motion and mutability, and there may even be a proto-Humean and sceptical acknowledgement of this potential instability at play in the ambiguous remark attributed to Galileo: ‘Pero si muove’ (‘But still it moves’).47 That phrase – with its ambiguous ‘si’ and ambiguous ‘muove’ – seems to anticipate the ongoing press of nature that Hume describes in the Treatise as a ‘perpetual flux and movement’ (T 1.4.6.4, SBN 252). Hume later reaffirms that motion in his essay ‘Of the Immortality of the Soul’, writing: ‘Nothing in this world is perpetual. Every being, however seemingly firm, is in continual flux and change’ (ES 597). In this idea of the natural as what presses us onward in ongoing motion, it is tempting to connect Hume, too, with Heraclitus and the ambiguity of his remark that panta rhei (‘everything moves’). Heraclitus probably influenced Aenesidemus, and it may not be too much to read rhei as ‘presses’ as well as ‘moves’ (PH 1.29.210).48 One cannot step twice into the same river because its ‘course’, the riverbed as well as its water, presses onward. It is a thought that occurs to Hume, too (T 1.4.6.14, SBN 258). Human life suffers the absence of an ultimate reason that would certify or ground what seems stable, that would assure us that the apparently stable is not subject to radical contingency and change. As Stanley Cavell observes, the sceptic reminds us – against Kant’s and Descartes’ futile insistence – that we possess no reason to think that the cement of the universe will not crack, that it has not cracked already: If I say that such ideas [i.e., that there is an independent world or that the future will be like the past] are the ground upon which any particular beliefs I may have about the world, or the others in it, are founded, this does not mean that I cannot find this ground to crack. (This is why the skeptic’s knowledge, should we feel its power, is devastating; he is not challenging a particular belief or set of beliefs about, say, other minds; he is challenging the ground of our beliefs altogether, our power to believe at all.)49

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We are bound; but what binds, what exerts a now gentle, a now inviolable force, may, for aught we know, cease to do so.

5.2.3 Stability as Press Nevertheless, amid phenomenal experience of change and contingency we do still find apparently fixed and enduring stability in the logos of moving nature, if not in its substantial being. In contrast to the Parmenidean idea of being as the inert and unchanging, Humean sceptical naturalism offers a different way of conceiving what-is. Contrary to Parmenides’ inert and unchanging esti, natural being as it appears for Hume is what resists the press of change and contingency. For Hume, that is, as for Heraclitus, what resists change manifests the natural press by pressing back (as if by its own counter-nisus or conatus) against us or even against the flow that otherwise sweeps the world along. Just so does Newtonian physics conceive material objects as resisting motion in the way, for example, that a wall stands because it exerts force against the ceiling and the wind that would otherwise press it to the ground. This natural pressing-back may add complexity to thinking about how Aristotle’s unmoved mover actually moves things. The mover may be understood not only to inspire entities to change but also to move them not to change, to stay put as they are against the flow of possible changes, as one might be moved to stand fast with stubborn tenacity against some adversary or against an otherwise altering force. Similarly, what impresses us shapes our convictions and leaves us firm and convicted in our beliefs, just as Martin Luther before the 1521 Diet of Worms was pressed to stand where he was and to do no other. This sense of the natural signals those logically contingent ways of thinking and acting to which we find in experience, and not through reasoning, that we must yield, resist or hold close. They are ways of thinking, feeling, perceiving and acting to which we find we cannot help but submit – and, moreover, without which reasoning and the concepts that reasoning deploys would themselves be impossible.50 It is by the press of nature that conclusions must follow deductively from premises and that effects must follow from causes. The press substitutes for both the logically rigorous, world-spinning activity of Kant’s transcendental ego, and the divine, unalterable geometry of Spinoza’s deus sive natura, the heaving breath of common life.

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5.3 The Fatalities of Nature and Human Empereia This rendering of the unbidden press of natural human necessities that Hume discerns resists interpretations that might read his account of the resurgence of nature as describing doxastic akrasia or hypocrisy in spite of the imperatives of sceptical argument.51 As the word ‘natural’ relates to the word ‘natal’, Hume’s natural press instead defines the very fatalities of human natality – the human ‘fit’, in the sense in which Hume says our faculties are best ‘fitted’ to operate (E 1.12, SBN 12).52 Emerson eloquently articulates this idea in his essay ‘Fate’: The book of Nature is the book of Fate . . . Nature is what you may do. There is much you may not. We have two things, – the circumstance, and the life. Once we thought positive power was all. Now we learn that negative power, or circumstance, is half. Nature is the tyrannous circumstance, the thick skull, the sheathed snake, the ponderous, rock-like jaw; necessitated activity; violent direction; the conditions of a tool, like the locomotive, strong enough on its track, but which can do nothing but mischief off of it . . .53

If my connecting nature with fate for Hume still seems a stretch, consider that Hume himself does so, writing the following about Greek deities in ‘The Natural History of Religion’: ‘Nor was it only in respect of their first origin, that the gods were supposed dependent on the powers of Nature. Throughout the whole period of their existence they were subjected to the dominion of fate or destiny’ (N 4.13; cf. N 8.2). Even P. F. Strawson, while not recognising the sceptical background of the idea, reads Hume’s naturalism as grounded in what he calls the ‘inescapable’, a characterisation not far from ‘fate or destiny’.54 In terms that Norman Kemp Smith draws from Hume, natural beliefs are ‘inevitable’; and following Kemp Smith, others have called them ‘fundamental’ and ‘indispensable’.55 For Cavell, the natural emerges in what ‘I just do’ – what one cannot help but think, feel and do.56 Hume’s discovery of nature in this sense of human fatality is not the disclosure of some matter of fact determined through inductive generalisation from experience, from Baconian or Galilean experiments, or from anything like the contemporary methods of randomly sampled, stratified, longitudinal and controlled studies. Nor is his discovery a conclusion reached through demonstrative or deductive reasoning from self-evident, intuitively seen or divinely revealed

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first principles. Neither is Humean fate about the results of utterly voluntary or free, contingent, undetermined and ungrounded choice (individual or social) about what to call ‘natural’. Hume’s discovery is of an Apelletic sort in the way that Pyrrhonian fateful (tûchikos) method was described in §3.4.1. Because of the way sceptical interrogation ‘finds’ human fatality, one might properly call Hume’s discovery the fruit of Apelletic empiricism. Unlike the fruit beyond Tantalus’s reach, these findings lie within the human ken. Hume’s philosophical investigations into the natural press of determination that undergirds the human fate refute summary judgements against Humean empiricism – judgements of the sort that afflict even a reader as sensitive as Stanley Cavell, who, cribbing from Emerson in his 1972 The Senses of Walden, opines that what is ‘wrong with empiricism is not its reliance on experience but its paltry idea of experience’.57 Apelletic empiricism is anything but paltry. Readers such as Cavell have thought so in part because Humean impressions seem to be received in a strictly passive way, as the wax receives the impression of a seal. If Book 1, Part 4 of the Treatise reveals anything, however, it is that in sceptical moments we, no less than Jacob, struggle with our fate, that there is nothing more human than doing so. Despite our resistance, like those ‘impressed’ into military service, we are dragged back into a common world, where finally, through careful sceptical reflection, we may, even with some measure of relief, come to accept, acknowledge and embrace our fate. Book 1, Part 4 of the Treatise, like much of his philosophical inquiry, displays Hume sounding out human empereia, much as a boat’s pilot might probe the bottom of the watercourse on which it sails. Hume’s sceptical practice aims to discern the pressing human fatalities that make naturalistic explanation of a causal or psychological or sociological sort possible at all – but with no guarantee that those conditions will not shift.58 Humean Apelletic empiricism is a project of finding and describing the human fatalities of appearance, not one of apprehending either truths about the real or, through transcendental deduction, the necessary conditions for any possible experience.

5.4 Conclusion Chapters 1–4 – that is, Part I of this book – set out an account of the history of philosophical scepticism in both its Academic and Pyrrhonian streams, with special focus on the dimensions of the sceptical traditions that illuminate Hume’s philosophical

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texts. The result of those four chapters was a general framework through which to interpret Hume’s texts. In this fifth chapter, I have undertaken to explore one of the principal elements of that framework as it appears in Hume – namely, the sceptical appeal to nature. The Pyrrhonian Fourfold identifies the guidance of nature as one dimension of its practical criterion for engaging common life. Hume enacts that guidance, his recognition of it, and his deference to it, not only in his submission to natural principles of association (see §5.1), but also more broadly in his identifying and articulating, in a theoretical way, a sceptical naturalism. Hume’s is a naturalism centred on what I have called the fatalities of human existence (see §5.3). Most fundamentally, it is centred on the ongoing press of nature disclosed through his Apelletic empiricism (see §5.2). For Hume, that distinctively sceptical kind of naturalism underwrites, as a matter of philosophical priority, other forms of naturalism, including scientific explanatory naturalism, especially in the contingencies and necessities of thinking, speaking, writing and otherwise acting. It is now time to turn, in the next three chapters, to the three remaining components of the Pyrrhonian Fourfold observances – custom, the technical arts and the passions – as well as to a more thoroughgoing investigation of the way Hume adopts and elaborates Academic-Clitomachian ideas about belief and probability.

Notes 1. Blumenberg, Legitimacy, p. 276; quoted by Laursen, ‘Natura vs. Libertà’, p. 7. 2. Kemp Smith, ‘Naturalism of Hume’. 3. Mounce, Hume’s Naturalism, p. 59. 4. Hobbes, Leviathan, 1.3, pp. 20–1; quoted in Susato, Hume’s Sceptical Enlightenment, p. 30. 5. Forbes, Philosophical Politics, pp. 10n2, 107, 130, as well as Wright, Sceptical Realism, pp. 70–1, 205–7, 213–15, both point to Malebranche as a likely source of Hume’s ideas about association; see Susato, Hume’s Sceptical Enlightenment, pp. 30–5. 6. Strawson, Secret Connexion, pp. 109ff.; Kail, ‘Conceivability and Modality’, p. 44. 7. Leibniz, New Essays, p. 475. 8. Hegel finds this contingency characteristic of Hume: ‘necessity to him [Hume] is thus a quite contingent association of ideas’; Hegel, Lectures, 3:372.

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Phûsis: The Fatalities of Appearance 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22. 23.

24. 25.

26. 27.

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Millican, ‘Against the “New Hume”’, pp. 221ff. Millican, ‘Context’, pp. 30–1. Kail, ‘Leibniz’s Dog’, p. 42; emphasis mine. Owen, ‘Hume’s Doubts about Probable Reasoning’, p. 156. Kail, ‘Sceptical Beast’, p. 225; Kail, ‘Leibniz’s Dog’, p. 45. Hume’s formulation is a mockery, it seems, of Descartes’ remarks in the Discourse, p. 118 (AT 6.59): ‘For next to the error of those who deny God . . . there is none which is more effectual in leading feeble spirits from the straight path of virtue, than to imagine that the soul of the brute is of the same nature as our own . . .’ Boyle, ‘Hume on Animal Reason’. Emphasising difference, Sextus writes at PH 1.14.59–60: ‘But if the same things appear different owing to the variety in animals, we shall, indeed, be able to state our own impressions of the real object, but as to its essential nature we shall suspend judgement. For we cannot ourselves judge between our own impressions and those of the other animals, since we ourselves are involved in the dispute and are, therefore, rather in need of a judge than competent to pass judgement ourselves. Besides, we are unable, either with or without proof, to prefer our own impressions to those of the irrational animals.’ Long and Sedley, Hellenistic Philosophers, p. 456. Bayle, Dictionary (1991), p. 221. Montaigne, Complete Works: Essays, ‘Apology’, 2.12, p. 363. Mill, Utilitarianism, p. 281; Bett, ‘What Kind of Self’, p. 152; Bett, Pyrrho, pp. 66, 68n16, 92, 103, 110. Fox, ‘Religion and Human Nature’, pp. 561ff.; Seidler, ‘Hume and the Animals’, pp. 362–4. Kail, ‘Nietzsche and Hume’, p. 6, connects Hume along these lines to Nietzsche. Seidler, ‘Hume and the Animals’, pp. 361–72; Muckler, ‘On the Reason of Animals’, pp. 863–82. Montaigne, Complete Works: Essays, ‘Apology’, 2.12, p. 336. In the 1595 edition of the Essays, Montaigne adds: ‘and from richer results, richer faculties’. Contra Loeb, Stability and Justification, p. 38. Bibliothèque raisonnée des ouvrages des savans de l’Europe (April– May–June, 1740). This reviewer regarded Hume’s Treatise, if not as intentionally Pyrrhonian, at least as Pyrrhonian in its reasoning and implication. Cf. Strawson, Secret Connexion, pp. 110–11; Kail, ‘Leibniz’s Dog’, pp. 256–9; and Wright, ‘Scepticism’, p. 135. See also AP12, SBN 634; and ‘Again, every thing, which is different, is distinguishable, and every thing which is distinguishable, is separable

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28.

29. 30. 31.

32.

33. 34. 35.

36.

37.

38.

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Hume’s Scepticism by the imagination. This is another principle. My conclusion from both is, that since all our perceptions are different from each other, and from every thing else in the universe, they are also distinct and separable’ (T 1.4.5.5, SBN 233). See Forester, Kant and Skepticism, ch. 5, pp. 21ff., for an extended discussion of what Kant found right and wrong in Humean scepticism, in particular Hume’s scepticism concerning causation. Cf. Garrett, ‘Should Hume Have Been a Transcendental Idealist?’ Kant, Prolegomena 4.313, 66; 4.310, 63. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B127–8; underlining mine. Beattie, Nature and Immutability of Truth, p. 266; quoted by Susato, Hume’s Sceptical Enlightenment, p. 44. Similarly, see Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity; Hegel, Lectures, 3.372ff.; and Livingston, Hume’s Philosophy, p. 174. Sextus writes: ‘if cause were non-existent everything would have been produced by everything and at random. Horses, for instance, might be born, perchance, of flies, and elephants of ants; and there would have been severe rains and snow in Egyptian Thebes, while the southern districts would have had no rain, unless there had been a cause which makes the southern parts stormy, the eastern dry’ (PH 3.5.17–18). Susato, Hume’s Sceptical Enlightenment, p. 22. As Cavell does; Cavell, Claim, p. 213. See also Pears, Russell, p. 11. On Hume and Quine, see Johnsen, Righting Epistemology. Baier reads in Hume a naturalistic determinism; see Progress of Sentiments, p. 90: Hume’s ‘whole account’ of causation ‘has advanced two theses of equal importance: that we and our thought are causally determined by the nature of which we are part, and that it is our thought that produces necessity’. The phrase ‘absolute and uncontroulable’ also appears, curiously, in Hume’s account of what he regards to be the mistaken view, endorsed by both Cicero and Tacitus, that mixed government is impossible (ES 44, ‘Of the Independency of Parliament’). That means that, for Hume, what is found to be ‘absolute and uncontroulable’ may later be found not to be so. Cf. Jay Garfield’s account of Hume and Sextus’ ‘skeptical inversion’; Garfield, ‘Epoche and Śūnyatā’, pp. 292–3. My thanks to Roger Eichorn for this reference. Wright, Sceptical Realism.

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39. Wright, ‘Postscript’, p. 160; Wright, ‘Human Nature?’ 40. The ‘animal nisus, which we experience, though it can afford no accurate precise idea of power, enters very much into that vulgar, inaccurate idea, which is formed by it’ (E 7.1.15n13, SBN 67). 41. Descartes, Meditation 2; Cavell, Claim, p. 236; cf. pp. 158–61, 218–19. 42. Emerson, ‘Experience’, p. 250: ‘The secret of the illusoriness is in the necessity of a succession of moods or objects. Gladly we would anchor, but the anchorage is quicksand. This onward trick of nature is too strong for us. Pero si muove.’ Blumenberg discerns a similar metaphor in Montaigne; Blumenberg, Shipwreck, p. 15. 43. Milton, Paradise Lost, 1.196–205. 44. Grimstad, ‘Emerson Discomposed’, pp. 164–5. 45. A boat metaphor appears in Kant, too. See Kant’s proof of objectivity in the Critique of Pure Reason, ‘Second analogy of experience: Principle of temporal sequence according to the law of causality’; Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B233–40. 46. I am grateful to Duncan Pritchard for bringing this passage in On Certainty to my attention. Cf. Parusniková, ‘Against the Spirit of Foundations’. 47. See Starobinski, Montaigne en mouvement. My thanks to Roger Eichorn for this connection. 48. See Polito, Sceptical Road; Castanogli, ‘Aenesidemus’, pp. 70–1. 49. Cavell, ‘Music Discomposed’, p. 204. 50. McCormick, ‘Hume on Natural Belief’, pp. 103, 108ff. Cf. Loeb’s stability reading, Stability and Justification. 51. Johnsen, Righting Epistemology, pp. 7–9, ‘the akratic sceptic’; Baier, Progress of Sentiments, p. 57, ‘the hypocritical rather than the true sceptic’. 52. For more on this idea, see Fosl, ‘Skepticism and the Possibility of Nature’; elaborated in Fosl, ‘Scepticism and Naturalism in Hume and Cavell’. 53. Quoted by Cavell, In Quest, pp. 34–5. 54. Strawson, Scepticism and Naturalism, p. 14; and Strawson, ‘Intellectual Autobiography’. 55. Kemp Smith, ‘Naturalism of Hume’, p. 152; Butler, ‘Natural Belief’, cited in Gaskin, ‘God, Hume and Natural Belief’, p. 287. All cited by McCormick, ‘Hume on Natural Belief’, pp. 103, 105, 113n11; cf. pp. 108ff. 56. Cavell, Claim, p. 125.

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57. Cavell, Senses, p. 126, draws from Ralph Waldo Emerson, who writes about ‘the despair which prejudges the law by a paltry empiricism’; Emerson, ‘Experience’, p. 266. 58. Cf. Laugier, ‘Transcendentalism and the Ordinary’, p. 60.

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6

Ethos: The Great Sceptical Guide

La coutume est notre nature Pascal, Pensées1 ἦθος ἀνθρώπῳ δαίµων Heraclitus2 Nα̑ϕɛ ϰαὶ µέµνασo ἀπιστɛι̑ν Epicharmus3

Hume’s Treatise is a tract about human nature, and Hume’s philosophy generally speaking is properly read as a kind of sceptical naturalism. Social and artificial matters such as custom, convention, habit and tradition are often conceived in opposition to nature, and Hume recognises that way of conceiving them. Yet he pointedly does not utterly cleave custom from nature. Eugene F. Miller, editor of the Liberty Fund edition of Hume’s Essays, overstates the case when he writes that Hume ‘virtually identifies “nature” with custom and habit’, but the subtle and complex play of custom and nature in Hume’s philosophical writing does indeed present one of the most compelling and powerful dimensions of his sceptical thought.4 This chapter, then, turns to an examination of custom.

6.1 Inhabiting the World Diogenes Laërtius says that Pyrrho understood that ‘men do all things by custom and habit’ (DL 9.61).5 Hume largely agrees. While explaining his ‘solution’ to the extreme doubts of scepticism, Hume famously signals his alignment with the second dimension of the Pyrrhonian Fourfold observance of common life, when he 215

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writes in the 1740 Abstract to the Treatise that ‘’Tis not, therefore, reason, which is the guide of life, but custom’ (A 16, SBN 652). In section 5 of the first Enquiry in 1748 he reiterates: ‘Custom, then, is the great guide of life’ (E 5.1.6, SBN 44). In the paragraph just preceding this remark, describing the great guide and how it leads us to think, feel and judge, Hume alternates ‘custom’ with ‘habit’: This principle is CUSTOM or HABIT. For wherever the repetition of any particular act or operation produces a propensity to renew the same act or operation, without being impelled by any reasoning or process of the understanding; we always say that this propensity is the effect of Custom. (E 5.1.5, SBN 43)

Custom and habit figure into nearly every aspect of Hume’s thought.

6.1.1 Custom, Recollection and Têrêsis Carefully articulating a metaphilosophy that describes the genesis of philosophical theory itself, Hume makes clear in the Treatise that repetitions are made habitual through the mind’s capacity for finding resemblances among perceptions.6 This capacity makes possible thinking through general concepts and using the general, abstract terms constitutive of theory (T 1.1.7, SBN 20). Following Berkeley, Hume rejects purely abstract ideas of all kinds, including general ideas. Hume develops a concrete and nominalist alternative. When people employ a word functioning as a general or universal term, the mind recalls one of the particular instances named by the term, but also something else. In addition, the mind recalls or, more precisely, ‘revives that custom’ of relating the initial perception to a specific set of other perceptions (T 1.1.7, SBN 19).7 In other words, for Hume, the use of abstract, general terms is made possible through 1) a particular idea associated with a particular word together with 2) a habit or custom of relating that idea to other particular ideas. Inverting Plato, universals, for Hume, are grounded in the repetitions of individuals, rather than the other way around. Philosophy as a network of abstract terms becomes, from this Pyrrhonian perspective, a network of habits and customs. We saw in §3.4.2 that Humean writing and sceptical inquiry may be understood as a kind of Pyrrhonian recollection. That kind

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of recollection is possible because ideas per se, for Hume, and not just general concepts, are intrinsically historical.8 In Hume’s wellknown formulation, ideas are ‘copies’ of impressions, but copies of this sort are temporally posterior to what they copy (T 1.1.2.1, SBN 7–8; T 1.1.7.5, SBN 19; E 2.9). This means that to understand an idea one must, for Hume, understand the source impressions that preceded it. Because this tracing-back process carries reflection backwards in time, understanding the impressions from which a given idea was derived is an intrinsically historical process. One might call it, if not a proper genealogy, at least a kind of conceptual archaeology, an excavation of historical meaning. Simple impressions yield simple ideas, and simple ideas combine to produce complex ideas of complex objects, a view not terribly far from Sextus’ own (PH 1.14.94; cf. T 1.1.1).9 General concepts, as well as the ideas of individuals, then, are not objects of momentary cognition. Both individual selves and individual objects are instead ongoing historical events that include past as well as present perceptions, and discerning the meaning of ideas and things is therefore a historical project. What distinguishes the names of enduring individuals, as well as enduring individual objects, from general terms is just their different customary histories. This historicity to human thought, language and practice grounds a distinctive kind of understanding that scepticism recognises. In Against the Ethicists, Sextus writes about ‘a preconception [prolepsei] connected to . . . ancestral laws and customs [patrious nomos]’ (ADO 5.165–6 [M 11.165–6]; cf. PH 1.11.23).10 In the Outlines, at PH 2.22.246, he elaborates: For it is, I think, sufficient to conduct one’s life empirically [empeíros] and undogmatically [adoxatos] in accordance with the observances and the pre-theoretical understandings of common life [katà tàs koinàs terésies te kaì prolépseis bioun], suspending judgment regarding the statements derived from dogmatic [dogmatikés] subtlety and furthest removed from the usage of common life [biotikes]. (PH 2.22.246)11

As we saw in §3.2.2, this usage of ‘observance’ (têrêsis) also connects to common life (bios) in Sextus’ important remark in the Outlines about the way sceptics practise and live undogmatically in ‘observance of everyday life [kata ten biotiken teresin]’ (PH 1.11.23).12 A têrêsis of the prolepsis of common life stands in contrast to the

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dogmatic stoic idea of epistemic ‘common notions’ (koine ennoia), an idea attractive to modern rationalists.13 Hume’s philosophy of custom, habit and historicity is, in other words, a têrêsis of our human prolepsis. Hume’s empiricism is, therefore, not only an Apelletic but also a teresic empiricism. For Platonists, Augustinians, Cartesians et alia, thinking – at least the thinking of the intellect – involves a direct seeing of a momentary, clear, distinct and purportedly adequate present. Hume, in contrast, offers a profoundly different model of thinking.14 His sceptical model of thinking is different, not only because it rejects intellectual seeing as an epistemic ground, but also because it rejects a thinking that conceives of itself as existing purely in a noetic, ahistorical present, the pure presence of positivist sense data or the pure presence of essences. One might say that Hume replaces the noêsis that apprehends evidence in a clarified epistemic present with a sceptical immersion in the fateful throw of an effective customary history across a temporal horizon that is not fully present and does not promise an epistemic ground. In this way Hume anticipates the historical philosophies of the nineteenth century, as well as later phenomenological and deconstructive critiques of ‘presence’. Customs, habits and history are themselves certainly underwritten and modulated by Hume’s natural ‘principles of association’ (T 1.1.4, SBN 12). But without the diachronic linking that habit achieves, those associations could not come to build and structure our effective historicity. The mere natural capacity for association gets one nowhere. Enacted historically in habit and custom, those natural capacities situate us in a world, but not in the world of the knowable metaphysical real to which dogmatic philosophers pretend.

6.1.2 Habitual Selves For Hume, it is through repetition, rather than through a metaphysical essence, that the self is maintained. Repetition does so when it becomes habitual, customary and historical. And repetition becomes habitual, customary and historical for Hume only through the possibilities of humanness to which we find ourselves bound – that is, the particular natalities and fatalities of our human nature. That is to say, habits are the results of a kind of human capacity for mimêsis; or, rather, habits mimetically repeat

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human existence. Humean ideas are ‘copies’ of ‘impressions’, but each new iteration or repetition of a habit in a sense also copies prior manifestations of that habit. So habits are in a sense not only mimetic copies of the world as we experience it but also mimetic repetitions of ourselves as composites of prior and continuing habits rather than Aristotelian or Cartesian substances. The self, for Hume, then, is more than a bundle of perceptions. It is in addition a bundle of habits and customs that link perceptions. Habits and customs do the bundling. Those self-defining habits are made possible by natural capacities for association and habit-formation as they are placed in a social-historical context of prior customs that the self inherits and appropriates in its own life. Although Hume accepts a common and enduring human nature, he is also well aware of ‘the great force of custom and education, which mould the human mind from its infancy, and form it into a fixed and established character’ (E 8.11, SBN 86). Hume in this way inverts the repetition implicit in Plato’s theory of phenomena as multiple copies of Forms by making objects as well as the selves that experience them customary repetitions of associative experience. Habit, for Hume, doxastically stabilises our ideas about the current of nature now, beforehand and henceforth, distinguishing beliefs from merely fanciful imaginings, and leading us, for example, to believe, with characteristically Humean optimism, not only that the same sun will rise tomorrow, but also that our persisting habits of self will be there to greet it (T 1.3.8, SBN 73; E 4, SBN 24).

6.1.3 Habitual Reasoning Hume’s agenda exhibits itself in this formulation: ‘when we pass from the impression of one to the idea or belief of another, we are not determin’d by reason, but by custom’ (T 1.3.7.6, SBN 97). But this formulation is misleading in distinguishing reason from custom so starkly. A short time later, Hume qualifies the idea, writing that ‘the far greatest part of our reasonings, with all our actions and passions, can be deriv’d from nothing but custom and habit’ (T 1.3.10, SBN 118); and, furthermore, ‘all reasonings are nothing but the effects of custom’ (T 1.3.13.11, SBN 149).15 Perhaps the best-known among the habits of reasoning that Hume describes is the specific habit of causal inference. Hume foregrounds this

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natural way of associating ideas by custom as the principle that ‘peoples the world’: ’Tis this latter principle, which peoples the world, and brings us acquainted with such existences, as by their removal in time and place, lie beyond the reach of the senses and memory. By means of it I paint the universe in my imagination, and fix my attention on any part of it I please. I form an idea of ROME, which I neither see nor remember; but which is connected with such impressions as I remember to have received from the conversation and books of travellers and historians. This idea of Rome I place in a certain situation on the idea of an object, which I call the globe. I join to it the conception of a particular government, and religion, and manners. I look backward and consider its first foundation; its several revolutions, successes, and misfortunes. All this, and every thing else, which I believe, are nothing but ideas; tho’ by their force and settled order, arising from custom and the relation of cause and effect, they distinguish themselves from the other ideas, which are merely the offspring of the imagination. (T 1.3.9.4, SBN 108; emphasis mine)

Hume combines in a remarkable way the critiques of causation and reasoning characteristic of both the Pyrrhonian and Academic sceptical traditions with the Pyrrhonian deference to custom to craft a distinctively sceptical theory of causation and causal inference. Hume’s deference to custom as reason, moreover, manifests a characteristically Academic modesty and integrity: By employing that word [i.e., custom], we pretend not to have given the ultimate reason of such a propensity . . . Perhaps we can push our enquiries no farther, or pretend to give the cause of this cause; but must rest contented with it as the ultimate principle, which we can assign, of all our conclusions from experience. (E 5.1.5, SBN 43)

The necessities of reasoning are indeed, as we saw in Chapter 4, determinations of the press of nature, but those necessities could not emerge without custom. ‘Our idea, therefore, of necessity and causation’, writes Hume in the first Enquiry, ‘arises entirely from the uniformity, observable in the operations of nature; where similar objects are constantly conjoined together, and the mind is determined by custom to infer the one from the appearance of

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the other’ (E 8.1.5, SBN 82; emphasis mine; cf. T 1.3.6). Reason may be, in Hume’s famous phrase, ‘the slave of the passions’ (T 2.3.3.4, SBN 415), but those passions are elicited and given shape by custom and habit. ‘All inferences from experience, therefore, are effects of custom, not of reasoning’ (E 5.1.5, SBN 43). In the Treatise, Hume affirms: ‘Now as we call every thing custom, which proceeds from a past repetition, without any new reasoning or conclusion, we may establish it as a certain truth, that all the belief, which follows upon any present impression, is deriv’d solely from that origin’ (T 1.3.8.10, SBN 102–3). Hume’s theory of causal inference as the means of extending our minds beyond the evidence of present impressions may be a response to a problem posed by Locke in his Essay: In fine then, when our Senses do actually convey into our Understandings an Idea, we cannot but be satisfied, that there doth something at that time really exist without us, which doth affect our Senses . . . But this Knowledge extends as far as the present Testimony of our Senses, employ’d about particular Objects, that do then affect them, and no farther. For if I saw such a Collection of simple Ideas, as is wont to be called Man, existing together one minute since, and am now alone, I cannot be certain, that the same Man exists now . . . And therefore though it be highly probable, that Millions of Men do now exist, yet whilst I am alone writing this, I have not that Certainty of it, which we strictly call Knowledge.16

Hume is, indeed, responding to the problem of reasoning’s moving beyond present perception – but not for the sake of acquiring knowledge. Locke himself expresses here a sceptical moment when he writes, ‘and no farther’, thereby limiting knowledge proper to present sensation (while a bit later including memories of present sensations). Hume too moves in a sceptical direction, holding fast to Locke’s scepticism about what is not present and extending it to cover what is, even while still advancing the value of reasoning. The result of Hume’s not only explaining causal reasoning as association-become-habit, but also his understanding habits as historical, contextualised and situated, approaches, in fact, a sceptical a priori for discursive reasoning – if that is not too much of an abuse of terms. Hume’s thinking about habit and custom in this way anticipates the historical a priori that the nineteenth-century

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hermeneutical philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey identified.17 Hume writes in the Treatise: the supposition, that the future resembles the past, is not founded on arguments of any kind, but is deriv’d entirely from habit, by which we are determin’d to expect for the future the same train of objects, to which we have become accustom’d. (T 1.3.12, SBN 92)

Much depends upon this ‘supposition’ grounded in our habits, and Hume deploys it as a principle to methodise and correct reflectively our philosophical and scientific reasonings: that like objects, plac’d in like circumstances, will always produce like effects; and as this principle has establish’d itself by a sufficient custom, it bestows an evidence and firmness on any opinion, to which it can be apply’d. (T 1.3.8.14, SBN 105; emphasis mine)

Like other philosophical principles, this one is rooted for Hume in the prior context of human custom and habit. This recognition on Hume’s part sets him again fundamentally at odds with rationalists and other First Philosophers of the Real, including Locke. For Locke, so close to Hume on matters of sensory empiricism, custom is something to be surmounted for the sake of epistemic ambition: That which thus captivates their reasons, and leads men of sincerity blindfold from common sense, will, when examined, be found to be what we are speaking of: some independent ideas, of no alliance to one another, are, by education, custom, and the constant din of their party, so coupled in their minds, that they always appear there together; and they can no more separate them in their thoughts than if they were but one idea, and they operate as if they were so. This gives sense to jargon, demonstration to absurdities, and consistency to nonsense, and is the foundation of the greatest, I had almost said of all the errors in the world; or, if it does not reach so far, it is at least the most dangerous one, since, so far as it obtains, it hinders men from seeing and examining.18

Custom and association are, for Locke, the most dangerous and the greatest sources of error. They render the mind ‘corrupted’.19

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It is ‘not easy for the mind to put off those confused notions and prejudices it has imbibed from custom’.20 This position could not be farther from Hume. Descartes also maintains a dim view of habit, and his philosophical method pretends, as he opines in the opening sentences of the Meditations, to ‘raze’ entirely the past and thereby to cleave us completely from our customary, habitual and historical situation.21 Just as Descartes methodologically pretends to raze or deconstruct (défaire, evertenda) ‘all the opinions’ of the past, Hume finds that past opinions evaporate in the wake of the sceptical reasoning of T 1.4 – momentarily. Whereas Descartes, however, responds by attempting to establish a new ground for knowledge, Hume relinquishes the project of First Philosophy and accepts the capacity of nature and custom to stabilise (stabilire or establish) belief without epistemic justification. One might say, indeed, that prior to all judgement, for Hume, lies the prejudice (or pre-judgement) of habit and custom as ‘the foundation of all our judgments’ (T 1.3.13.9, SBN 147). Custom is the prior condition of reasoning; it even ‘precedes reflection’ (T 1.3.13.8, SBN 147). If Hume is to be read as an Enlightenment figure, therefore, it must be of a very peculiar sort. Hume’s Enlightenment, indeed, is well described by Ryu Susato as a ‘sceptical Enlightenment’.22

6.1.4 Habitual Feeling Morality is grounded for Hume in moral sentiment. In addition, however – although Thomas Reid, Locke and Kant all reject the idea – moral conduct and moral judgement depend, for Hume, upon custom and habit.23 For Hume, moral judgements are about people’s characters (T 3.3.1.9, SBN 577) as those characters are ‘fitted to be beneficial to society’ (T 3.3.1.20, SBN 585). Characters are dispositions to feeling and acting, but character, as Aristotle taught, is constituted by habit.24 Moral judgements not only depend upon feeling, habit and custom; they are also about them. Hume may have been influenced by Joseph Butler’s account of the way habit lends ease and facility to forms of feeling and conduct, moral as well as rational, in The Analogy of Religion (1736).25 There is, indeed, a very Butler-like quality to passages such as Hume’s remark that we ‘find from common experience, in our actions as well as reasonings, that a constant perseverance in any course of

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life produces a strong inclination and tendency to continue for the future’ (T 1.3.12.6, SBN 133). ‘Nothing’, writes Hume with special emphasis on moral feeling, ‘causes any sentiment to have a greater influence upon us than custom’ (T 3.2.10.4, SBN 555). For Hume, aesthetic pleasures and judgements are variable, share a common nature, and are shaped by custom, too. In the Treatise, Hume identifies three factors affecting aesthetic judgement that interact in a variety of ways: If we consider all the hypotheses, which have been forme’d either by philosophy or common reason, to explain the difference betwixt beauty and deformity, we shall find that all of them resolve into this, that beauty is such an order and construction of parts, as either by the primary constitution of our nature, by custom, or by caprice, is fitted to give a pleasure and satisfaction to the soul. (T 2.1.8.2, SBN 299)26

In ‘Of the Standard of Taste’, Hume writes that there are ‘two sources of variation’ in aesthetic judgement: the ‘one is the different humours of particular men; the other is the particular manners and opinions’ (ST 243). Unsurprisingly, Hume apologises for his countrymen (and perhaps confesses his own social anxiety) through an appeal to custom when he writes in ‘The Sceptic’ that ‘You will never convince a man, who is not accustomed to Italian music, and has not an ear to follow its intricacies, that a Scotch tune is not preferable’ (ES 217). Hume announces a clear and more general principle of variation when he writes, in a section of the Treatise entitled ‘Of the Effects of Custom’, that ‘nothing has a greater effect both to encrease and diminish our passions, to convert pleasure into pain, and pain into pleasure, than custom and repetition’ (T 2.3.5.1, SBN 422).

6.1.5 Passive and Active Habits To appreciate the scope of Hume’s Pyrrhonism, it is important to remember that habit and custom exist only in act and in conduct. It would be simply incoherent to say, ‘I am in the habit of X, but I no longer do that.’ In fact, the very meaning of breaking or letting go of a habit (habit literally means ‘holding’) is that the relevant act is no longer performed. The intelligibility of the world, therefore, for Hume, depends not only upon the propositional states of human minds but also upon conduct in the world, people’s continuing historical actions in both word and deed. Goethe’s Faust may be right

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that Im Anfang war die Tat! (Faust, 1.3), but Hume understands that the course of the human world – and not just in the beginning – depends upon die Gewohnheit (habit, habitation). Following Joseph Butler, Hume argues that, at first, actions through habit are ‘passive’, since they are motivated by passions such as pity.27 As habits become cemented over time, the originating passions fall away, and people acquire dispositions to act that become written into their very selves (T 2.3.5.5, SBN 424). Butler and Hume may have drawn their nomenclature about ‘active’ habits from Aristotle’s Metaphysics Book 5 (1022b), where he says that acquiring ‘habit’ (hexis) is like having an ‘activity’ or ‘energy’ (enêrgeia). Once a habit becomes active, one simply acts out of character. A momentary sensation of pity gives way to an enduring compassionate character enacted in the life of human mind and body.

6.1.6 The Nature and Contingency of Habit As we saw in Chapter 4, the binding of ideas takes place through natural and artificial associations. In addition, those associations must be forged through habit and custom. They bring stability to human doxastic life that neither First Philosophy of the Real nor other forms of dogma and ‘false philosophy’ can achieve.28 Sometimes those habits follow upon reflective methodising and correcting, but the stability that emerges as a result of reflection ‘does not’, for Hume, ‘require any argument that reflection is epistemically privileged’.29 The connectedness of ideas and perceptions defined through custom and habit is not a matter of metaphysical or logical necessity, and it requires no dogmatic ground. Stability is consistent with scepticism. Though they reinforce and even intensify thought, feeling and action, habits can nevertheless be broken. To recognise this is also to acknowledge that habits are variable, contingent, fragile and uncertified by anything beyond themselves. They remain unsponsored by any divine or rational ground. The contingency Hume describes among relations of ideas is expressed for him not only in the externality and naturalness of those associative relations (as we saw in §5.1), but also in the contingency implicit in habit and custom, their potential for being let go and for changing. In his 1486 Oratio de hominis dignitate, half a millennium before the existentialists, young Pico della Mirandola (1463–94), rejecting

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the neo-Platonism of his Florentine mentor Marsilio Ficino, argued for an utterly contingent human existence, one where free human choices rather than natural essences or fixed causal mechanisms determine what humans are and do. For Mirandola, it is in this free self-creation that humans present an image of their divine source. Hume accepts the apparent contingency of human existence, but he does not abandon the countervailing force of nature, and he has his doubts, of course, about liberty and free will (T 2.3.1, E 8). Habits and customs, for Hume, are contingent, but they are also rooted in the natural principles of association situated in already-determined historical moments. 6.1.6.1 The variability and uniformity of morals. Moral judgements exhibit remarkable variation across time, space and culture, and Hume’s theory of custom accommodates those changes. Hume’s short essay ‘A Dialogue’, appended to the second Enquiry, the Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals (1751), outlines how, among other things, what passed for morally proper conduct among the ancients would to moderns seem incestuous and murderous (EM.Dial, SBN 324–43). These contingent variations of moral custom do not, however, for Hume, imply the separation of the human from the natural described by, for example, Frances Hutcheson and so many recent philosophers.30 In fact, according to Hume, variations ‘are the natural effects of such customs’ (EM.Dial 50, SBN 340), and they imply no alteration in the ‘primary sentiments of morals’ (EM.Dial 36, SBN 336). Hume accordingly offers a counterpoint to the many instances of cultural and customary variability that he chronicles: I shall conclude this long discourse with observing, that different customs and situations vary not the original ideas of merit (however they may, some consequences) in any very essential point, and prevail chiefly with regard to young men, who can aspire to the agreeable qualities, and may attempt to please. The manner, the ornaments, the graces, which succeed in this shape, are more arbitrary and casual: But the merit of riper years is almost every where the same; and consists chiefly in integrity, humanity, ability, knowledge, and the other more solid and useful qualities of the human mind. (EM.Dial 51, SBN 341)

Judgements about those with more experience and time to refine and settle their habits seem to converge.

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While the habits of moral judgement exhibit substantial variation, the habits of sociability and discourse that expose us through experience to the thoughts and feelings of others eventually generate a countervailing effect and bring people, according to Hume, to relatively impartial standards of moral and aesthetic judgement.31 Human beings even generate through custom and natural reasoning a ‘common point of view’ (EM 9.6, SBN 272). One way of achieving convergence is through ‘general rules’ by appeal to which people regulate – impose order, consistency and relative uniformity upon – judgement. This process need not be reflective. Social concourse affects us and draws people together even in unreflective operations. As a result, the agreements generated through custom affect people’s judgements and passions in corrective and civilising ways. That is especially so through habituation to various sorts of thinking and feeling that are easy, agreeable, strong and durable – constitutive of what Hume calls ‘calm passions’ (e.g., T 2.3.4.1, SBN 418–19). The calm habitual passions of mind characteristic of philosophy and reasoning enact these salutary social effects especially well (unlike the enthusiasm-generating habits of religion and ‘false’ metaphysics): ‘Here then is the chief triumph of art and philosophy; it insensibly refines the temper, and it [philosophy] points out to us those dispositions which we should endeavour to attain, by a constant bent of mind, and by repeated habit’ (ES 171, ‘The Sceptic’). Hume adopts Butler’s focus on habit and custom but not his religion. Hume may have advanced this view of the refining and tempering effects of the habits of philosophy in opposition to the Christian stoicism of Frances Hutcheson, which emphasised self-control through will rather than habit.32 Indeed, opposing the negative effects of Christianity and religion more generally is a special matter of concern for Hume, particularly in the way habits related to them promote troublesome forms of conduct. The corrective applies to people in common life as much as to intellectuals. About the ‘easy and obvious’ philosophy that Hume calls ‘true’ philosophy, he maintains that it enters more into common life; moulds the heart and affections; and, by touching those principles which actuate men, reforms their conduct, and brings them nearer to that model of perfection which it describes. (E 1.3, SBN 7)

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For Hume, true philosophy adopts the project pursued by Joseph Addison, Bernard Mandeville and Lord Shaftesbury, along with other thoughtful advocates at the time, of promoting a culture of politeness and eloquence that can reform the manners (habits) and, in fact, the very selves constitutive of society through the process of ongoing, sociable and reflective practice.33 One might think of it as Hume’s sceptical version of the French pursuit of revised and improved selves through a culture of refined politesse, not the least in his defence of luxury. There is, of course, a more narrowly political implication to this. Hume laboured through his polite rhetoric and eloquence to produce an anti-factional, moderating effect in the political order.34 It is an aspiration he shared with Montaigne, as well as with Daniel Defoe. 6.1.6.2 The contingencies of science. The natural variability and contingency of custom and habit explain how there is, for Hume, a contingency and therefore uncertainty to the criteria governing judgements not only in morals and aesthetics, but also in natural science. Like aesthetic judgements, judgements in natural science also vary over time, sometimes more so; and what counted as scientifically uncontroversial among medievals became no longer settled among moderns. Galen’s (AD 129–c. 217) theories of bodily humours and animal spirits endured in the habits of medicine as it was practised for well over a thousand years. Now, like Thales’ view that all is water, they are almost universally rejected. Homer, whose work precedes that of both Galen and Thales, on the other hand, remains today a figure of widespread admiration. As Hume writes in ‘Of the Standard of Taste’: Though in speculation, we may readily avow a certain criterion in sciences and deny it in sentiment, the matter is found in practice to be much more hard to ascertain in the former case than in the latter. Theories of abstract philosophy, systems of profound theology, have prevailed during one age: In a successive period, these have been universally exploded: Their absurdity has been detected: Other theories and systems have supplied their place, which again gave place to their successors . . . (ST 242)

Our ‘taste’ in the sciences, one might say, has proven less durable than our aesthetic taste. Because habit and custom are the prior condition of their possibilities, judgements in morals, aesthetics and the sciences share

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a common ground – but none has ultimate grounding. For Hume, the sciences as well as morals and aesthetics are rooted in common life, and they should not pretend to transcend it.

6.1.7 Collective Habits: Custom and Convention Habits and customs may, for Hume, be either individual or collective. Habits may become social, in the form of conventions that function in conjunction with sympathy and history to make it possible for people to come together (con-vene) and manage – though not in an epistemic way – the separateness of persons that underwrites scepticism with regard to other minds. Hume’s example of two ‘men, who pull the oars of a boat’ (T 3.2.2.10, SBN 490) shows how people are able without verbal consent or argument to convene and achieve coordinated action. It is a passage pointedly aimed at social contract theory, arguing that prior to compacts and promises there lies something deeper – namely, the nature, customs and feelings that compose the Pyrrhonian Fourfold of common life. The passage is worth quoting at length. Two men, who pull the oars of a boat, do it by an agreement or convention, tho’ they have never given promises to each other. Nor is the rule concerning the stability of possession the less deriv’d from human conventions, that it arises gradually, and acquires force by a slow progression, and by our repeated experience of the inconveniences of transgressing it. On the contrary, this experience assures us still more, that the sense of interest has become common to all our fellows, and gives us a confidence of the future regularity of their conduct: And ’tis only on the expectation of this, that our moderation and abstinence are founded. In like manner are languages gradually establish’d by human conventions without any promise. In like manner do gold and silver become the common measures of exchange, and are esteem’d sufficient payment for what is of a hundred times their value. (T 3.2.2.10, SBN 490)

Along these lines, Hume writes about the convention that secures private property: ‘This convention is not of the nature of a promise: For even promises themselves . . . arise from human conventions’ (T 3.2.2.10, SBN 490), that is from prior human agreement. About promises, Hume rightly holds ‘that a promise wou’d not be intelligible, before human conventions had establish’d it’

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(T 3.2.5.1, SBN 516). Just as Hume’s sensory empiricism renders theories of substance and causal power unintelligible, so his philosophy of habit makes social contract theory unintelligible. The consent to a social contract (primordial, implicit, ongoing or otherwise) is made possible only by other, prior kinds of con-vention. So while the political order may make claims upon us, the source of those claims runs deeper than consent, deeper than performative utterance.35 It lies in practices, habits and a lived recognition of its value – therefore in history. Hume argues in the last essay he would write, ‘Of the Origin of Government’ (1774 or afterwards), that ‘Government commences more casually and more imperfectly’ than by contract or command; and, in addition, ‘it cannot be expected that men should beforehand be able to discover them [i.e., natural principles], or to foresee their operation’ (ES, 39). We produce explicit conventions such as manners, compacts, promises, principles of justice and rules of social etiquette because, for Hume, we already, in a pre-theoretical way, con-vene in common life; and we con-vene in common life because we already agree in what we find to be our nature, our customs, our instruments and our feelings – that is, in the Fourfold. Deeper than contracts, constitutions, promises and abstract theories is our common life. Without need of any scientific theories of space and time, agency, transportation, water, and without any formal agreements, contracts or promises, the background conditions composed of customs of thought and action already make it possible for people to sit down next to one another and pull against oars in coordinated ways. They make it possible for people to inhabit forms of life that are aligned and in agreement, feeling in synch and at home with one another as they do so. Human agreement is not only a result of our speaking and acting and feeling together, especially in customary and habitual ways; it is also more basically the prior condition of our doing so. That prior background of custom, as we have seen, is not separable from our nature. The political achievement of a sense of general interest is an achievement of custom and convention – sometimes artful custom and convention – but it is also an achievement made possible by a prior attunement in our human nature.36 Our conventional ‘agreements’, in other words, are not only arbitrary social arrangements but also manifestations of our agreement in a common nature. Cavell points to this deeper attunement when he writes about ‘convention not as the arrangements a particular culture has found convenient . . . but as those forms of life which

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are normal to any group of creatures we call human’.37 Unlike the rationalistic Kant, for whom the transcendental condition of the very possibility of agreement is the prior universality and commonality of reason, Hume accepts agreement as natural, historical and rationally ungrounded. Addressing this issue, Kant writes that the judgments of every understanding must be in agreement (consentientia uni tertio, consentiunt inter se). Thus, whether assent is conviction or mere persuasion, its touchstone externally is the possibility of communicating assent and of finding it to be valid for every human being’s reason.38

Much weight is borne by the idea of finding ‘agreement’ in this passage, as well as by the appeal to validity and reason, but Kant and Hume (Cavell) carry that weight differently. As a sceptic who accepts communication as unsponsored and for whom reason may or may not succeed in its universal appeal, Hume might have reformulated Kant’s remarks to read something like the following: ‘Thus, whether assent is conviction or mere persuasion, its touchstone seems to be the possibility of simply finding agreement (no more than apparent and possibly contingent agreement) with others in the common course of human life.’ One might call conventions of this sort conventional fatalities – our fated forms of common life. It should come as no surprise, then, that Hume writes in the closing passages of T 1.3 that habit, like custom, ‘is nothing but one of the principles of nature, and derives all its force from that origin’ (T 1.3.16.9, SBN 179). Conversely, nature can, for Hume, be realised only in convention. It is not just that what is found to be natural for human beings underwrites convention; nature actually completes or realises itself in custom and convention and does so in accordance with the limits it sets, or, rather, that are set in it. This interplay of nature and convention in the sceptical Fourfold makes sense of Hume’s curious and provocative remark about the conventions of justice: Tho’ the rules of justice be artificial, they are not arbitrary. Nor is the expression improper to call them Laws of Nature; if by natural we understand what is common to any species, or even if we confine it to mean what is inseparable from the species. (T 3.2.1.19, SBN 484)

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Hume no more embraces a metaphysics of boundless freedom completely detached from nature than he does a Cartesian-Kantian metaphysics of pure, autonomous will and intellection. Human capacities for custom, convention and habit are not created or spontaneously generated ex nihilo. They are, rather, natural capacities to which humans are born and fated, and they establish a limited range of possibilities for agreement that people can sound out only in an empirical way. One might say, then, that Pascal has it backwards or, anyway, only halfway right in Pensée §89 [680]: it is not only that ‘custom is our nature’, but also that our nature is custom.

6.2 Sceptical Politics The political order is composed, of course, of habits and customs, and Hume’s thinking about politics is largely framed in terms of Academic and Pyrrhonian scepticism.

6.2.1 The Politics of Doxa Unlike stoic thinkers, Hume understands politics sceptically, as matters of doxa rather than epistemê, and his political criticism centres on a critique of political dogmatism.39 In his 1741 essay ‘Of the First Principles of Government’, an essay that appeared just in the wake of the 1739–40 Treatise, Hume writes that it is therefore ‘on opinion only that government is founded’ (ES 32).40 While, moreover, Hume positions considerations of ‘interest’ prominently among his analyses of social-political dynamics – for example, in the genesis of rules of justice – he clearly means by ‘interest’ people’s opinions of their interest: ‘though men be much governed by interest; yet even interest itself, and all human affairs, are entirely governed by opinion’ (ES 51). Doxa is also very much a matter of feeling for Hume, and so his analysis of the bounds of legislative authority is typically sceptical: he observes that establishing that demarcation ‘is the work more of imagination and passion than of reason’ (T 3.2.10.14, SBN 560–1).41 Sedimented doxa – organised in habit and custom and underwritten by nature and feeling – compose for Hume the prolepsis of common life (see §6.1.1). Early in the Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, Hume categorises politics as a component of common life, and he describes

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the way sceptics approach studying it: ‘So long as we confine our speculations to trade, or morals, or politics, or criticism, we make appeals, every moment, to common sense and experience, which strengthen our philosophical conclusions’ (D 1.10). Humean sceptical social science, including political science, is the study of the practised doxa of common life, undertaken from within common life, for the purpose of methodising and correcting common life.

6.2.2 Political Isosthenia, Ataraxia and Moderatio Though Hume ultimately views the political order as a component of common life and therefore as made up of opinions (doxa), at times his political thought seems, in contrast, to be dogmatic and to lay claim to epistemê. When Hume undertakes to consider the possibility of a proper political science in another 1741 essay, ‘That Politics May Be Reduced to a Science’, he adopts Machiavelli’s method of analysing political life into distinct factors (how things go under tyranny, monarchy, aristocracy and democracy, etc.; ES 18). Among the conclusions that Hume seems to claim to have apprehended epistemically are several ‘eternal political truths’ and a ‘universal axiom’ (ES 18, 21). These formulations are, however, best read as just the type of dogmatic lapses about which, as a more sober sceptic, Hume had warned his readers and apologised two years earlier in the Treatise (T 1.4.7.15; see §7.1 below). Notably, in the Treatise Hume also characterises his theoretical system – and, it seems, the best possible scientific system – as nothing more than a ‘set of opinions’ (T 1.4.7.14, SBN 272). A still closer and more comprehensive examination of the text of ‘That Politics May Be Reduced to a Science’ indicates, moreover, that the commanding concern of Hume’s political science in that essay is not the production of epistemê but rather relief from the clashing contradictions, disputes and discord of political dogmatism. Hume’s ruling aspiration in political science is not to apprehend epistemically the political ‘real’, but rather to establish a practical political technê, a ‘system of laws’ and practices, crafted in light of the best empirical findings for the purpose of cultivating ‘moderation in every party’ (ES 27). In the Treatise, Hume’s exposition is more sceptical and sober when he makes a plea for the ataractic submission to customary government and warns against inquiries that would threaten to undermine its legitimacy: ‘No

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maxim is more conformable, both to prudence and morals, than to submit quietly to the government, which we find establish’d in the country where we happen to live, without enquiring too curiously into its origin and first establishment. Few governments will bear being examin’d so rigorously’ (T 3.2.10.7, SBN 558). Hume labours to quell the interminable discord that defenders and promoters of political dogmas inflame. Hume’s criticisms are not advanced in the service of a new and different political dogma, but rather for the sake of sceptical ataraxia and metriopatheia.42 Ataraxia is the fruit of true sceptical political philosophy, and that end proves in experience to be more important than the realisation of theoretical ideals: the study of history confirms the reasonings of true philosophy; which, shewing us the original qualities of human nature, teaches us to regard the controversies in politics as incapable of any decision in most cases, and as entirely subordinate to the interests of peace and liberty. (T 3.2.10.15, SBN 562)

As it is in theoretical life, the principal adversary in politics is, for Hume, turbulent, stormy, diaphonic conflict – in a word, ‘faction’. In his 1741 essay ‘Of Parties in General’, Hume elaborates his position on the danger posed by factions: ‘Factions subvert government, render laws impotent, and beget the fiercest animosities among men of the same nation, who ought to give mutual assistance and protection to each other’ (ES 55). For example, although, according to Hume, the usurper Henry I of England was flawed in many ways, the ‘chief merit of this monarch’s government consists in the profound tranquility, which he established and maintained throughout all his dominions during the greater part of his reign’ (H 1.6.273). Humean method in politics is commonly the practice of isosthenia. In his histories and essays, one finds Hume at pains to balance the various sides of an issue and to do so charitably and sympathetically.43 Hume’s aim is not only to achieve what stable balance is possible among political ideologies but also to describe the logical vulnerabilities of competing positions in a way that diffuses (or, rather, defuses) the powerful emotions that those positions potentially generate. Hume’s practice is a kind of ‘moderation through opposition’, attenuating ‘passion with passion’, as it were.44 In matters of statecraft, Hume is like other early modern liberal theorists in aspiring to peace.45 As a sceptic, however, Hume

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is unlike other liberal theorists because he is not driven by the aspiration to establish an absolute political ideal (e.g., a representative republic) or defend the conclusions of a dogmatic political science. Hume the political sceptic defines and develops ‘a philosophy of politics that was as sceptical about the myths of Whiggism as it was about the myths of Toryism’.46 For that reason, interpreters have often been confounded by the facility with which he seems alternatively to endorse and criticise both Tory and Whiggish positions. In ‘Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth’ (1754), Hume does develop his own ideal ‘imaginary republic’ (ES 514), one inspired in part by James Harrington’s 1656 Oceana, about which he writes: the ‘Oceana is the only valuable model of a commonwealth, that has yet been offered to the public’ (ES 514).47 Unlike Harrington’s model, however, Hume’s imagined ideal is better read as a contingent sceptical technê of faction management than as a purportedly eternal and universal truth apprehended as political epistemê. Hume takes a ‘technological attitude towards politics’, and his overriding political concern is evident when he remarks at the close of that essay:48 ‘I would only persuade men not to contend, as if they were fighting pro aris & focis [for altars and hearths], and change a good constitution into a bad one, by the violence of their factions’ (ES 31). As it is in the dogmatic moments of ‘That Politics May Be Reduced to a Science’, so it is in the ‘Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth’. The end is sceptical ataraxia and metriopatheia. The isosthenetic and ataractic quality of Hume’s writing about politics also shows itself in his dyad of essays, ‘Of the Original Contract’ and ‘Of Passive Obedience’, written shortly after the bloody and nearly successful Jacobite uprising of 1745.49 In the first, Hume undermines the social contract theory of obligation and authority characteristic of Whigs and liberals; in the second, he tackles the passive obedience theory of the Tories. On the one hand, social contract theory is a specious fiction that cannot underwrite the political order because it presumes the prior agreements of a political order. Seemingly sympathetic with conservatives, Hume sets himself in a stance inclining towards allegiance to standing authority, including then-standing monarchy: ‘I must confess, that I shall always incline to their side, who draw the bond of allegiance very close, and consider an infringement of it, as the last refuge in desperate cases, when the public is in the highest danger, from violence and tyranny’ (ES 489; ‘Of Passive Obedience’). Just after discussing, in his History, the regicide of Charles I without

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praising those who toppled him and with apparent sympathy for the monarch, Hume even goes so far as to recommend ‘hiding the truth from the populace’ of ‘the doctrine of resistance’ (H 5.59.544). On the other hand, although inclining towards allegiance to standing authority, for Hume sometimes the ‘highest danger’ standard is met. While stable standing authority is ordinarily to be preferred, from a ‘pragmatic and sceptical’ perspective, passive obedience on important occasions runs up against nature and human beings’ opinions concerning their own interest: ‘’Tis certain, therefore, that in all our notions of morals we never entertain such an absurdity as that of passive obedience, but make allowances for resistance in the more flagrant instances of tyranny and oppression’ (T 3.2.9.4, SBN 552).50 Whether the standing government is monarchical or republican, Hume prescribes ordinary submission, but he accepts rebellion and revolution in highly constrained and extraordinary circumstances: ‘our submission to government admits of exceptions, and . . . an egregious tyranny in the rulers is sufficient to free the subjects from all ties of allegiance’ (T 3.2.9.1, SBN 549). Indeed, Hume’s remarks about ‘hiding’ the truth of the doctrine of resistance ought to be read as ironic, enacting precisely the opposite of what they appear to instruct. By publishing the very idea that he says should be hidden, Hume slyly affirms the doctrine.51 He extends, moreover, implicit support to the Glorious Revolution, when he calls the settled regime that followed it ‘if not the best system of government, at least the most entire system of liberty that ever was known amongst mankind’ (H 6.71.531; cf. 2.23.525). Hume cites Spain’s Philip II and the Roman emperors Nero and Dionysius (T 3.2.9.4, SBN 552; ES 426), as well as Tiberius, Caligula, Domitian (ES 94), Nabis and Agathocles (ES 409–10), as rulers so exceptionally tyrannical as to warrant their overthrow. Those who revolted against them are beyond reproach. Accordingly we may observe, that this is both the general practice and principle of mankind, and that no nation, that cou’d find any remedy, ever yet suffer’d the cruel ravages of a tyrant, or were blam’d for their resistance. Those who took up arms against Dionysius or Nero, or Philip the second, have the favour of every reader in the perusal of their history; and nothing but the most violent perversion of common sense can ever lead us to condemn them. (T 3.2.9.4, SBN 552)

Sounding notes that would be familiar not only to the radical Whig Algernon Sidney (1623–83) and to the more conservative

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Scottish Whig Gilbert Burnet (1643–1715), but also to left-leaning Whiggish followers of Hugo Grotius (1583–1645), though without appeal to divine or natural rights, Hume writes in Book 3 of the Treatise: ‘in the case of enormous tyranny and oppression, ’tis lawful to take arms even against supreme power; and that as government is a mere human invention for mutual advantage and security, it no longer imposes any obligation, either natural or moral, when once it ceases to have that tendency’ (T 3.2.10.16, SBN 563). Indeed: ‘Those, therefore, who wou’d seem to respect our free government, and yet deny the right of resistance, have renounc’d all pretensions to common sense, and do not merit a serious answer’ (T 3.2.10.16, SBN 564). At what moment and under what circumstances exactly tyranny becomes sufficiently ‘enormous’ to warrant resistance is not, for sceptics, a question of abstract political theory reached by intellection or by deductive or inductive logic. As Sextus writes in Against the Ethicists: the sceptic does not live according to philosophical reason [philosophon logon] (for with respect to this he is inactive), but . . . through non-philosophical ‘observance’ [aphilosophon teresin] he can choose certain things and shun others. And when forced by a tyrant to commit any of the prohibited things, he will perchance choose one thing and shun another on the basis of a preconception [prolepsei] connected to his ancestral laws and customs [patrious nomos]; and he will more easily endure hardship compared to the dogmatist, since unlike the latter he opines nothing in addition to these things. (ADO 5.165–6 [M 11.165–6])

Montesquieu understands the importance of human diversity in moral and political philosophy in The Spirit of the Laws (1748). Hume follows him in this, but for Hume, as for Sextus, political judgement should also walk a sceptical path, one guided by a têrêsis of the prolepsis and the customary history of a particular situation.52 In ‘Of the Coalition of Parties’, the very next essay after the isosthenetic pairing of ‘The Original Contract’ and ‘Passive Obedience’, Hume describes his method in terms of balancing and moderating emotion directly, in conjunction with scepticism about reason: There is not a more effectual method of promoting so good an end than to prevent all unreasonable insult and trump of one party over the other, to encourage moderate opinions, to find the proper medium

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in all disputes, to persuade each that its antagonist may possibly be sometimes in the right, and to keep a balance in the praise and blame, which we bestow on either side. The two former Essays, concerning the original contract and passive obedience, are calculated for this purpose with regard to the philosophical and practical controversies between the parties, and tend to show that neither side are in these respects so fully supported by reason as they endeavour to flatter themselves. We shall proceed to exercise the same moderation with regard to the historical disputes between the parties, by proving that each of them was justified by plausible topics; that there were on both sides wise men, who meant well to their country; and that the past animosity between the factions had no better foundation than narrow prejudice or interested passion. (ES, 494)53

As Sextus says with regard to dealing with dogmatism generally (PH 1.12.25), in the tumult of political life it is best not to be carried away by irrational emotions (to para lôgon kaì amêtros epaíresthai) but instead to practise ‘peaceful opinion’ (doxan ataraxía) and ‘moderate feeling’ (metriopatheia). That may be the best that finite human beings can achieve in politics.54

6.3 Scepticism and Religion Like the political order, religions are largely composed of customs, habits and traditions – deep traditions. As in his approach to politics, Hume’s engagement with religion is also deeply informed by scepticism. Hume’s personal remarks about religion are sparse and inconclusive, and so it may finally be impossible to determine what he himself actually believed or disbelieved.55 Still, we saw in §2.1.2 that in the ‘Natural History of Religion’, Hume seems to align himself with Carneades’ irreligious programme (N 12.25). We also saw in §4.2.2 that Hume suffered withering intimidation from powerful religious authorities. He had therefore more than reasonable motive to dissimulate or ‘cover his tracks’, and his conduct seems consistent with prudential considerations of this kind.56 When writing to Kames about his dim prospects for employment in 1747, Hume declaimed: ‘the Church is my Aversion’ (NLT 26, #10). There are substantial grounds for suspecting that his aversion and its antecedents motivated Hobbesian and otherwise irreligious dimensions of his philosophical thought.57 On the basis of his published texts alone, Hume came commonly to be known as the ‘Great Infidel’, and not without reason.

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Contrary to the ideologies of religious ‘high flyers’, Hume’s ‘Natural History of Religion’, his posthumous Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, important sections of his Treatise and first Enquiry, and various of his essays launch direct, devastating critiques of modern rationalistic religion, natural theology and traditionalist religious practices. Hume undermines religious conviction with a naturalistic account of the development of religious dogma and with penetrating philosophical criticisms of: human superiority (see §5.1); theistic teleology; intelligent design (D 2–8, 11–12); theodicy (D 10–11); the ontological and cosmological arguments, especially Samuel Clarke’s version (D 9); the rationality of belief in immortality, providence (E 11) and miracles (E 12); and theological claims about the nature of God (E 12).58 In opposition, moreover, to conservative religious doctrine, Hume’s moral theory is naturalistic and Ciceronian. It rejects ‘monkish’ Christian values and character virtues such as humility, poverty and meekness (EM 9.3, N 10.2), including the chastity enforced by ‘vain superstition’ (ES 145). Hume’s texts delegitimise prohibitions against suicide in cases of extreme suffering; and they praise pride, luxury and wealth.59 Suspicious ironies related to religion abound in his texts.60 At the close of the first Enquiry, Hume (in)famously commits ‘to the flames’ books of ‘divinity’ as well as metaphysics, condemning them as ‘nothing but sophistry and illusion’ (E 12.34, SBN 165).61 Considering this instruction in light of the irreligious components of his work comprehensively, it is difficult to imagine a less ambiguous judgement, especially at that historical moment.

6.3.1 The Immediate ‘Flow’ of Theism Hume is certainly a profound critic of religion, but his texts addressing religion are complex. In a positive way, for example, he praises established and customary religious practices, especially those that predate the rise of philosophical inquiry and theology. Those practices are, he argues, relatively innocent and immune to the contestation that theologically informed religions incite. They are immune even to the demands of logic. In his political essay ‘Of Parties in General’, for example, Hume writes about religion and contrariety: Religions, that arise in ages totally ignorant and barbarous, consist mostly of traditional tales and fictions, which may be different in every sect, without being contrary to each other; and even when they

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are contrary, every one adheres to the tradition of his own sect, without much reasoning or disputation. (ES 62, emphasis mine)

Hume even variously seems to claim that something like the customarily worshipped deity of his own time and place exists – or at least that he is led to think it exists, especially on the basis of the argument from design. He also indicates that there is a natural basis to religious belief. In the Appendix to the Treatise (1740), Hume writes about how design proves something like God’s existence: ‘The order of the universe proves an omnipotent mind’ (T 1.3.14.12n30App., AP SBN 633n1); and seventeen years later, in ‘The Natural History of Religion’ (1757), he argues that the natural fit of things leads naturally to monotheism: ‘Every thing is adjusted to every thing. One design prevails throughout the whole. And this uniformity leads the mind to acknowledge one author’ (N 2.2). There is even an aesthetic dimension to this causal inference: ‘All the new discoveries in astronomy, which prove the immense grandeur and magnificence of the works of Nature, are so many additional arguments for a Deity, according to the true system of Theism’ (D 5.2).62 It is well known how, for Hume in the Treatise, the ‘current of nature’ (see §§5.1–2) presses us, despite the corrosive effect of sceptical arguments, to believe in the external world, in the necessity of causal connections, in others who feel and think as we do, etc. Less commonly acknowledged is that Hume later asserts, through the voice of Cleanthes in the Dialogues, that the natural flow also presses us towards theistic belief: ‘tell me, from your own feeling, if the idea of a contriver does not immediately flow in upon you with a force like that of sensation’ (D 3.7).63 It is a powerful and characteristically Humean remark, and sceptical Philo seems to join Cleanthes in this view when at the close of the Dialogues he suggests that belief in the deity is, like belief in the external world, un-suspendable or immune to epochê: ‘So little . . . do I esteem this suspense of judgement in the present case to be possible, that I am apt to suspect there enters somewhat of a dispute of words into this controversy, more than is usually imagined’ (D 12.6).64 Even in the Treatise, Hume observes that theology ‘arises naturally and easily’ (T 1.4.7.13, SBN 271). Hume reinforces the point in a 10 March 1751 letter to Gilbert Elliot of Minto. Discussing the Dialogues, he maintains that seeing divine intention in the natural world is ‘somewhat different’ in kind from fallacious pareidolia or projections of ourselves on

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to clouds, the moon, etc. (LT 1.153, #72; cf. N 3.2). Despite the disanalogies between the divine and the human, moreover, many ‘Dissimilitudes do not weaken the Argument. And indeed it woud seem from Experience & Feeling, that they do not weaken it so much as we might naturally expect’ (LT 1.157, #72, Postscript).65 Hume connects human beings’ belief in a creative deity and their fated natural belief in the causal power directly when he writes in ‘The Natural History of Religion’ that ‘The universal propensity to believe in invisible intelligent power, if not an original instinct is at least a general attendant of human nature’ (N 15.5). On the whole, Hume seems to accept a relatively natural religious doxa, if not a natural theological dogma.

6.3.2 Religion that Humanises and Civilises In addition to his acknowledging the natural flow leading to theistic belief, or at least a propensity to religious belief, Hume also seems to accept the customary practices of religion when they positively serve the sceptical moral and political project of moderating the passions and stabilising social coherence. Like well-formed systems of laws and well-crafted rules of rationality, salubrious religious customs seem, in Hume’s view, to pacify people by cultivating civilised characters and social orders. Hume gives voice to the humanising effect of religion in a preface he wrote in 1756, but withheld from publication, for the second volume released of the History of England (1757, today’s Volume 6). A truncated version of this preface was buried in a footnote.66 Hume later revised that text and placed it in the mouth of Cleanthes in the closing section of the Dialogues: The proper office of religion is to regulate the heart of men, humanize their conduct, infuse the spirit of temperance, order, and obedience; and as its operation is silent, and only enforces the motives of morality and justice, it is in danger of being overlooked, and confounded with these other motives. When it distinguishes itself, and acts as a separate principle over men, it has departed from its proper sphere, and has become only a cover to faction and ambition. (D 12.12)67

Hume goes so far in the History as to maintain that ‘there must be an ecclesiastical order, and a public establishment of religion in every civilized community’ (H 3.29.134–5).68 Again, in the ‘Natural History’, he says: ‘Look out for a people, entirely destitute of religion:

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if you find them at all, be assured, that they are but a few degrees removed from brutes’ (N 15.9). Of course, these affirmations may simply mean that ‘Hume’s support of an established church was motivated not by religion, but by a purely civil desire for peace and order’ (cf. Aristotle Politics, 1.2, 1253a29).69 Or they may not.

6.3.3 Natural Propensities, but Unnatural Beliefs These positive remarks about religion and religious belief must be balanced against others that qualify them and that advance powerful and radical instruments of criticism against religion. Hume’s remarks about a ‘universal’ propensity to believe must be tempered, for example, in light of his also breezily writing in the Introduction to the ‘Natural History’ about nations that ‘entertained no sentiments of Religion’ at all (N Intro 1).70 This apparent inconsistency may be resolved by observing that, for Hume, a propensity to believe may be natural and universal, while the relevant belief is not.71 Religious beliefs can be suppressed, and that makes them different from other natural beliefs – notably, belief in the external world. There might be nations of atheists, but, given our fated forms of common life, there can be no nations of solipsists. As Dr Johnson might have dimly understood, one can lose one’s faith in God more easily than one’s belief in the existence of stones. That difference among natural beliefs explains why Hume is able to write without inconsistency to William Mure, on 30 June 1743, about the unnaturalness of religious belief, maintaining that the deity ‘is not the Natural Object of any Passion or Affection. He is no Object either of the Senses or Imagination, & very little of the Understanding’ (NLT 13, #6; LT 1.51, #21).72 Later, in the ‘Natural History’, Hume accordingly concludes that ‘the first religious principles must be secondary’ (N Intro 1). The realisation of the natural propensity to theism is so contingent and unstable for Hume that he even expresses doubts about the religious convictions of people in common life: ‘the conviction of the religionists, in all ages, is more affected than real’ (N 12.15). The apparently faithful commonly deceive themselves about their beliefs: ‘Men dare not avow, even to their own hearts, the doubts, which they entertain on such subjects’; they ‘disguise to themselves their real infidelity’ (N 12.15).73

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6.3.4 False Religion’s Pathological Habits: Superstition and Enthusiasm Besides the dubitability and instability of religious conviction, religiously motivated conduct is of special moral and political concern to Hume. Cut loose from the tempering scrutiny of other people and from common life, philosophy can occasionally lead its practitioners to strange theories and ideas. Truly bizarre philosophically motivated conduct is, however, rare. Few are able to adopt lifestyles like the ‘extravagant’ Diogenes of Sinope, the Cynic, who is said to have lived in a barrel and masturbated in public.74 Monastic orders of philosophers are almost unknown. Philosophy tends to be safe, because the passions excited by philosophical theories are not themselves extreme. Philosophy . . . if just, can present us only with mild and moderate sentiments; and if false and extravagant, its opinions are merely the objects of a cold and general speculation, and seldom go so far as to interrupt the course of our natural propensities. The Cynics are an extraordinary instance of philosophers, who from reasonings purely philosophical ran into as great extravagancies of conduct as any Monk or Dervise that ever was in the world. Generally speaking, the errors in religion are dangerous; those in philosophy only ridiculous. (T 1.4.7.13, SBN 272)

It is central to Humean sceptical criticism that, in contrast with those of philosophy, the effects of religion upon political and common life are significantly more problematic. Hume identifies two especially pernicious religious pathologies that are, in practice, commonly intertwined with one another: ‘superstition’ and ‘enthusiasm’. Hume’s essay ‘Of Superstition and Enthusiasm’ was, in 1741, his first publication centred on matters of religion, and the modes of ‘false’ religion it names are diagnosed there as ‘corruptions of true religion’ (ES 73). Superstition and enthusiasm in false religion correspond to the toxic pair ‘melancholy and delirium’, characteristic of ‘false philosophy’, that Hume describes in the Treatise (T 1.4.7.9, SBN 269).75 Like their philosophical kin, superstition and enthusiasm in religion stimulate characteristic families of passion and also therefore characteristic modes of conduct.

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In Hume’s analysis, superstition arises from ‘Weakness, fear, melancholy’ (ES 74) and ‘terror’ (N 10.2). It comprises networks of habitual thinking about imagined threats and dangers ‘whose power and malevolence sets no limits’ (ES 74). Superstition is especially the result of theology – that is, of abstract religious theory. Adam Smith, in a storied letter to the printer William Strahan, recalls a conversation with Hume near the end of his life that suggests that Hume remained deeply opposed to superstition until the end, perhaps because it so long held a grip on him.76 Smith’s report of Hume’s reading Lucian before his death reinforces the idea of Hume’s enduring opposition to religion.77 For those subdued by superstition, the threatening supernatural entities it hopes to appease demand acts that are ‘equally unaccountable’ in their detachment from common life and ‘consist in ceremonies, observances, mortifications, sacrifices, presents, and in any practice, however absurd or frivolous which either folly or knavery recommends to a blind and terrified credulity’ (ES 74). Because superstitious religious thinking is not as difficult and abstruse as philosophy and because it draws energy from popular opinion, ‘it seizes more strongly on the mind’ (T 1.4.7.13, SBN 271). In doing so, superstition leads to a sharpened ‘keenness in dispute’ (ES 63). For this reason, religion more generally leads to ‘opposition of the passions’, to ‘disorder’ (T 2.3.4.5, SBN 421), and to deeply unpleasant thoughts and feelings. Religion can even do ‘violence to’ one’s ‘natural inclinations’ (N 14.6). The upshot is that religious superstition leads to frighteningly uncommon, ‘extraordinary’ and ‘dangerous’ acts. As examples, Hume details the massacres of Jews by Christians under Richard I, Henry III and Edward I. He also describes the horrors inflicted on Protestants by Catholics, on Catholics by Protestants, and on the English by the Irish: ‘Amidst all these enormities the sacred name of Religion resounded on every side’ (H 5.55.296).78 Superstitious habits of thought, feeling and conduct seem to have persisted in their hold on Hume, well into his middle age. According to a young James Caufield (Lord Charlemont), the 37-year-old Hume fell, while in Turin in May 1748, into unrequited love for the Countess Duvernan. He subsequently slipped into a deep depression, and then collapsed into ‘a most violent Fever’ attended with ‘Delirium and Ravings’. The content of those ravings is telling:

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in the Paroxysms of his Disorder He often talked, with much seeming Perturbation, of the Devil, of Hell, and of Damnation, and one night, while his Nursetender happened to be asleep, he rose from his Bed, and made towards a deep Well, which was in the Court-yard, with a Design, as was supposed to drown himself, but, finding the Back Door locked, He rushed into a Room where, upon a Couch, the Gentlemen of the Family were, He well knew, used to deposite their Swords, and here He was found by the Servants who had been awakened by the noise He had made at the Door in endeavoring to open it, and was by them forcibly brought back to his Bed.79

If Hume’s letter to a physician in 1734 describes his suffering as the ‘Disease of the Learned’ (LT 1.14, #3), in this terrifying episode, physical illness, sexual frustration and superstitious dogma seem all to have become clotted in a terrible, toxic brew. Superstition, like parties of principle (ES 60–1), also disrupts common life. It does so both through its abstruse theories and through the ‘less reasonable’ (ES 59) and combative diaphônia that it provokes. Superstition contains, moreover, a special disruptive element that renders it even more dangerous than the dogmas of non-religious political factions. The priestly class makes claim to a transcendent and hidden (adêlos) authority, an authority radically disconnected from common life and superior to it. Through the political exercise of ‘priestcraft’, the priest becomes an extraordinary ‘tyrant’ exercising terrible dominion over people and stifling their civil liberty in the name of an unimpeachable Absolute. Through superstition, people are ‘thrown on their knees’ (N 3.4) and rendered ‘tame and abject’, well fitted ‘for slavery’ (ES 78). Superstition is not just disputatious, raising up ‘endless contentions’; it also demands conduct of a much more extreme and physical sort in terrifying ‘religious wars’ (ES 78). In an extensive footnote to his essay ‘Of National Characters’, Hume dissects the noxious character of clerics and finds that ‘many of the vices of human nature are, by fixed moral causes, inflamed in that profession’ (ES 201n3). Because of the viciousness engendered by the ‘contagion’ borne by clerics, ‘wise governments will be on their guard’ against their institutions (ES 201n3). Clerics, according to Hume, are not only commonly ‘hypocrites’, who dissimulate to hide the inconstancy of their faith (ES 200n3); they are also fearsomely ‘actuated by ambition, pride, revenge, and a persecuting spirit’ (ES 201n3). When they are challenged and contradicted in

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their authority or in the precepts of their religious belief, clerics fly into that proverbial ‘Odium Theologicum or Theological Hatred’ typified by ‘a degree of rancour, which is the most furious and implacable’ in the human world (ES 201n3).80 Superstition’s negative effects are especially foul when the priestly power is cut loose from the mitigating effects of a limiting civil authority. Ungoverned superstitious customs generate ‘a spirit of persecution, which has ever since been the poison of human society, and the source of the most inveterate factions in every government’ (ES 62). The mixing of theology and politics with traditional religion has made things only worse and exacerbated this pathology: ‘Sects of philosophy, in the ancient world, were more zealous than parties of religion; but in modern times’ when philosophical theology and politics mix with customary religion, ‘parties of religion are more furious and enraged than the most cruel factions that ever arose from interest and ambition’ (ES 63). The habits of false religion’s second pathology, enthusiasm, draw upon otherwise more positive passions that have been corrupted by a lack of discipline. Enthusiasm is composed of ‘Hope, pride, presumption’ and ‘ignorance’, all infused with ‘a warm imagination’ (ES 74). Enthusiasm, says Hume, is a kind of madness characterised by ecstatic ‘raptures, transports, and surprising flights of fancy’ (ES 74). It inspires in the mind the wildest and greatest ‘liberty to indulge itself in every imagination, which may best suit its present taste and disposition’ (ES 74). Instead of superstition’s fearsome threats, the enthusiastic imagination swells with ‘great but confused conceptions, to which no sublunary beauties or enjoyments can correspond’ (ES 74). Unlike superstition, however, enthusiasm is not without its benefits, especially in the liberty it authorises. In fact, Hume writes with admiration that the ‘precious spark of liberty had been kindled, and was preserved, by the puritans alone; and it was to this sect, whose principles appear so frivolous and habits so ridiculous, that the English owe the whole freedom of their constitution’ (H 4.40.145–6). Enthusiasm’s ecstatic flights of fancy, however, also possess a profoundly dark side, especially in relation to common life. Hume anticipates Nietzsche’s critique of Christian-Platonic nihilism when he observes that before the gaze of the religious enthusiast, ‘Every thing mortal and perishable vanishes as unworthy of attention’ (ES 74). The enthusiast is bound by no institution or network of common customs that can order liberty and limit its exercise. For that reason,

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enthusiasm permits the ‘most cruel disorders in human society’ and ‘contempt for the common rules of reason, morality, and prudence’ (ES 77). While Dostoevsky’s Ivan Karamazov worries that if God does not exist then everything is permitted, in Hume’s analysis permits for unlimited conduct find their provenance in religion. Hume observes that ‘We know not to what length enthusiasm, or other extraordinary movements of the human mind, may transport men, to the neglect of all order and public good’ (ES 528–9). He may write with a bit of tongue in cheek, therefore, when he maintains that philosophers who would disabuse people of their religious beliefs cannot ‘be good citizens’ because they free people from the ‘restraint upon their passions’ that religion promises ‘and make the infringement of the laws of society, in one respect, more easy and secure’ (E 11.28, 147).81 In contrast, while it does possess the capacity to affect religious belief, philosophy itself is, again, safer: there ‘is no enthusiasm among philosophers; their doctrines are not very alluring to people’ (E 11.29, SBN 147).

6.3.5 Religion’s Corruption of Common Life Clearly, common life is not, for Hume, immune to the pathologies of philosophical religion. Superstition ‘steals in gradually’ upon common life, ‘and insensibly; renders men tame and submissive’ (ES 78). It ‘is often able to disturb us in the conduct of our lives and actions’ (T 1.4.7.13, SBN 272). Religious thinking results in a cycle of ‘flux and reflux’ between monotheism and polytheism generated by the unstable logic of its fearful, mangled and cloying sentiments (N 8.1). This cyclical instability is particularly acute in religious belief, but it is also related to the distressing, if less dangerous, ‘continual flux and revolution’ of speculative opinion characteristic of false philosophy (ES 246). Enthusiasm often joins superstition in the corruption. Though Hume drops mention of enthusiasm in the ‘Natural History’, in the Dialogues he is again vocal about enthusiasm’s pathological influence upon common life and moral society. But even though superstition or enthusiasm should not put itself in direct opposition to morality; the very diverting of the attention, the raising up a new and frivolous species of merit, the preposterous distribution, which it makes of praise and blame; must have the most pernicious consequences, and weaken extremely men’s attachment to the natural motives of justice and humanity. (D 12.16)

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Similarly, in ‘Of the Standard of Taste’, Hume observes of religious ‘bigotry and superstition’ that they can ‘confound the sentiments of morality, and alter the natural boundaries of vice and virtue’ customarily established by common life (ST 247). The History of England follows this acknowledgement of the pernicious effects of false religion on common life. Criticising the political culture that put Charles I to death, Hume complains that theology and metaphysics had corrupted and rendered dangerously malignant not only politics but also even ordinary commerce: ‘inquiries and debates concerning tonnage and poundage went hand in hand with . . . theological or metaphysical controversies’ (H 5.59.334).82 If true philosophy methodises and corrects common life, false religion – both popular and learned – renders it fractious, unstable, violent, vindictive, haughty, cruel and confused. It is therefore no surprise that Hume famously calls religious beliefs across space and time a matter of ‘sick men’s dreams’: Survey most nations and most ages. Examine the religious principles, which have, in fact, prevailed in the world. You will scarcely be persuaded, that they are any thing but sick men’s dreams; Or perhaps will regard them more as the playsome whimsies of monkies in human shape, than the serious, positive, dogmatical asseverations of a being, who dignifies himself with the name of reason. (N 15.6)

It is no wonder that Hume issued the following verdict against the faithful when Boswell came to inquire on 7 July 1776, a few weeks before Hume’s death, about the great sceptic’s views on religion. In Boswell’s recollection, written the following March: He [Hume] then said flatly that the morality of every religion was bad, and, I really thought, was not jocular when he said that when he heard a man was religious, he concluded he was a rascal, though he had known some instances of very good men being religious. This was just an extravagant reverse of the common remark as to infidels.83

Dogmatic religion is, for Hume, a malady that needs again and again to be cured.

6.3.6 Tolerance, Philia and Mitigated Religion It is important to note, however, that Hume is, in spite of all this criticism, tolerant of religion so long as it has been rendered innocuous:

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one is not ‘ever permitted to judge of the civility or wisdom of any people, or even of single persons, by the grossness or refinement of their theological principles’ (ES 247). In an analogy that he draws with art, Hume writes that such principles can be harmless in an individual so long as they ‘remain merely principles, and take not such strong possession of his heart’ (ES 247). How is a truly safe and even beneficial religion to be achieved? Philosophical reasoning is not by itself powerful enough to defuse the potential danger by confronting religion head on. Trying to do so risks persecution by religious authorities and zealots, as Hume directly understood. To oppose the torrent of scholastic religion by such feeble maxims as these, that it is impossible for the same thing to be and not to be, that the whole is greater than a part, that two and three make five; is pretending to stop the ocean with a bull-rush. Will you set up profane reason against sacred mystery? No punishment is great enough for your impiety. And the same fires, which were kindled for heretics, will serve also for the destruction of philosophers. (N 11.5)

With a few exceptions, religion is characteristically, in Hume’s view, a corrupt and dangerous affair, an opponent not to be underestimated. On the other hand, Hume does suggest that uniting ‘the ecclesiastical with the civil order’ might render superstitious religion more peaceable (ES 61; also H 1.8.311, H 3.29.134ff.); but even then, because superstition is generally comfortable with strong political authority and able to co-opt it, Hume remains dubious about that union (ES 79). For all its weakness, sceptical philosophy, all things considered, offers the best hope, though it is a limited hope, for managing the dangers that religion poses. Hume writes with youthful confidence in the 1741 ‘Of Superstition and Enthusiasm’ that ‘nothing but philosophy’ – and he means, in particular, nothing but sceptical philosophy – is ‘able entirely to conquer’ the ‘unaccountable terrors’ that religion imagines and deploys (ES 75). The full range of sceptical tropes must be brought to bear, such as when, in ‘The Natural History of Religion’, section 12 (‘With regard to Doubt and Conviction’), Hume sceptically balances different religious dogmas against one another (e.g. N 12.4ff.) in the service of peace.84 This closing passage from the ‘Natural History’ sums up his strategy, though now

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from a more chastened point of view, having been informed by hard experience: The whole is a riddle, an aenigma, and inexplicable mystery. Doubt, uncertainty, suspence of judgment appear the only result of our most accurate scrutiny, concerning this subject [i.e., the divine and the world]. But such is the fault of human reason, and such the irresistible contagion of opinion, that even this deliberate doubt could scarcely be upheld; did we not enlarge our view, and opposing one species of superstition to another, set them a quarreling; while we ourselves, during their fury and contention, happily make our escape, into the calm, though obscure, regions of philosophy. (N 15.13)

Again, in the Dialogues, Hume writes that when confronting religious controversy, a ‘total suspense of judgement is here our only reasonable resource’ (D 8.12). Hume seems to have come to realise that sometimes the best that even sceptical philosophy can achieve is to ‘escape’ rather than entirely ‘conquer’ religious fury. Philosophy is not always a helpmate. When poorly practised or, as Hume puts it, imprudently managed, philosophy is no help at all. With ironic understatement, he writes about the ‘inconvenience’ that dogmatic philosophy threatens: The passion for philosophy, like that for religion, seems liable to this inconvenience, that, though it aims at the correction of our manners, and extirpation of our vices, it may only serve, by imprudent management, to foster a predominant inclination, and push the mind, with more determined resolution, towards that side, which already draws too much, by the biass and propensity of the natural temper.

Unlike the practices of scepticism, false philosophy and theology are liable, when it comes to religion, to push people towards in-con-venience (or not coming together), making difficult matters even worse. In contrast, true sceptical philosophy, reflectively grounded in common life, tempers, so far as possible, ‘those fiery particles’ (T 1.4.7.14, SBN 272) that generate religion’s furious and inconvenient pathologies. Its practice can be effective and salutary. There is, however, one species of philosophy, which seems little liable to this inconvenience, and that because it strikes in with no disorderly

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passion of the human mind, nor can mingle itself with any natural affection or propensity; and that is the Academic or Sceptical philosophy. The academics always talk of doubt and suspense of judgment, of danger in hasty determinations, of confining to very narrow bounds the enquiries of the understanding, and of renouncing all speculations which lie not within the limits of common life and practice. Nothing, therefore, can be more contrary than such a philosophy to the supine indolence of the mind, its rash arrogance, its lofty pretensions, and its superstitious credulity. Every passion is mortified by it, except the love of truth; and that passion never is, nor can be carried to too high a degree. (E 5.1, SBN 40–1)

Sceptical philosophy, says Hume, is ‘the medicine of the mind’ (ES 160, ‘The Sceptic’). In the very first sentence of his troublesome essay ‘Of Suicide’, which in 1756 had been physically cut out of Five Dissertations (see §4.2.2), Hume more pointedly makes plain that philosophy is ‘the sovereign antidote . . . to superstition and false religion’ (ES 577). Hume had of course recognised limits to even the sovereign’s power. One important, perhaps crucial, consequence of sceptical therapy is that it opens up – in the face of dogmatic violence, exclusion and suppression – the possibility of social philia. Hume’s scepticism in the Dialogues about religious questions and the capacities of the human mind to settle them is resolved not in favour of a demonstrated, universally accepted conclusion laying claim to eternal truth. He does not disprove the religion of his interlocutors. Hume’s sceptical criticism, however, does diffuse divisive passions and clear a safe space for sociability, tolerance and even ‘friendship’.85 So it is when in Part 12, at the end of a long day of theological argument – perhaps in rejoinder to the religious fellowship imagined by Augustine’s Cassiciacum dialogues – sceptical criticism makes it possible for Hume’s Philo to ask rhetorically and in a conciliatory spirit: ‘Will you quarrel, Gentlemen, about [trivial, abstruse differences], and enter into a controversy, which admits not of any precise meaning, nor consequently of any determination?’ (D 12.7). In the face of religious and political dogmatism, the practice of Humean sceptical philosophy is therapeutic both through its critical logic and as an exemplar of civil concord among reflective beings.86 As a late amendment to the Dialogues, the passage may have been Hume’s final word on scepticism.87

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6.4 Conclusion This chapter has explored the way in which Hume engages the second dimension of the Pyrrhonian Fourfold, ‘custom’. Not only is thinking and reasoning for Hume habit and custom-based, but so are feelings (see §6.1.4) and human beings’ very selves (see §6.1.2). Habits are not only, however, matters of mental and subjective life for Hume. As they play out in the conduct of life, habits are first passive and then active (see §6.1.5). Habits are both contingently variable and grounded in a common human nature. While habits are made possible by human nature, human nature is also realised in habit – not just in habit singularly but also, moreover and perhaps more deeply, in the social habits of human custom and convention (see §§6.1.6–7). Both Hume’s politics (see §6.2) and his philosophy of religion (see §6.3) are accordingly organised through scepticism and aim towards realising the characteristically sceptical ends of ataraxia and metriopatheia. Two dimensions of the Pyrrhonian Fourfold observances remain, and the next two chapters will undertake to show how Hume’s philosophical practice enacts them. Chapter 7 will focus upon the technai of doubt, in particular on the arguments and strategies that Hume deploys to undermine dogmatism, both epistemological and metaphysical. Chapter 8 will take a narrower focus. There we will examine Hume’s appeal to the fourth dimension of the Pyrrhonian Fourfold, the passions and feeling, in relation to his ideas about belief in the external world.

Notes 1. Pascal, Pensées, §89: ‘Custom is our nature.’ 2. ‘Êthos anthropo daimôn’ may be translated as ‘Humanity’s fate is habit’ or as ‘Humanity’s fate is to inhabit.’ Charles Kahn translates the remark thus: ‘Man’s character [êthos] is his fate [daimôn]’ (CXIV, D.19); Kahn, Art and Thought, pp. 80–1. 3. ‘Keep sober and remember to be sceptical.’ On the back of one of the sheets of his memoranda, Hume wrote this remark. Mossner, ‘Hume’s Early Memoranda’, p. 503n17. 4. Miller, review of Hume’s Philosophical Politics, p. 252. 5. Trans. Scharffenberger and Vogt; Vogt, Pyrrhonian Skepticism in Diogenes, p. 17. 6. Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode; cf. Farr, ‘Hume, Hermeneutics, and History’; Herdt, ‘Artificial Lives’, p. 57n9; Schmidt, David Hume.

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7. What Garrett calls a ‘revival set’; Garrett, ‘Ideas, Reason, and Skepticism’, p. 175. See also Garrett, ‘Reply to My Critics’. 8. Livingston and King, Re-Evaluation, pp. 213–18. 9. Sextus writes at PH 1.14.94: ‘Each of the phenomena perceived by the senses seems to be a complex: the apple, for example, seems smooth, odorous, sweet, and yellow. But it is non-evident whether it really possesses these qualities only; or whether it has but one quality but appears varied owing to the varying structure of the sense-organs; or whether, again, it has more qualities than are apparent, some of which elude our perception.’ 10. Sextus, Against the Ethicists. 11. Translation mine, revising Bury’s use of têrêsis. 12. Spinelli, ‘Neither Philosophy nor Politics?’, p. 23. 13. For example, Spinoza adopts the idea of ‘common notions’ at Ethics 2.38.40, scholium 2; Descartes equates them with axioms in the Principles of Philosophy 1.49–50 (AT IXB 24, CSM I 209); he discusses related ‘primitive notions’ in the 21 May 1643 letter to Elisabeth of Bohemia. Dyson argues that discussions of prolepsis, especially in relation to the stoics, can be found ‘in Plutarch’s polemical works (especially On Stoic Self-Contradictions and On Common Conceptions against the Stoics), Sextus Empiricus Against the Professors, and Alexander of Aphrodisias’s On Mixture. Without these texts we would have just three passages that directly connect prolepsis to the early Stoa: Diogenes Laërtius 7.54, Ps-Plutarch Plac. 4.11.1–4, and Galen PHP 5.3.1. But if we take a wider look at the use of prolepsis and koine ennoia [common notions] in these later authors, we quickly discover that the terms have become common currency among the philosophical schools’; Dyson, Prolepsis and Ennoia, p. xxiv. 14. In Rule 8 of Rules for the Direction of the Mind, Descartes makes the point: ‘there can be no truth or falsity in the strict sense except in the intellect alone’; quoted by Garrett, ‘Ideas, Reason, and Skepticism’, p. 176. 15. Harris, David Hume, p. 99. 16. Locke, Essay, 4.11.9; some emphases added and deleted. Quoted by Loeb, Stability and Justification, p. 39, who argues for the potential influence of this passage. 17. See de Mul, Tragedy of Finitude, pp. 148–50ff.; and Makkreel and Rodi, Dilthey. Cf. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A346/B404. 18. Locke, Essay, 2.33.18. 19. Ibid., 1.1.27. Casson, Liberating Judgment, p. 259, finds Hume’s appeal to custom antithetical to political liberty, which Locke grounds in probability.

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20. Locke, Essay, 2.13.28. 21. AT 7.17. Descartes’ 1641 Latin edition: ‘ac proinde funditus omnia semel in vitâ esse evertenda, atque a primis fundamentis denuo inchoandum, si quid aliquando firmum & mansurum cupiam in scientiis stabilire’. While the common English translation of this passage uses ‘raze’, Descartes’ Latin uses the less violent and less revolutionary evertenda or ‘overturn’. Duc de Luynes’s 1647 French translation reads as follows: ‘de me défaire de toutes les opinions que j’avais reçues jusques alors en ma créance, et commencer tout de nouveau dès les fondements’. De Luynes’s French translates evertenda as défaire, which is closer to undo, unmake or dismantle, even deconstruct, than ‘raze’. 22. Susato, Hume’s Sceptical Enlightenment. 23. Wright, ‘Ideas of Habit and Custom’, p. 19. 24. Hume remarks that ‘reflecting on the tendency of characters and mental qualities, is sufficient to give us the sentiments of approbation and blame’ (T 3.3.1.9, SBN 577). The opening sentence of Book 2 of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics famously declares that ‘excellence of character results from habituation – which is in fact the source of the name it has acquired [êthikê], the word for “character-trait” [êthos] being a slight variation of that for “habituation” [ĕthos]’ (1103a14–18; translation Rowe). 25. Laursen, ‘David Hume on Custom’, pp. 88–9; Wright, ‘Ideas of Habit and Custom’, pp. 19–20. 26. Cf. Dadlez, ‘The Vicious Habits of Entirely Fictitious People’. 27. Wright, ‘Ideas of Habit and Custom’, p. 23. 28. Loeb, Reflection and Stability, p. 149. On a stability reading of Hume, see also Loeb, Stability and Justification, and Loeb, ‘Sextus, Descartes, Hume, and Peirce’. On Hume’s conception of ‘false philosophy’, see Livingston, Philosophical Melancholy. 29. Loeb, Stability and Justification, p. 97; see also pp. 93, 87ff. 30. Section 7 of Hutcheson’s An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue; Laursen, ‘David Hume on Custom’, p. 89. 31. Wright, ‘Butler and Hume on Habit’, p. 116; Wright, ‘Ideas of Habit and Custom’, pp. 24–5. 32. Wright, ‘Butler and Hume on Habit’, p. 111. See also Stewart, ‘Stoic Legacy’; Moore, ‘Hume and Hutcheson’. 33. See ES 90, 191, 231, 537. See also Phillipson, ‘Scottish Enlightenment’, pp. 32, 59; Laursen, ‘David Hume on Custom’, p. 91; Mandeville, Fable of the Bees, 2.147; Potkay, Fate of Eloquence, ch. 2; Hanvelt, Politics of Eloquence.

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34. Merrill, Hume and Politics, p. 133nn7 and 8; see also Hanvelt, Politics of Eloquence. 35. Hammer, Stanley Cavell, pp. 129–30. 36. On the achievement of fellow feeling, or ‘passions that unite us’, through eloquence in Hume, see Potkay, Fate of Eloquence, ch. 4, pp. 159–88. Hume’s essay ‘Of Eloquence’ is an endorsement of the importance of the ancient idea of eloquence, and is a plea for incorporating eloquence into reflective society. See also Herdt, Religion and Faction, especially for her account of the importance of sympathy as a prophylactic against faction. See also Plato’s Republic 5 (463e–464b): ‘the community of pain and pleasure is the greatest good for a city’; cf. Republic 3 (412b). See also Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §241: ‘“So you are saying that human agreement [die Übereinstimmung der Menschen] decides what is true and what is false?”—It is what human beings say that is true and false; and they agree in the language they use [in der Sprache stimmen die Menschen überein]. That is not agreement [Übereinstimmung] in opinions but in form of life [der Lebensform].’ 37. Cavell, Claim, p. 111. 38. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A820, B848, trans. Werner Pluhar. 39. Marie Martin rightly argues that Hume’s repudiation of knowledge as basic to moral life distinguishes him from the stoics; Martin, ‘Classical Moralist’, pp. 328–9; see Wulf, ‘Skeptical Life’, p. 98. F. A. Hayek connects Hume’s scepticism to his political theory through the idea of limits to knowledge in politics; Hayek, ‘Legal and Political’, p. 342. 40. Susato, Hume’s Sceptical Enlightenment, pp. 60ff., follows C. B. Macpherson, who suspects that the source of Hume’s view about politics as opinion is William Temple’s ‘An Essay upon the Original and Nature of Government’ (1679), along with the work of Hobbes, Locke, Bayle and Shaftesbury. 41. Susato, Hume’s Sceptical Enlightenment, p. 69. 42. Merrill, ‘Hume’s Socratism’, p. 26: ‘Hume’s intention is not simply to promote moderation, as important as that is. He also makes an argument about why radical questioning is necessary for politics and even attractive for its own sake.’ 43. See Herdt, Religion and Faction, on this kind of critical sympathy. 44. Immerwahr, ‘Hume on Tranquilizing’, p. 304. 45. Eichorn, ‘How (Not) to Read Sextus’, pp. 142–3. Quoted by Laursen, ‘Natura vs. Libertà’, p. 19. Wulf argues that caution as a political principle, especially for political advisers, is also characteristic of

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46. 47. 48.

49.

50. 51. 52.

53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58.

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Hume’s Scepticism Hume’s moderate scepticism; Wulf, ‘Skeptical Life’, pp. 86ff., 89ff. See also Letwin, Pursuit of Certainty. Harris, David Hume, p. 131. Susato, Hume’s Sceptical Enlightenment, pp. 196–7; Moore, ‘Hume’s Political Science’, pp. 810, 823, 834. Sabl, ‘Skepticism in Politics?’, p. 163. See also Forbes, Hume’s Philosophical Politics, ch. 3, ‘Political Obligations for “Moderate Men”’, pp. 91ff. Although this dyad was incorporated as a dialectical pair into the 1748 ‘Third Edition, Corrected’, of Essays, Moral and Political, the two were also published with a third essay, ‘Of National Characters’, in a standalone volume in Edinburgh and London that same year as Three Essays, Moral and Political (by Andrew Millar in London and Alexander Kincaid in Edinburgh). Three Essays was the first publication to bear Hume’s name, and Hume’s first publication with Andrew Millar. The first Enquiry was also published in 1748. Harris, David Hume, p. 236. Merrill, ‘Rhetoric of Rebellion’, dissects this curious, ironic and paradoxical moment. Cf. Spinelli, ‘Neither Philosophy nor Politics?’, pp. 25–6. On the way in which Montesquieu and an appreciation of human diversity inform the second Enquiry, see Harris, David Hume, pp. 250–3. In the 1751 and 1753–4 editions of the second Enquiry, Hume writes that Montesquieu is ‘an author of great genius as well as extensive learning’ and that the System of Laws is ‘the best system of political knowledge, that, perhaps, has ever yet been communicated to the world’. Hume later attenuated this adulation in the note at E 3.2.34n12. See Wiley, Theory and Practice, p. 146. Quoted by Sabl, ‘Skepticism in Politics?’, p. 153. On the politics of this passage in Sextus, cf. Wiley, Theory and Practice, pp. 154, 292n121. Harris, David Hume, pp. 19, 22–3. Millican, ‘Context’, p. 36. Russell, Riddle, pp. 61ff. While Aquinas and Descartes had earlier presented important formulations of cosmological reasoning (arguments for God’s existence based on causation), one of the argument’s most important renderings in Hume’s time appeared in Samuel Clarke’s Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God (1705), a text based on Clarke’s Boyle Lectures. Clarke’s objective in the Demonstration was both to establish (in a variety of ways) the existence of God as a necessary being and also to derive (principally in a priori ways) many of the

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59. 60.

61. 62. 63.

64.

65. 66.

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central qualities that Christianity attributes to its deity. Instituted in the 1690s for the purpose of ‘proving the Christian Religion, against notorious Infidels, viz. Atheists, Theists, Pagans’, principally by means of natural theology, the Boyle Lectures were named after the natural philosopher and chemist Robert Boyle, author of the Sceptical Chymist (1661). Clarke (1675–1729) delivered Boyle Lectures in 1704 (‘A Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God’) and 1705 (‘A Discourse Concerning the Unchangeable Obligations of Natural Religion’). For Hume’s reflections on causation in direct opposition to Clarke’s view, see T 1.3.3.4–5, SBN 80–1; E 12.29, SBN 164; and D 9.9, D 2.3. See also Russell, ‘Skepticism and Natural Religion’, pp. 251–6. Phillipson, Hume; Wiley, Theory and Practice, p. 16, as well as chs 2 and 3. John Valdimir Price’s study of Hume’s irony catalogues many of the ironies Hume advances in his criticism of religion; for example, Price, Ironic Hume, pp. 121ff. On Hume’s use of ‘asseveration’, cf. N 12.15 and E 10.7, SBN 112–13. Immerwahr, ‘Hume’s Aesthetic Theism’, p. 326. Price figures Cleanthes as a representative of the natural theologian Bishop Joseph Butler as well as Cicero’s stoic character Balbus from De natura deorum; Price, ‘Empirical Theists’, p. 256. Ryan sees, in Cleanthes’ responses to Philo’s criticisms, Hume’s acknowledgement of a limited legitimacy to natural theology; Ryan, ‘Academic Scepticism’, pp. 319–44, 342–3. John Wright draws a connection between Hume’s remark about the question of the deity’s existence being a merely ‘verbal’ dispute and a similarly sceptical remark about ‘logomachy’ from Ralph Cudworth’s True Intellectual System of the Universe (1678) concerning arguments about ta adêla and natural powers: the ‘Controversie whether the Energy of the Plastick Nature, be Cogitation, or no, seems to be but a Logomachy, or Contention about Words’ (True Intellectual System, 1.3.36.16); Wright, Sceptical Realism, p. 171. Hume’s memoranda suggest that he had read Cudworth’s True Intellectual System. Malebranche, Search, p. 135, also discusses pareidolia; quoted by Bernard, ‘Hume and the Madness’, p. 225. The preface was relegated to a footnote on p. 449 of the 1757 volume of the History; Mossner, Life, p. 306. Hume released the volumes of the History in roughly reverse chronological order. Thus, what was the second volume of Hume’s History to be published appeared in 1757, though it is today recognised as the final volume of the series,

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67.

68. 69. 70. 71.

72. 73. 74.

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Hume’s Scepticism i.e., Volume 6, on the Stuart reigns; see William B. Todd’s preface (H 1.xii–xiv). In order, Hume published what today is called Volume 5 (1754) first, then subsequently Volume 6 (1757); next came Volumes 3 and 4 (1759), and finally Volumes 1 and 2 (1761). The present, chronological numbering of volumes appeared first with the 1762 ‘complete’ edition of his History of England from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to The Revolution in 1688. The 1754 and 1757 volumes were initially titled The History of Great Britain 1 and 2. The suppressed preface reads: ‘The proper Office of Religion is to reform Men’s Lives, to purify their Hearts, to enforce all moral Duties, & to secure Obedience to the Laws & civil Magistrate. While it pursues these useful Purposes, its Operations, tho’ infinitely valuable, are secret & silent; and seldom come under the Cognizance of History . . . That Principle is always the more pure & genuine, the less figure it makes in those Annals of Wars, & Politics, Intrigues, & Revolutions, Quarrels & Convulsions, which it is the Business of an Historian to record & transmit to Posterity’; the complete preface is quoted by Mossner, Life, pp. 306–7. Costelloe, ‘Every Civilized Community’, p. 182; McArthur, Political Theory, p. 72; Potkay, Fate of Eloquence, ch. 4. Susato, ‘Tyranny of Priests’, p. 275. Kail, Projection and Realism, p. 71. McCormick, ‘Hume on Natural Belief’, p. 111: ‘Hume calls the propensity to believe in God universal. But it seems that it is a propensity which is easier to resist than is the propensity to believe in the external world. Concerning the belief itself, Hume says it is very common “but it has neither perhaps been so universal as to admit of no exception” ([N Intro 1]). Nor does Hume ever ascribe a necessity to this belief. Given that it is not needed in all our reasoning or actions, it is a belief that can be eradicated.’ See Holden, Spectres of False Divinity, p. 53. Bernard, ‘Hume and the Madness’, pp. 233ff. Hume discusses Diogenes and his extravagances in ‘A Dialogue’, but there, unlike in the Treatise, Hume is reluctant to suggest a congruence between even this uncommon behaviour and those who are religiously motivated. In Hume’s later text, the religious seem incomparably worse: ‘Diogenes is the most celebrated model of extravagant philosophy. Let us seek a parallel to him in modern times. We shall not disgrace any philosophic name by a comparison with the Dominics or Loyolas, or any canonized monk or friar. Let us compare him to Pascal, a man of parts and genius as well as Diogenes

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75.

76.

77.

78.

79. 80.

81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87.

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himself; and perhaps too, a man or virtue, had he allowed his virtuous inclinations to have exerted and displayed themselves’ (EM.Dial 54, SBN 342). See Willis, True Religion, and Mossner, Life, p. 306. Harris, David Hume, p. 49, finds in Shaftesbury’s opposition to superstition another antecedent to Hume’s conception of true religion. On Spinoza’s conception of ‘true religion’, see his Tractatus theologico-politicus, ch. 12, p. 168. Adam Smith’s letter to William Strahan is dated 9 November 1776, shortly after Hume’s death. Smith recounts there Hume’s joking about how he might respond to the commands of Charon, the boatman who ferries the dead across the River Styx, to climb into his vessel: ‘But I might urge, “Have a little patience, good Charon, I have been endeavoring to open the eyes of the Public. If I live a few years longer, I may have the satisfaction of seeing the downfall of some of the prevailing systems of superstition”’ (ES xlvi); quoted and discussed by Millican, ‘Context’, pp. 39ff. See Hume’s recognition of the moral anti-religious implication of Lucian at E 10.2.23 and EM 6.1.21; Schliesser, Adam Smith, p. 359; on the 9 November 1776 letter, see pp. 358ff. Hume indicates in a 1755 letter to Adam Smith that Smith had questioned him about the vivid ‘elocution’ he employed to describe the Irish massacre of 1641 in the History at 1.55 (LT 1.216, #107); discussed and quoted by Baier, Death and Character, p. 83. Quoted by Mossner, Life, p. 217. See Cavendish, David Hume, p. 177n16. Mossner reports that Montesquieu had in a letter complained to Hume that ‘you maltreat the ecclesiastical order a little’; Mossner, Life, p. 260; quoted by Susato, ‘Tyranny of Priests’, pp. 273–4. Price, Ironic Hume, p. 119. Cf. Livingston, Hume’s Philosophy, pp. 317ff. Boswell, ‘An Account’, p. 227. Russell, Riddle, ch. 15, Part 6. Dees, ‘Morality above Metaphysics’. Clark, ‘Uses of Dialogue’, p. 72. Harris writes about this passage as ‘Hume’s final attempt to clarify the character and import of his scepticism’; David Hume, p. 570n212.

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7

Technai: Dogmatism and the Technologies of Doubt

Vain Wisdom all and false Philosophy. Yet with a pleasing Sorcery could charm Pain, for a while, or Anguish; and excite Fallacious Hope, or arm the obdurate Breast With stubborn Patience, as with triple Steel. Milton, Paradise Lost, 2.565–91

Hume’s philosophical theories are the wheels, gears, circuits and blades of a device that both describes and produces a sceptical outcome – a non-dogmatic theory, a non-dogmatic way of doing or practising theory. Hume undertakes a philosophical practice that makes it possible to engineer ideas, feelings and beliefs to produce a distinctively sceptical, rather than a dogmatic, theoretical form of life.2 In philosophising this way, Hume acts as a doxastic, sentimental and conceptual technician, and he shows others how to do the same. This chapter, accordingly, will focus upon the third general dimension of the Fourfold, the instruction of the technical arts (didaskalia technon). Typically contrasted with epistemê, or theoretical knowledge, technê is itself a term of art in Greek philosophy, meaning roughly ‘know-how’ or practical knowledge, the knowledge not only of the technician and craftsman but also of the artisan and artist (e.g., carpenter or physician). Technê is a kind of knowledge that may be difficult if not impossible to formulate in words. Hume praises Academic scepticism because it is ‘durable and useful’ (E 12.24, SBN 161), concepts closely related to technical considerations, and he describes his Academic philosophy as a technical practice when he says that it methodises and corrects the reflections of common life (E 12.25, SBN 161). There are many ways in which Hume engages technical thinking. In the conclusion to the second Enquiry, he maintains with regard to individual virtue that ‘personal merit consists altogether in the 260

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possession of mental qualities, useful or agreeable to the person himself or to others’ (EM 9.1, SBN 268).3 Moral education, moral rules and habits of conduct, in other words, may be understood as technical instruments of social utility (T 3.2.2.26, SBN 500–1). The same goes for political rules, principles and laws, a point for which Hume argues across the whole of the second Enquiry’s section 3: ‘public utility is the sole origin of justice, and . . . reflections on the beneficial consequences of this virtue are the sole foundation of its merit’ (EM 3.1, SBN 183).4 Hume’s reflectively generated ‘general rules of a second influence’ (T 1.3.13.12, SBN 149–50) are, in this sense, technical instruments to which he appeals to correct and refine the sciences, politics, religion and other sectors of human life. Arguably, even natural beliefs acquire normative status because of our recognition of their practicality or practical necessity.5 For Hume, experienced reality itself is the product of a kind of technê. Painting is unequivocally a technê, and Hume says that we ‘paint the universe’ with our imagination, perhaps calling upon Pyrrho the painter as well as upon Huet’s comparing appearances and our ideas of things to paintings (T 1.3.9, SBN 108; cf. §3.4.1 above).6 Ancient sceptics did not use the term technê in this sense, but if my interpretation of Hume as a deeply Pyrrhonian thinker is correct, his thought is properly read as enlarging the extension of the term technê in a way consistent with scepticism. Scepticism is commonly understood to be motivated by an aspiration to ataraxia, but one might also say that sceptics aspire to live without dogmatism, adoxatos, ‘with no dogmatical spirit’. What is it, though, to practise philosophy without a ‘dogmatical spirit’, and what are the particular technai that Hume enlists to achieve a spirit of that sort? To understand better what Hume is after in developing a non-dogmatic philosophy, it will prove useful to take a closer look at dogmatism.

7.1 A Caveat and a Reminder At the end of Book 1, Part 4 of the Treatise, Hume enters an important description of his philosophical practice – that is, of the way he wishes to philosophise sceptically. Hume warns against the excess of characteristically dogmatic ‘desire’ as well as against the dogmatic ‘hope’ of gaining philosophical ‘satisfaction’ by apprehending what is ‘ultimate’ about reality (T 1.4.7.5, SBN 266–7). Another kind of hope and satisfaction must be found, a sceptical

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kind that relinquishes dogmatic desires for the truth and for apprehending the ultimately real. Once dogmatism is ‘remov’d’, one can theorise through ‘opinions’ (doxa) rather than through supposed knowledge (epistemê), deferring to appearances and to what is persuasive and ‘satisfactory’ (pithanon), rather than to the purportedly true and real: were these [dogmatic] hypotheses once remov’d, we might hope to establish a system or set of opinions, which if not true (for that, perhaps, is too much to be hop’d for) might at least be satisfactory to the human mind, and might stand the test of the most critical examination. (T 1.4.7.14, SBN 272)

Dogmatism, for Hume, is not, therefore, only a matter of what we think and believe but also of what we hope for and desire. Later Hume writes about sceptical method: ‘As long as we confine our speculations to the appearances of objects to our senses, without entering into disquisitions concerning their real nature and operations, we are safe from all difficulties . . .’ (T 1.2.5n12, SBN 638). In adopting a philosophy strictly of appearances and of properly sceptical hope, Hume enacts a zetetic, inquiring Pyrrhonism, as well as a limiting, modest Academicism. Hume is, moreover, concerned that he has, on ‘occasion’, forgotten his scepticism and written in a dogmatic voice, that he has exceeded the sceptical limits according to which he has intended to discipline his philosophical practice. As a ‘caveat’, then, and as a Pyrrhonian reminder designed to correct the ahistorical ‘present view’ he has taken, Hume, in an apparent allusion to Sextus at PH 1.1.4 and PH 1.7.15, writes:7 On such an occasion we are apt not only to forget our scepticism, but even our modesty too; and make use of such terms as these, ’tis evident, ’tis certain, ’tis undeniable; which a due deference to the public ought, perhaps, to prevent. I may have fallen into this fault after the example of others; but I here enter a caveat against any objections, which may be offer’d on that head; and declare that such expressions were extorted from me by the present view of the object, and imply no dogmatical spirit, nor conceited idea of my own judgment, which are sentiments that I am sensible can become no body, and a sceptic still less than any other. (T 1.4.7.15, SBN 274)

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These important closing remarks in Book 1 of the Treatise contain compressed but direct insights into Hume’s understanding of dogmatism, as well as his sceptical practice (see §3.2–3 above).

7.1.1 Dogmatic Forgetfulness and Sceptical Hope In this passage from T 1.4.7.15, Hume suggests that dogmatism ‘forgets’ not only sceptical thinking but also ‘modesty’, and perhaps more. To be dogmatic is to forget, to lose something of the past. Whereas recollection is retrospective, Hume’s having at times written in a dogmatical spirit was, he tells us, the result of his excessive focus on the ‘present’ view of various topics. Scepticism by implication would seem, as we began to describe in §3.4.2 (on sceptical recollection) and later in §6.1.1 (on habit and historicity), to resist or preclude dogmatism by adopting and maintaining a kind of historical consciousness – a sustained and mindful recollection not only of past appearances but also of past errors, of the poor ‘examples’ others have made in their dogmatism, and of the modesty appropriate to inquiring humans. While Francis Bacon constructed tables of ‘natural history’, including records of error, in service of a comparatively dogmatic epistemology, reflection upon our histories of error may serve sceptical ends, too. One might say that dogmatism suffers a kind of carelessness and forgetfulness all its own. We must, therefore, in every reasoning form a new judgment, as a check or control on our first judgment or belief; and must enlarge our view to comprehend a kind of history of all the instances, wherein our understanding has deceived us, compared with those, wherein its testimony was just and true. (T 1.4.1.1, SBN 180)

True philosophy, therefore, requires a historical recollection of dogmatic failure. This sceptical-historical reflection on error and finitude comes at a price, however. Flowing from it is a kind of existential angst or ‘dread’ characteristic of sceptical consciousness, the kind of dread suffered by those who set out on leaky and weather-beaten vessels to ‘sail the Atlantic and Pacific of one’s being alone’.8 The ‘man of best sense’, writes Hume, ‘must be conscious of many errors in the past, and must still dread the like for the future’ (T 1.4.1.5, SBN 181).

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‘Carelessness and inattention’ of a sort may be all that ‘can afford us any remedy’ to the crises of sceptical angst (T 1.4.2.57, SBN 218), but sustaining a true sceptical philosophy requires more than careless forgetfulness. It requires careful recollection of human epistemological limits and the historicity of human life, as well as a tempered hope for theorising to chastened satisfactions.9 That sceptical, hopeful, historical consciousness emerges for Hume from a philosophical dialectic and contrasts with two other kinds of thinking.

7.1.2 True Philosophy’s Three-Step Dialectic Hume defines true philosophy by distinguishing a tripartite scheme of human opinions – 1) those of the ‘vulgar’ or people who are not philosophically reflective, 2) those of ‘false philosophy’ and 3) those of ‘true philosophy’.10 What Hume calls ‘false philosophy’ refers to a form of dogmatism of particular importance, though it is not for him the only form of dogmatism. Part 4 of Book 1 of the Treatise charts dogmatisms along two axes: epistemological and metaphysical. Among metaphysical forms of dogmatism, Hume distinguishes another division, that between internal and external types. Sections 1 and 2 of Part 4 tackle epistemological dogmatism by undermining the twin pillars understood by early modern philosophers to sustain the architectonics of knowledge: section 1 reason and section 2 the senses. Subsequently sections 3–6 are directed towards metaphysical dogmatisms concerning the ‘external and internal world’ (T 1.4.2.57, SBN 218). Sections 3 and 4 engage dogmatisms about the ‘external’ world, in particular the ancient-medieval-early-modern philosophical ideas of ‘substance’ and ‘matter’ (in §3) as well as of matter as ‘extension’ and ‘solidity’ (in §4). Next, sections 5–6 focus on dogmatisms about the ‘internal’ world. In particular, section 5 dissects the central idea of so much ancient and modern philosophy and religion – namely, soul or mind as immaterial substance. In section 6, Hume deflates the related idea of an abiding, unified, substantial and self-conscious self that persists through the flowing changes of the bundle of perceptions composing experience – a dogma central to religious ideas about judgement, salvation and damnation.11 The organisation can be schematised this way: Epistemological dogmatisms of T 1.4: • §1 Senses • §2 Reason

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Metaphysical dogmatisms of T 1.4: • External • §3 Substance • §4 Matter • Internal • §5 Soul or mind • §6 The self Acknowledging the mutual entanglement of epistemological and metaphysical dogmatism, Hume initiates, in the sections on epistemological dogmatism and even earlier in T 1.3, his sceptical investigation of the ‘real’.

7.2 Epistemological Dogmatism Before we examine the properly Academic and Pyrrhonian technologies of Hume’s epistemic doubt, we should acknowledge that the religious context of his intellectual development more than likely influenced his views. We should take note, too, of the powerful inversion that Hume undertakes of the religious doctrines in which he was steeped. During his dramatic meeting with Hume on 7 July 1776, just a month before Hume’s death, James Boswell reports that I asked him if he was not religious when he was young. He said he was, and he used to read The Whole Duty of Man; that he made an abstract from the catalogue of vices at the end of it, and examined himself by this, leaving out murder and theft and such vices as he had no chance of committing, having no inclination to commit them.12

Hume’s early exposure to Richard Allestree’s High Church Anglican moralism in The Whole Duty of Man (1658), as well as the Calvinism that pervaded Scotland and his family’s Presbyterian kirk in Chirnside, could not but have left an enduring mark on the young man. Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, there is a striking similarity of ideas on belief between Hume and Pierre Jurieu, the Calvinist theologian and mentor to Bayle (see §7.2 above).13 Drawing upon the Augustinian tradition (which, as we saw in §2.1.1, may itself have been influenced by ancient Academic scepticism), Calvinists understood nature, in particular human nature, to be ‘fallen’ and corrupted by the Fall. In a phrase that has come nearly to define Calvinism, human nature suffers a condition of ‘total depravity’.

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James A. Harris therefore observes, rightly, that ‘Hume would have been well prepared by his Calvinist upbringing to be sceptical of the possibility of giving religion a foundation in reason.’14 And not only religion. As José Maia Neto has observed, the dogmatic contention ‘that the Fall of Man had sceptical epistemological consequences was current after the Reformation’. Among the consequences of humanity’s fallen depravity were understood to be the darkening of the intellect and the weakening as well as perverting of the will, especially in relation to the compulsions of desire.15 Because of the weakness of human faculties and the overwhelming power of human passions, a divine remedy in the form of grace is required to redeem, assist or at least to liberate the will, as well as to illuminate the intellect with truth. ‘Acquired’ scepticism of this sort (acquired through the Fall) in the Scottish context proceeded, of course, from Augustinian-Calvinist precedents, while among the French it also found support in the rigorous Augustinian soil of Catholic Jansenism and the Port-Royal philosophers – Pascal, Arnauld and Nicole.16 The Catholic Bishop of Ypres, Cornelius Jansen (1585–1638), wrote the influential theological text Augustinus (Louvain, 1640), and this work drew many into its orbit. Jansenism deeply affected the torment of Pascal’s passionate longing for God (Pensées §434), and in all likelihood his scepticism.17 Intervention by God to dispense unmerited grace is the only way to save humanity from its own wretched condition. Cartesianism, after its own fashion, agrees. For Hume, in contrast, the sceptical condition is not acquired but natural and irredeemable. His philosophy, however, is more than Calvinism sans grace and salvation. Hume’s naturalistic and sceptical acceptance of the human condition fixes him as an antecedent to Nietzsche’s inversion or ‘transvaluation’ of Augustine’s, of Calvin’s, and of John Knox’s negative judgements about the human condition. Hume’s antipathy for Calvinism is particularly evident in ‘The Natural History of Religion’. Inverting the Calvinist view of human nature and rebuking Calvinist morality across his work, Hume’s sceptical diagnosis signals that what in his view needs remedy in human life is not human characteristics attributed to fallenness but instead our wish and our pretension to transcend those human characteristics, to escape them and to avoid them (a diagnosis of which we saw precedent in Montaigne; see §4.1.4.4 above). The proper therapy for human finitude is not

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undeserved salvific redemption that would cure humanity of the human condition. Instead the methodising and correcting salve of scepticism aims to relieve the dogmatic-theological and false philosophical desire to flee the human and, in the characteristically self-hating phrase of many Christians, construe it as a condition of ‘total depravity’. Religious dogmatisms are, for Hume, ‘sick men’s dreams’ (N 15.6), and its ‘terrors’ (N 13.1–3), as well as other pathologies apparently intrinsic to dogmatism, must be diagnosed and treated. Like Camus’s plague, these maladies may resist permanent cure, but despite that, we do well to press onward with philosophical ‘temerity’ in the ‘hope’ of acquiring what durable satisfactions and pleasures may be found in human existence. Hume’s technai of doubt are central to that therapy and crucial to achieving those satisfactions.

7.2.1 The Criterion: Evidence, Certainty and Undeniability As we have seen in our surveys of ancient Academic and Pyrrhonian philosophy, sceptical thinking hinges on the ‘problem of the criterion’ (see §1.3.2 above). Following that tradition, Hume resists the idea that either the senses or reason provide criteria for knowledge – for knowing the truth, for transcending appearances and for epistemically apprehending the metaphysical real. He, of course, refuses the idea of intellectual intuition of the sort imagined by rationalists and other dogmatists, too. Philosophy practised dogmatically, in contrast, makes claim to having determined its findings on the basis of what ‘’tis evident, ’tis certain, ’tis undeniable’, says Hume (T 1.4.7.15, SBN 274), a remark that suggests three different lines of resistance to dogmatism: the refusal of 1) evidence, 2) certainty and 3) undeniability. How so? Put tersely, for Hume the senses seem incapable of producing evidence of anything beyond themselves, even of themselves. They can ground justifiable claims neither to positive representational epistemic content (as Locke, Descartes and the scholastics argue) nor to apprehending reality directly (as Reid and Austin maintain): ‘they neither can offer’ external reality ‘to the mind as represented, nor as original’ (T 1.4.2.11, SBN 191). Embracing the Academic acknowledgement of human weakness and finitude, perhaps even systematic cognitive distortion, Hume also deploys sceptical arguments

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that erode the warrant of reason as a criterion of truth. In doing so, those arguments precipitate, in a phrase that Hume may again have drawn from Bayle, a ‘total extinction of . . . evidence’ related to reasoning and intuition (T 1.4.1.6, SBN 183; emphasis mine).18 The total extinction of rational evidence and of reason’s capacity to legitimate itself is so complete, indeed, that for Hume even the authority of the sceptical arguments themselves vanishes ‘away into nothing’ (T 1.4.1.12, SBN 187) in a self-cancelling dynamic. Descartes builds the claim to scientia of his philosophical system upon the certainty (certum) of the cogito and other ‘clear and distinct’ ideas (Principles 1.45). In addition, however, just as Hume had written to John Stewart in 1754 about ‘different kinds of Certainty’ (LT 1.187, #91), Descartes also describes truths that are ‘morally certain’ and have ‘sufficient certainty for application to ordinary life’ (Principles 4.205). In ‘A Letter to a Gentleman’ Hume writes that ‘Moral Certainty may reach as high a Degree of Assurance as Mathematical’ (LG 26, 1.426–7). Unlike their purportedly ‘metaphysical’ kin, however, moral certainties are prima facie logically vulnerable to doubt.19 Hume will show, as we will see, however, that all certainties are subject to sceptical subversion that opens into doubt. Hume unleashes a sceptical broadside at the epistemic pretensions of both types of certainty, moral and metaphysical. His scepticism refuses claims to the epistemic warrant of ‘certainty’ not only in the practices of ordinary life and the matters of fact of empirical science but also even in matters of mathematical and deductive reasoning and intuition. For Hume, certainty is a criterion necessary for making affirmative judgements of knowledge proper, but Hume’s arguments subvert the epistemic pretensions of certainty in a way that is complete and total: ‘all [putative] knowledge degenerates into probability’ (T 1.4.1.1, SBN 179), and all probability collapses to nothing. Hume does proclaim, in a remark that was especially compelling to P. F. Strawson, that ‘’tis vain to ask, Whether there be body or not?’; but Hume does not say that is so because we are certain about body or that body is known.20 Hume is clear that we ‘cannot pretend by any arguments of philosophy to maintain’ the ‘veracity’ of that pronouncement (T 1.4.2.1, SBN 187), let alone its certainty. Of course, to the extent that Hume’s sceptical arguments undermine the pillars of any knowledge claims whatsoever, clearly nothing for him is epistemically undeniable. Even where evidence and

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probability have not been utterly subverted, by definition whatever is probable is deniable. Whereas Wittgensteinians and those who follow Strawson’s reading of Hume understand there to be propositions that are senseless to doubt in contexts of epistemological inquiry, zetetic Hume refuses to invest even the most deeply rooted natural beliefs with that kind of ephectic immunity. As Quine illustrates with his image of the web of belief, everything stands open to revision – characterised, that is, by zetetic revisability (see §3.4.3.1 above).

7.2.2 Above the Winds and Clouds: The Abstruse, Difficult and Ephemeral Besides laying claim to evidence, certainty and undeniability, dogmatic philosophy is distinguished for Hume by its characteristically appearing abstruse, difficult and ephemeral. These qualities are found not only in false or dogmatic philosophy, but also in troublesome forms of scepticism. Hume acknowledges this when he observes: We save ourselves from this total scepticism only by means of that singular and seemingly trivial property of the fancy, by which we enter with difficulty into remote views of things, and are not able to accompany them with so sensible an impression, as we do those, which are more easy and natural. (T 1.4.7.6, SBN 267)

Indeed, ‘here is the chief and most confounding objection to excessive scepticism, that no durable good can ever result from it’ (E 12.2.23, SBN 159). These additional characteristics of a dogmatical spirit as it is described at T 1.4.7.15 are bound up with theory itself, both dogmatic and sceptical. Theory is prone to uncertainty, deniability and shortfalls of evidence, but it is also per se abstruse, difficult and ephemeral. But this obscurity in the profound and abstract philosophy, is objected to, not only as painful and fatiguing, but as the inevitable source of uncertainty and error. Here indeed lies the justest and most plausible objection against a considerable part of metaphysics, that they are not a science; but arise either from the fruitless efforts of human vanity, which would penetrate into subjects utterly inaccessible to

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the understanding, or from the craft of popular superstitions, which, being unable to defend themselves on fair ground, raise these intangling brambles to cover and protect their weakness. (E 1.11, SBN11)

Hume writes in ‘The Sceptic’ about philosophy in general that ‘The reflections of philosophy are too subtile and distant to take place in common life . . . The air is too fine to breathe in, where it is above the winds and clouds of the atmosphere’ (ES 172). Philosophical reflection by its very nature, for Hume, seems to depart from the ‘gross earthy mixture’ of common life (T 1.4.7.14, SBN 272). For Hume, however, it does not follow that thinkers should never visit those regions – that is, that they should never theorise philosophically or engage in reflective thinking. Difficult and abstruse though true philosophy can be, its careful, serious and exact practice nevertheless remains important to Hume, not least of all because it yields a therapeutic, anti-dogmatic effect. The only method of freeing learning, at once, from these abstruse questions, is to enquire seriously into the nature of human understanding, and show, from an exact analysis of its powers and capacity, that it is by no means fitted for such remote and abstruse subjects. We must submit to this fatigue, in order to live at ease ever after: And must cultivate true metaphysics with some care, in order to destroy the false and adulterate. (E 1.12, SBN 12)21

When it comes to combating dogmatism, Hume is no advocate of philosophical laziness or carelessness. He does not advocate abandoning reflective philosophy’s ship.22 Simply put, that thinking is difficult and abstruse is by itself no proof of its falsehood or dogmatism. Hume understands that ‘if truth be at all within the reach of human capacity, ’tis certain it must lie very deep and abstruse’ (T Intro.3, SBN xiv–xv). Of course, this introductory remark is largely meant in an ironic way, since Hume is about to argue in what follows that truth as it is pursued by false philosophy is not within human reach. Because truth lies very deep and abstruse, it may be beyond us, and only false philosophical fools such as Tantalus and Sisyphus would seek ‘what for ever flies us’ (T 1.4.3.9, SBN 223). An epistemic apprehension of the metaphysically real flies us. The aspiration of First Philosophy of the Real flies us. What does not fly us, however, and what can be achieved through reflective, abstruse and difficult true

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philosophy is the self-understanding of human existence and theoretical practice that sceptical inquiries afford. Having passed through the rough seas of abstruse and difficult reflection, sceptics find a condition that is easier and more durable than dogmatism, especially with regard to superstition. In the essay ‘Of Commerce’, Hume tersely remarks: ‘The greater part of mankind may be divided into two classes; that of shallow thinkers, who fall short of the truth; and that of abstruse thinkers, who go beyond it’ (ES 253). But what about the lesser part? What of that minority of true sceptical philosophers whose thinking is abstruse but also true and rare. It may be that it is still ‘easier to forbear all examination and enquiry’ (T 1.4.7.15, SBN 274), but true philosophy possesses its own difficult satisfactions and its own gain.

7.2.3 The Technai of Doubt In light of this reading, let us take a closer look at the therapeutic ‘tincture’ of Pyrrhonism (E 12.3.24, SBN 161–2) and at the abstruse yet true sceptical philosophy of remembering that Hume enjoins the reader to deploy against dogmatic evidence, certainty and incorrigibility. It will prove important in this investigation to remember that none of Hume’s sceptical arguments results in a dogmatic metaphysical or epistemological thesis. That is to say, Hume does not advance arguments for a metaphysical or epistemological conclusion, positive or negative. He advances no new dogmatic system whatsoever. He writes: ‘’Tis impossible upon any system to defend either our understanding or senses; and we but expose them farther when we endeavour to justify them in that manner’ (T 1.4.2.57, SBN 218; emphasis mine).23 Rather, Humean scepticism is centred instead upon a kind of self-aware corrective recovery of the non-dogmatic beliefs and practices of common life. Hume engineers a sceptical theory that situates inquirers meaningfully and consciously within the world as it appears – reflectively and zetetically, but with no dogmatical spirit. 7.2.3.1 Reason: regresses, contradictions, self-cancellations. With regard to reason, Hume develops critical technai to undermine the dogmatic uses of both deduction and induction. He develops strategies to call into doubt not only claims to certainty but also to probability in an epistemic sense. He casts doubt not just upon discursive and inferential reasoning but also upon intuitive certainty

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as a criterion of truth.24 About the scope of sceptical criticism, Hume writes: ‘It may seem a very extravagant attempt of the sceptics to destroy reason by argument and ratiocination; yet is this the grand scope of all their enquiries and disputes. They endeavour to find objections, both to our abstract reasonings, and to those which regard matter of fact and existence’ (E 12.17, SBN 155–6). How does Hume lay out sceptical critiques so comprehensive in scope? 7.2.3.1.1 Reason in the Treatise: the ‘total extinction’ of evidence.25 In order to certify their epistemic claims, the dogmatic rationalists Descartes and Malebranche, as we have seen (§5.1.1 above), postulate a special power of apprehension, in their case a ‘natural light’ (lumen naturale) of reason. It is a specious appeal with a long pedigree. Aristotle calls upon the metaphor of light at De Anima 2.7 (4018b ff.) in preface to his dogmatic epistemological theory of the ‘active’ or ‘agent’ intellect (noûs poiêtikos; De Anima 3.5). Before Aristotle, Plato described the divine Form of the Good as the sunlike source of epistemic intelligibility (Republic 507b–509c). Descartes’ conception of the ‘natural light’ may have found root in this Aristotelian-Platonic tradition more immediately through Thomas Aquinas’s theory of abstraction, where the active intellect abstracts purely formal conceptions from the empirical sensory input of experience.26 Through this natural, illuminated intellect, modern Cartesians, like the Spinozists with their scientia intuitiva, lay claim to having apprehended causal powers and other diverse populations of metaphysical entities. In Hume’s estimation, however, these dogmatists merely ‘pretend to explain the secret force and energy of causes’, and indeed whatever else they claim to lie hidden beyond experience (T 1.3.14.7, SBN 158). Hume advances this criticism in several ways. Sections §3.3.1.2 and §3.3.4 above suggest that Hume’s argument against the epistemic warrant of reason in the Treatise, what is often called his ‘iterative probability’ argument, follows Agrippa’s second trope regress ad infinitum, as presented by Sextus (PH 1.15.164, DL 9.88–90) – though there are also a number of early modern sources that may have influenced Hume.27 This argument exhibits a particularly Pyrrhonian and anti-Metrodorian moment in Hume’s thought, one that prepares the way for his Clitomachian resolution to the doxastic problems generated by the epistemological project.28 Hume’s deployment of this trope is momentous, because it strips away not only the epistemic legitimacy of reason (its Pyrrhonian function) but also the Metrodorian association of epistemic apprehension of the

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real through probability (its anti-Metrodorian Academic function).29 Vaunted and authoritative though reason is taken to be, one ‘cannot defend his reason by reason’ (T 1.4.2.1, SBN 187). In fact, reason subverts itself in the attempt to do so. Hume’s variant of Agrippa’s trope appears first early in the Treatise, at T 1.2.4.23 (SBN 47). There he invokes a regress argument against our ability to acquire the ‘common and invariable’ standard for judgements about the ‘greater, less and equal’. Every standard of measure itself requires another standard of measure to assess it, and so on and so on. This means that ‘we are not possess’d of any instrument or art of measuring, which can secure us from all error and uncertainty’ (T 1.2.4.24, SBN 48). Because of the doubt raised by this regress, humans can only suppose an ‘imaginary standard’ (T 1.2.4.24, SBN 48). What are thought of as ‘ultimate standards’ secure no more perfection than what is allowed by the imperfect senses and imagination: ‘As the ultimate standard of these figures is deriv’d from nothing but the senses and imagination, ’tis absurd to talk of any perfection beyond what these faculties can judge of; since the true perfection of any thing consists in its conformity to its standard’ (T 1.2.4.29, SBN 51). The standards of even geometric demonstration are grounded in nothing more than appearances: the ‘original standard of a right line is in reality nothing but a certain general appearance’ (T 1.2.4.30, SBN 52). Hume’s ultimate standards make no pretence to apprehension of either perfection or the real. These paragraphs from Treatise 1.2 compose a fascinating and compressed set of passages, but the regress of Hume’s iterative probability argument at T 1.4.1 is better known and represents, for many, Hume’s deepest criticism of reason’s epistemic pretensions. Its position in Part 4 of the text suggests as much. The argument first surfaces, actually, at T 1.3.13.5, where in a footnote Hume prospectively calls upon T 1.4.1 in reflecting upon the chain of testimony thought to underwrite claims to religious truth (T 1.3.13.5n, SBN 145–6n). At T 1.4.1, however, the target becomes reason itself. The argument at T 1.4.1 opens with Hume’s well-known distinction between ‘relations of ideas’ and ‘matters of fact’ (E 4.1.1–2, SBN 25–6; cf. T 1.3.6–7). Relations of ideas – as in, for example, mathematics and the formal sciences – underwrite assessments of topics purely conceptual; while matters of fact are determined by investigating, as in the empirical sciences, what is the case with the inner and outer worlds that we perceive. For Hume (as for

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Foucher; see §2.1.3.5 above), therefore, ‘knowledge’ strictly speaking is by definition demonstrative or deductive and results from examining the logical and otherwise conceptual relations among ideas. In contrast, ‘proof’ for Hume is related to causal reasoning, and proof, while falling short of proper knowledge, is the best kind of reasoning about ‘matters of fact’. Hume argues in T 1.3.1 (‘Of knowledge’) that ‘knowledge’, like ‘proof’, is characterised by certainty such that one can possess knowledge only if one possesses certainty (cf. E 4.1). Probability, unlike knowledge and proof, includes the irremediable presence of doubt. As Hume says midway through Book 1 of the Treatise: ’twould perhaps be more convenient, in order at once to preserve the common signification of words, and mark the several degrees of evidence, to distinguish human reason into three kinds, viz. that from knowledge, from proofs, and from probabilities. By knowledge, I mean the assurance arising from the comparison of ideas. By proofs, those arguments, which are deriv’d from the relation of cause and effect, and which are entirely free from doubt and uncertainty. By probability, that evidence, which is still attended with uncertainty. (T 1.3.11.2, SBN 124)

This is an instance of Hume’s internalism, in the sense that it is not enough for him that the right relations of ideas or the right matters of fact be perceived to possess knowledge; a knower must also be consciously certain of having apprehended those relations, those perceptions. To be certain, moreover, is to be without doubt, and so a knower must, for Hume, know that she knows without any doubt about it. Hume, in other words, adopts a variation of the epistemological KK requirement (according to which a knower must know that he knows). In Hume’s case, the requirement is CC (a knower must be certain of his certainty). In Hume’s analysis, two problems arise with this criterion. In the first place, people are fallible in the way they execute and intuit the four relations of ideas that Hume identifies as sources of knowledge: ‘resemblance, contrariety, degrees in quality, and proportions in equality or number’ (T 1.3.1.2, SBN 70). It is true that ‘algebra and arithmetic’ remain ‘the only sciences in which we can carry on a chain of reasoning to any degree of intricacy, and yet preserve a perfect exactness and certainty’. In the relations among

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their ideas they give us ‘a precise standard, by which we can judge of the equality and proportion of number’. Not only, however, as we saw in T 1.2.4, is that kind of perfection and exactness limited, but in the application of rational standards humans are vulnerable to error: ‘In all demonstrative sciences the rules are certain and infallible; but when we apply them, our fallible and uncertain faculties are very apt to depart from them, and fall into error’ (T 1.4.1.1, SBN 180). These problems, however, are just the start of Hume’s critique of certainty. On a second, more reflective level, Hume maintains that we may err in our certainty or uncertainty about just that question of application and whether or not we have properly applied reason’s standard. So, the Humean sources of doubt about certainty are twofold – 1) in making an inference and 2) in assessing that inference. That is, people may err in whatever certainty certifies their reasoning, not only in the initial certainty but also in reflection upon it. Inquirers, in other words, may err not only when they reason but also when they ‘check’ their reasoning – and when they check their checking, and so on and so on. In this way, Hume’s argument in T 1.4.1 marks his rejection not only of the ‘natural light’, illuminationist traditions of epistemic certification, and what Hans Albert calls the ‘revelation model’ of knowledge.30 The argument also undermines modern versions of noetic intuition and of stoic katalêpsis – what had in the seventeenth century come to be known as l’évidence (what is dêlos).31 The line of sceptics preceding Hume advanced similar critiques. The argument that Bayle’s philosophical abbé from the Dictionnaire’s article on ‘Pyrrho’, for example, gives in response to his dogmatic interlocutor aligns with Hume’s position: [The philosophical abbé declares:] . . . if one had any hopes of victory over the skeptics, one would have to prove to them first of all that truth is certainly recognizable by certain marks. These are commonly called the criterion of truth (criterium veritatis). You could rightly maintain to him that self-evidence (l’évidence) is the sure characteristic of truth; for if self-evidence were not, nothing else could be. [Giving voice to the sceptic, the philosophical abbé explains:] ‘So be it’, he will say to you. ‘It is right here that I have been waiting for you. I will make you see that some things you reject as false are as evident as can be.’32

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The radical sceptic finds no ultimately verifying criterial ‘marks’ of knowledge (even in certainty), and the evidentness of evidence (self-evidence or otherwise) is no guarantee of infallibility. The upshot is that the mere presence of certainty in the mind at any step by itself is insufficient to legitimate an inference. Certainty may be a necessary condition for knowledge, but it is not a sufficient condition. Knowers must not only possess certainty; they must, for Hume, also justify their certainty, and since they cannot do so, they cannot possess knowledge.33 Not only can one not be certain about the operations of human rational faculties; one also cannot be certain of having properly certified any given inference made by them. Because what is ‘as evident as can be’ can still be false, deductive-demonstrative reasoning, for Hume, degenerates to the level of causal reasoning, but not even causal reasoning can produce what Hume calls a ‘full proof’: ‘Our reasoning must be consider’d as a kind of cause, of which truth is the natural effect; but sucha-one as by the irruption of other causes, and by the inconstancy of our mental powers, may be frequently prevented’ (T 1.4.1.1, SBN 180). All knowledge reduces to probability, and probability reduces to zero, the complete absence of epistemic warrant.34 All this informs the iterative regress that Hume finally runs at T 1.4.1.6 ad infinitum. Having thus found in every probability, beside the original uncertainty inherent in the subject, a new uncertainty deriv’d from the weakness of that faculty, which judges, and having adjusted these two together, we are oblig’d by our reason to add a new doubt deriv’d from the possibility of error in the estimation we make of the truth and fidelity of our faculties. This doubt, which immediately occurs to us, and of which, if we wou’d closely pursue our reason, we cannot avoid giving a decision. But for this, tho’ it shou’d be favorable to our preceding judgment, being founded only on probability, must weaken still further our first evidence, and must itself be weaken’ed by a fourth doubt of the same kind, and so on in infinitum; till at last there remain nothing of the original probability, however great we may suppose it to have been, and however small one diminution by every new uncertainty. (T 1.4.1.6, SBN 182)

The dogmatic project of grounding reasoning tumbles recursively into the ‘immense depths’ (T 1.4.7.1, SBN 263–4) of a conceptual space perhaps not terribly different from the ‘abyss of scepticism’

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(einen Abgrund des Skeptizismus) that Kant describes in the opening paragraph of the Preface to the Critique of Practical Reason (5.3).35 Bayle employs a similar image, writing that sceptical reason’s subversion of reason ‘plunges us into such an abyss’.36 Bayle writes, too, about the disturbing qualities of this condition: ‘How great a chaos, and how great a torment for the human mind!’37 Refusing every alternative of Agrippa’s Trilemma, we have seen that Hume rejects 1) ‘just’ epistemic foundations (T 1.3.6.10, SBN 91), 2) circularity (E 4.19, SBN 35–6) and now, again in more detail, 3) infinite regresses of justification.38 This sets Hume at odds with defences of rational justification überhaupt. Even if one begins with the perfect certainty sometimes claimed for mathematics and other forms of deductive reasoning, reflection on the fallibility of our faculties and on the uncertainties of application entirely quashes that certainty and with it epistemic standing in toto. The intense view of these manifold contradictions and imperfections in human reason has so wrought upon me, and heated my brain, that I am ready to reject all belief and reasoning, and can look upon no opinion even as more probable or likely than another. (T 1.4.7.8, SBN 268–9)

Although this iterative probability argument drops out of the first Enquiry, Hume’s claims about the fallibility of our faculties and the error-prone probabilities of application persist, especially in light of the positive lessons to be learned from ‘consequent’ scepticism. (There is, however, a kind of probability characteristic of common life that Hume accepts. He writes: ‘all knowledge resolves itself into probability, and becomes at last of the same nature with that evidence, which we employ in common life’; T 1.4.1.4, SBN 181. As we will see below in Chapter 8, however, that type of probability is sceptical and non-dogmatic.) 7.2.3.1.2 Reason in the first Enquiry: Hume’s ‘chief objection’. Bayle’s article on Zeno of Elea raises proto-sceptical problems concerning extension and contiguity in light of infinite divisibility.39 Perhaps inspired by this, Hume in the first Enquiry poses another infinitum argument, though not a regress. Rather, the argument turns upon reason’s conclusions about the divisibility of matter in infinitum, the infinitely small differences in size among geometric angles, the infinite numbers of parts that must compose extended spaces, and the contrariety of this with belief in indivisible physical or perceptual atoms.

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In the first Enquiry, nine years after Treatise Book 1, Hume calls this conundrum the ‘chief’ objection against reasoning that departs from the perceptually concrete: ‘The chief objection against all abstract reasonings is derived from the ideas of space and time’ (E 12.2, SBN 156). The objection is twofold. One fold of Hume’s objection stems from a contrariety pitching the infinities of reason against the finitude of perceptual experience. Contrary to the infinite divisibility demanded by abstract mathematical reason, experience pushes towards basic atoms or uncuttables: ‘whatever disputes there may be about mathematical points, we must allow that there are physical points; that is, parts of extension, which cannot be divided or lessened’ – and here is the qualification restricting his analysis to appearances – ‘either by the eye or imagination’ (E 12.2.18n33, SBN 156n1). A second fold follows from Hume’s Academic acknowledgement of the limits and weakness of human cognition in the face of infinities and near infinities. Prior to the issues raised in the first Enquiry 12.2, Hume had, in the Treatise, already argued that it seems impossible for the limited human mind to compute the exact number of points that make up any line segment and therefore to use an account of the number of points as a standard of measure (T 1.2.4.19, SBN 45). Because of human limits, standards of judgement about space and time must remain indeterminate, or what Pyrrhonians call, as we have seen (§3.1.1), anepikritos. Reason’s ideas about space and time lead to contradictions with perceptual experience and to bumping one’s head against experiential limits. From a rational point of view, those contradictions seem insoluble and those limits unsurpassable. Hume’s logical strategy here may be older than Bayle, as it is similar to Sextus’ argument at M 3.56, where he maintains that geometers’ conceptions of lines and points become dubious since they seem impossible to apply to actual bodies and since they are contrary to the prolepsis or preconceptions of common life. 7.2.3.1.3 Inductive reason: begging the question of nature. Hume also notes the sceptical implications for reasoning of his theory of causal inference. Of course, reasoning solely by relations of ideas implies nothing about what externally exists: ‘Propositions of this kind are discoverable by the mere operation of thought, without dependence on what is anywhere existent in the universe’ (E 4.1.1, SBN 25). Perceptual experience does tell us about apparent existence, but it offers no empirical or intuitive grasp

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of necessary causal connections. That being so, the contrary and contradiction of every causal claim is logically possible (E 4.1.2, SBN 25). Like demonstrative reasoning, when inductive reasoning attempts to justify its own warrant, trouble emerges. For inductive reasoning, that trouble takes the form a petitio principii. Describing the question-begging quality of inductive reasoning’s attempt to justify itself, Hume writes with a flourish of irony that According to this account of things, which is, I think, in every point unquestionable, probability is founded on the presumption of a resemblance betwixt those objects, of which we have had experience, and those, of which we have had none; and therefore ’tis impossible this presumption can arise from probability. The same principle cannot be both the cause and effect of another . . .40 (T 1.3.6.7, SBN 90)

And, again, in the first Enquiry, he writes: All our experimental conclusions proceed upon the supposition that the future will be conformable to the past. To endeavour, therefore, the proof of this last supposition by probable arguments, or arguments regarding existence, must be evidently going in a circle, and taking that for granted, which is the very point in question. (E 4.19, SBN 35–36)

The deep sceptical implication of Hume’s analysis of deduction and induction is that neither those procedures nor the beliefs we generate through them can ultimately be grounded rationally. In Hume’s words: ‘No object ever discovers, by the qualities which appear to the senses, either the causes which produced it, or the effects which will arise from it; nor can our reason, unassisted by experience, ever draw any inference concerning real existence and matter of fact’ (E 4.1.23, SBN 27). In the Treatise, Hume confesses that ‘my intention never was to penetrate into the nature of bodies, or explain the secret causes of their operations’ (T 1.2.5.26, SBN 64). More to the point, Hume writes about natural science: ‘The most perfect philosophy of the natural kind only staves off our ignorance a little longer’ (E 4.1.26, SBN 310). The implications here are deep, for, as the speculative realist Quentin Meillassoux observes, what is at stake in Hume’s critique is not just some particular scientific theory or the question

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of whether science is certain or merely probabilistic. Because his argument undermines the epistemic gain of repeated experimentation, Hume’s critique of induction and his regress arguments extinguishing all evidence call into question the very possibility of science.41 It does not follow, of course, that Hume is against the use of reason or that he concludes that reason leads to epistemic error and false conclusions. Hume accepts the procedures of reasoning but gives up on the project of using reason to justify itself, just as he suspends judgement upon the question of whether reason discloses ultimate truth. Hume, moreover, accepts that his theory of causal inference as a matter merely of custom and feeling is perhaps ‘not a true one’ (E 5.1.36, SBN 43). The practices of rationality become technai of doxastic management rather than epistemic apprehension and justification. The ungrounding of reason by reason raises what many have recognised as a self-reflexive vulnerability in scepticism itself, its potential for hoisting itself by its own petard. For Hume, as for traditional Pyrrhonians, that objection is irrelevant. 7.2.3.1.4 Self-reflexive purgatives: sheltering ‘Samson’ under the ‘throne’. Self-reflexive or self-defeating challenges have frequently been raised against sceptical reasoning. Huet, for example, acknowledges objections of that sort in chapter 5 of Book 3 of his Traité.42 Huet recognises in those passages that despite their immediately troubling quality, self-reflexive problems are for radical sceptics non-problems. They are, in fact, an important dimension of the sceptical project. Like others in the Pyrrhonian tradition, Huet accepts that sceptical arguments destroy themselves: ‘When I undertook to prove that there was no Demonstration, the Proofs, I made use of, ought to be included with the rest, and so destroy themselves along with them.’43 This acceptance, as Huet understands, is characteristic of Academic (as well as Pyrrhonian) scepticism, whose mode of discourse he describes as ‘narrative’ rather than ‘affirmative’, akin perhaps to Bayle’s reportage. When therefore an Academick says, that there is nothing true, that every Thing is uncertain, or that we know nothing; he doth not advance those Propositions affirmatively, but narratively; and here it is, that that Exception of Charneades [sic] and of the Scepticks, which I have else where quoted, ought to take Place, viz. that those very Propositions do include themselves, and that when any one says that he can know nothing, he doth not except even that which he says,

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and that his Discourse doth overthrow it self at the same Time that it destroys all the rest, in the same manner as Samson buried himself under the same Ruins with which he crush’d his Spectators to Death.44

The self-reflexive result, in other words, does not undermine scepticism but typifies it. The means to radical sceptical subversion of dogmatism must subvert themselves. Otherwise they become new dogmatisms and land the sceptic in a fundamental inconsistency.45 Self-reflexive subversion is consistent, moreover, according to Huet, with a deference to probability, because probability does not presuppose certainty or, as we will see in Chapter 8, knowledge: ‘I only say that they [scepticism’s proofs] are probable, but that which is only probable, is not infallibly sure, which it ought to be in order to amount to a Demonstration.’46 Sceptical arguments dethrone reason, but they make no pretence to enthroning scepticism. Sceptical philosophy is not just another dogmatic philosophical language-game in which participants vie to establish their pet theses. Scepticism establishes no philosophical theses of this sort; and, when they are not serving to achieve isosthenia, scepticism’s arguments by design purge themselves, along with targeted dogmatisms. Hume writes: This I take to be the true state of the question, and cannot approve of that expeditious way, which some take with the sceptics, to reject at once all their arguments without enquiry or examination. If the sceptical reasonings be strong, say they, ’tis a proof, that reason may have some force and authority: if weak, they can never be sufficient to invalidate all the conclusions of our understanding. This argument is not just; because the sceptical reasonings, were it possible for them to exist, and were they not destroy’d by their subtility, wou’d be successively both strong and weak, according to the successive dispositions of the mind. Reason first appears in possession of the throne, prescribing laws, and imposing maxims, with an absolute sway and authority. Her enemy, therefore, is oblig’d to take shelter under her protection, and by making use of rational arguments to prove the fallaciousness and imbecility of reason, produces, in a manner, a patent under her hand and seal. This patent has at first an authority, proportion’d to the present and immediate authority of reason, from which it is deriv’d. But as it is suppos’d to be contradictory to reason, it gradually diminishes the force of that governing power, and its own at the same time; till at last they both vanish away into nothing, by a regular and just

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diminution. The sceptical and dogmatical reasons are of the same kind, tho’ contrary in their operation and tendency; so that where the latter is strong, it has an enemy of equal force in the former to encounter; and as their forces were at first equal, they still continue so, as long as either of them subsists; nor does one of them lose any force in the contest, without taking as much from its antagonist. (T 1.4.1.12, SBN 186–7; emphasis mine)

Situating Hume within a historical stream of sceptical thinking makes it possible to see this gesture as an expression not only of his Academicism but also of his Pyrrhonism. Sextus describes the self-reflexive effect of sceptical arguments in a similar way: And just as purgative medicines expel themselves together with the substances already present in the body, so these arguments are capable of canceling themselves along with the other arguments which are said to be probative. (PH 2.13.188)47

In Against the Logicians, prefiguring Wittgenstein’s famous metaphor at Tractatus 6.54, Sextus elaborates: For there are many things that put themselves in the same condition as they put other things. For example, just as fire after consuming the wood destroys itself as well, and just as purgatives after driving the fluids out of bodies eliminate themselves as well, so too the argument against demonstration, after doing away with all demonstration, can cancel itself as well. And again, just as it is not impossible for the person who has climbed to a high place by a ladder to knock over the ladder with his foot after his climb, so it is not unlikely that the skeptic too, having got to the accomplishment of his task by a sort of step-ladder – the argument showing that there is not demonstration – should do away with this argument. (ADO 2.480–1 [M 8.480–1])48

Mutual cancellation works like an emetic, like a self-consuming fire.49 Regarding sceptical sentences or formulae, rather than sceptical arguments, Sextus similarly writes: ‘All things are false’ asserts the falsity of itself as well as of everything else, as does the formula ‘Nothing is true’, so also the formula ‘No

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more’ asserts that itself, like all the rest, is ‘No more (this than that)’, and thus cancels itself along with the rest. And of the other formulae we say the same. If then, while the dogmatizer posits the matter of his dogma as substantial truth, the Sceptic enunciates his formulae so that they are virtually cancelled by themselves, he should not be said to dogmatize in his enunciation of them. (PH 1.7.14–15; cf. also PH 1.28.206–9)

It is clear, too, then in Hume’s appeal to ‘equal force’ that not only do his sceptical arguments with regard to reason call upon Pyrrhonism in 1) its use of a strategy like Agrippa’s second mode of infinite regress (PH 1.15.164ff.); they also enlist 2) Pyrrhonian emetic strategies as well as 3) Pyrrhonian strategies that create equipollence, ‘ballancing’ (T 1.4.1.9, SBN 185) or isosthenia (PH 1.4.8, 1.5.11, 1.27.202). These latter tactics, especially, shift the mode of philosophical discourse from dogmatic assertion to the practice of sceptical technai. In the same way, self-reflexive self-subversion is not a problem for Humean philosophy. It does not represent a philosophical dead end, an incoherency, or a kind of strange and momentary reductio that exposes the ‘diseased’ misguidedness of philosophical reflection about epistemological grounds antecedent to abandoning that reflection, as Donald C. Ainslie has recently argued.50 Self-reflexive self-subversion is, rather, integral to Hume’s sceptical philosophical stratagem. 7.2.3.2 The senses: perceptions as appearances. Hume’s Treatise opens with a sentence about all ‘perceptions’ (T 1.1.1.1, SBN 1), and upon perceptions Hume’s scepticism turns. It may be, as he claims, that Hume had not begun his philosophical voyage with the intention of subverting the senses as a conduit of knowledge. In Part 4 of Treatise Book 1, he writes that ‘I begun this subject with premising, that we ought to have an implicit faith in our senses, and that this wou’d be the conclusion, I shou’d draw from the whole of my reasoning’ (T 1.4.2.56, SBN 217–18). The endpoint he reached, however, was rather different. Hume’s influential arguments for scepticism regarding sense perception are more straightforward than those regarding reason, though hardly less controversial. They elicited immediate and vigorous opposition from many thinkers, including Common Sense philosophers such as Thomas Reid, James Beattie and Dugald

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Stewart. Hume’s arguments depend upon 1) his rejection of purely abstract ideas and 2) the ever-since-contested claim that since humans are fated to confront the world via sensory perception, we stand at a distance or suffer a difference from what perception re-presents. Hume acknowledges, in short, what Barry Stroud calls a sensory ‘veil of perception’ (cf. H 6.71.542).51 Hume’s limiting of cognition to non-abstract impressions that are separate from the world, and to ideas about them, is important, because if ideas about what lies beyond what sense experience and internal reflection can immediately present to us are impossible, then so is metaphysics. As James A. Harris puts it: ‘Hume . . . used Berkeley’s anti-abstractionism as the basis for a Pyrrhonist attack on metaphysics as such.’52 In detaching perceptions from a metaphysical ground, moreover, Hume radicalises and extends the implications of what de Pierris calls the ‘presentational-phenomenological model’ of perception dominant in early modernity. In doing so, Hume identifies what she calls an ‘evidential gap’ that undermines the epistemic project of natural science, too.53 Since we have no purely abstract ideas, and since the senses do not present an independent and external world to us directly, we cannot even think about the topics that metaphysics purports to investigate, and we cannot establish the veracity of the empirical sciences. We may observe, that ’tis universally allow’d by philosophers, and is besides pretty obvious of itself, that nothing is ever really presented the mind but its perceptions or impressions and ideas, and that external objects become known to us only by those perceptions they occasion. (T 1.2.6.7, SBN 67)

By the end of T 1.4.2, of course, the voice of Hume’s Treatise realises that knowledge of external objects tumbles into the evidential gap between immediate perceptions and whatever might lie beyond them. The separateness that we are fated to suffer from an independent and external real presents, indeed, an abyss, a gaping maw that swallows First Philosophy of the Real. It is just this gap that drove Berkeley to oppose scepticism with dogmatic idealism.54 Hume opts instead to radicalise scepticism. Just as it does not follow, however, from Hume’s scepticism regarding reason that reason should be abandoned, it does not follow from his scepticism regarding the senses that we should abandon the world or that nothing exists beyond the veil of sensory

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perception. Hume suspends judgement on the metaphysical issue; he is ‘neutral’.55 Hume does talk, as we have just seen, about objects occasioning perceptions, about ‘two different systems of beings’ at T 1.4.5.21 (SBN 242–3), about a ‘pre-established harmony between the course of nature and the succession of our ideas’ (E 5.21, SBN 54), and about how he will distinguish ‘for the future’ between ‘perceptions and objects’ (T 1.4.2.26, SBN 211–12). These and other remarks suggest that he inclines towards the ‘advantage’ of a non-dogmatic ‘double existence’ model, where external objects seem to cause and to resemble distinct perceptions, ‘happily’ found in an Apelletic way (T 1.4.2.52, SBN 215–16).56 Hume, nevertheless, balances that model against others in a practice of Pyrrhonian isosthenia and zêtesis (and perhaps an appeal to Aenesidemus’ causal trope 2). He does so when, in a revision of his earlier scruples, he allows the curious alternative possibility that perceptions and their qualities ‘may exist separately’ from any particular mind and ‘have no need of any thing else to support their existence’ – including mental substance or resembling external objects that cause perceptions (T 1.4.5.5, SBN 233; cf. T 1.4.5.24, SBN 244; cf. §7.3.2.1 below).57 Hume may have encountered something like this idealistic relevant alternative theory in Berkeley’s works, though, again, unlike Berkeley, Hume does not adopt it or any other metaphysical position.58 7.2.3.2.1 The awful gap and the limits of representation. Hume is not, epistemically speaking, a representationalist, as he does not claim that perceptions are representational in a positive epistemic sense.59 It is false philosophers who make that claim (T 1.4.3.9, SBN 222–3). Hume inverts Plato and false philosophers such as Descartes who argue that the perceived world is a copied image of an independent and apprehensible external real. For Hume, the human condition is just the converse: the external real is an imaginatively projected copy of what we perceive (T 1.3.9.3–4, SBN 107–8). While not a dogmatic representationalist, Hume is not, as the positivist A. J. Ayer held, a phenomenalist either.60 Phenomenalism maintains that objects of perception are just composites of sense data, but Hume, again, accepts, as at least a zetetic possibility, the existence of independently existing objects resembling our perceptions – in his words, a ‘universe of objects’ matching a ‘universe of thought’ (T 1.4.5.21, SBN 242). Unlike the false philosopher, however, the true philosopher understands that those

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independently existing objects, so far as we are acquainted with them at all, can be conceived only through projections of memory and imagination. Their existence – and this is the important bit – is not for true philosophical sceptics asserted in any dogmatic way (PH 1.7.14–15). Hume does write about ideas representing objects: ‘ideas always represent their objects or impressions’ (T 1.3.14.6; cf. T 1.2.3.11 and E 12.9). The disjunction between objects and impressions that Hume posits in this formulation, however, is telling. It reminds readers that Hume commonly means by ‘objects’ just objects as they appear in sensory perceptions, imagination and memory. He does not in most contexts mean by the term ‘objects’ what is investigated by First Philosophies of the Real behind the veil of sensory perception – that is, what are ‘specifically different’ from those objects we perceive: ‘’tis impossible our idea of a perception, and that of an object or external existence can ever represent what are specifically different from each other’ (T 1.4.5.19, SBN 241; emphasis mine).61 We may imagine that distinct objects resembling our perceptions exist independently of us, but we cannot claim to know via epistemic representation that this is so, and we ought not to pretend that what we imagine is or corresponds to the metaphysically real. Hume accepts that some of the natural world may be hidden (adêlos) in two ways. In one sense, bits of the world ‘are hid, by reason of their minuteness or remoteness’ (T 1.3.12.5, SBN 132). This kind of hiddenness will vary depending upon human technological capacities, such as the development of microscopes and telescopes. But a deeper hiddenness bound up with relating to the world only by means of sensation seems for Hume endemic to the human condition. Kant understood that about Hume, and so Kant describes human beings facing the world strictly via ‘sensible’ rather than ‘intellectual’ intuition, and that difference marks the awful gap, the ‘abyss of scepticism’, between the world as it appears to us (as phenomena) described by sceptics and the world as it is ‘in itself’ (as noumena or the hidden) that dogmatists pretend to know. Gassendi wrote similarly about the ‘great distance dividing the Spirit of Nature from the human mind’.62 Descartes and Malebranche thought the gap could be bridged and the spectre of scepticism exorcised by appealing to divine certification of human perceptual and intellectual apparatuses. It would be, according to Descartes, logically inconsistent with God’s goodness to endow humans with deceptive senses.63 Hume’s scepticism about

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the senses, in contrast, refuses divine certification as well as the claim that reason or intellect can by itself overcome the awful gap.64 We must suffer, in Hume’s rendering, the epistemological finitude of sensation, a limitation that Lord Drummond understood to be central to Academic thought.65 Hume writes about this limit: Let us chace our imagination to the heavens, or to the utmost limits of the universe; we never really advance a step beyond ourselves, nor can conceive any kind of existence, but those perceptions, which have appear’d in that narrow compass. This is the universe of the imagination, nor have we any idea but what is there produc’d. (T 1.2.6.8, SBN 67–8)

In the way the artist René Magritte says of an artful representation of a pipe in his 1958 painting La trahison des images, one can, in Humean terms, say of any object-laden system or network of perceptions: ‘ceci n’est pas le réel’ – not the metaphysical real that exists independently of our acts of perception.66 Just as the painted pipe is not the real pipe, the pipe we perceive – the world we paint in our imaginations – is not the pipe that exists independently of us. It is rather a composite of appearances or perceptions painted out by the imagination: common human ‘opinion’ that the objects of perception exist in a ‘continu’d and distinct’ way (across time and independently of perceivers) ‘must be entirely owning to the IMAGINATION’ (T 1.4.2.14, SBN 193).67 Hume makes the same point in the same terms in the first Enquiry, writing about external and independent objects: ‘I paint them out to myself as existing at present’ (E 5.2.12, SBN 50). Hume draws upon Aenesidemus’ tropes 1–3 and 5–6 regarding the finitude of cognition to make his point (e.g., PH 1.14.47), but a variety of figures across the history of scepticism develop important and similarly sceptical arguments.68 7.2.3.2.2 Relative ideas of the ‘specifically different’. While Hume follows Berkeley in refusing the rationalist claim to having apprehended the essence of the external world through abstract, non-sensuous ideas, he does write briefly about the mind’s capacity to form ‘relative’ ideas of external objects that are ‘specifically different’ from our perceptions: The farthest we can go towards a conception of external objects, when suppos’d specifically different from our perceptions, is to form a relative idea of them, without pretending to comprehend the related

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objects. Generally speaking we do not suppose them specifically different; but only attribute to them different relations, connections and durations. (T 1.2.6.9, SBN 68)69

‘Generally speaking’ (both in common life and in ordinary science) people just think about external objects on the model of what they perceive. External objects commonly understood are just perceptions to which people ‘attribute’ relations that are different from those of perceptions (such as existing independently from anyone’s perception). As several scholars have understood, however, the conceptual device of ‘relative ideas’ underwrites in a more philosophically precise way at least some minimally coherent thinking about – though not knowing – a world we do not directly perceive (cf. §7.3.1.2 below). Relative ideas make possible, for example, a kind of thinking about causal power: ‘the idea of power is relative as much as that of cause’ (E 7.29, SBN 77n).70 Consistent with his sceptical empiricism, Hume’s footnote to T 1.4.2 at the end of T 1.2.6.9 (SBN 68) indicates that relative ideas pretend to no content beyond what can be borrowed from impressions and ideas of perceived things. While they allow us to form ideas of objects that are, in principle, directly unavailable to us – even with technological enhancements – relative ideas can pretend to no epistemic apprehension of the metaphysically real.71 Hume is clear that the rigorous semantic and cognitive constraints he identifies make non-relative ideas of such entities impossible (T 1.2.6.8, SBN 67).72 Human beings cannot directly observe not only quarks, neutrinos, the sub-atomic strong force or the past; also unavailable to us directly are external objects (T 1.3.2.2, SBN 73–4). We can and do, however, commonly project imagined, non-dogmatic content into ideas about them, and in the context of strict philosophy and science we can form relative ideas about them. Unlike the ta adêla of dogmatic metaphysics, moreover, we can discipline those ideas in scrupulous ways through the practices and instrumentation of logic and empirical science. Anything goes without limit, by contrast, with the dogmatic ta adêla of religious doctrine and superstition. It is one thing to discipline physicists’ disputes about, for example, the unobservable Higgs boson (the so-called ‘God particle’) and quite another to bridle the metaphysical ideas about God enmeshed in the filioque controversy dividing Christian theologies. It is no surprise that the former controversy has been relatively settled, while the latter has been divisive for seventeen centuries, with little prospect for resolution.

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7.2.3.2.3 Radicalising the way of ideas. Hume’s empiricist critique radicalises Berkeley. Hume calls Berkeley’s epistemological conclusions about perception ‘the best lessons of scepticism, which are to be found either among the ancient or modern philosophers, Bayle not excepted’ (E n1, SBN 155) – indeed, contrary though those lessons are to Berkeley’s anti-sceptical intent. In §§18–20 of Part I of his 1710 A Treatise concerning the Principles of Knowledge, Berkeley precipitates the latent scepticism of modern empiricist theories in this way, even as he develops a metaphysical idealism: But, though it were possible that solid, figured, movable substances may exist without the mind, corresponding to the ideas we have of bodies, yet how is it possible for us to know this? . . . As for our senses, by them we have the knowledge only of our sensations, ideas, or those things that are immediately perceived by sense, call them what you will: but they do not inform us that things exist without the mind, or unperceived, like those which are perceived.73

Hume realises the radical implications of Berkeley’s analysis and marshals them to powerful sceptical purpose. Berkeley’s line of argument maintains that it is not properly false to claim metaphysically that what we cannot perceive exists (for example, an independent world beyond our perceptions). Rather it is not, strictly speaking, even possible to generate meaningful thoughts about such matters – true or false. Berkeley makes his case by deploying an empiricist critique of the very meaning of the term ‘material substance’, which concludes that it is unintelligible.74 He argues that because they are unthinkable it is not that material substances do not exist (which is an empirical question), but that they cannot even meaningfully be said or thought to exist (which is a question of their conceptual possibility). Hume writes: ‘Bereave matter of all its intelligible qualities, both primary and secondary, you in a manner annihilate it, and leave only a certain unknown, inexplicable something, as the cause of our perceptions; a notion so imperfect, that no sceptic will think it worth while to contend against it’ (E 12.1.16, SBN 155). A similar criticism of Locke’s infamous substance as ‘I-know-not-what’ is also registered at the very opening of the Treatise, there more tersely and in a less deprecating voice: ‘the particular qualities, which form a substance, are commonly refer’d to an unknown something, in which they are supposed to inhere’ (T 1.1.6.2, SBN 16).75 Hume pushes this critical line farther, going on to assail the intelligibility

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of the purported concept of mental or spiritual substance to which Berkeley clings. Hume famously argues that for all we can understand from experience, the self seems a bundle of perceptions rather than an enduring substance or res. A consistent sceptic, Hume advances a radicalisation of the Lockean (see §2.1.3.6 above) and Berkeleyan empiricist critique of the intelligibility of substance (T 1.1.6.1–2, SBN 16). All we experience of any body, like any mind, is a ‘bundle’ of perceptions bound together through sensation, association and custom (cf. T 1.4.2–3): ‘the ideas of objects and perceptions being in every respect the same’ (T 1.4.5.23, SBN 244). Hume’s use of this critique is a radicalisation because it stops short of the positive metaphysical realities that his predecessors incoherently pretended to grasp. Others of Hume’s time flirted with the sceptical implications of perceptions but could not fully let go of metaphysical dogmatism, in part because they did not fully appreciate the positive possibilities of a sceptical alternative. Francis Hutcheson, for example, writes: ‘As to material substrata, I own I am a sceptic; all the phenomena might be as they are, were there nothing but perceptions, for the phenomena are perceptions . . . [but] I own I cannot see the force of the arguments against external objects.’76 To appreciate a thoroughgoing sceptical vision, a more radical critique of metaphysical dogmatism is required.

7.3 Metaphysical Dogmatism Early modern philosophy was awash in an enormous variety of metaphysical dogmatisms, even more numerous than the systems, ideologies and movements on the scene today. Current during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were not only legions of dogmatic theology and not only lingering ancient, medieval and Renaissance dogmatisms in natural philosophy, but also a panoply of dogmatic emergent natural sciences – in particular dogmatic theories about the independent causal order, matter, substance, energies and powers. While it is true that the early modern intellectual landscape was crisscrossed by intellectual war parties harrying older dogmatisms, those campaigns were too often conducted in the service of brand new dogmatists. In fact, new dogmatisms gestated within the old, and those new dogmas proved to be as sophistical and specious as they were radical and aggressive.

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7.3.1 External Metaphysics Like their epistemological kin, the new forms of metaphysical dogmatism that Hume locates launch self-deceptive attempts to transcend human perceptual experience while they also concoct metaphysical theories about the nature of ultimate reality. Unlike true philosophers, false philosophers place behind or beneath what appears to us, as if they were ultimately real, metaphysical posits that purportedly ground and explain appearances. False, dogmatic philosophers exercise their inventive ‘genius’; they ‘feign something unknown and invisible’ (T 1.4.3.4, SBN 220). Indeed, these self-deceptive fictions render their philosophies, once properly dissected, not simply false but, strictly speaking, ‘incomprehensible’ (T 1.4.3.8, SBN 222). Hume refuses to make false metaphysical posits. In James A. Harris’s words, he ‘maintains the sceptic’s agnosticism about what is responsible for the ordered complexity discovered by scientific investigation’.77 7.3.1.1 Ancient dogmatic philosophy. Ancient dogmatic philosophy (T 1.4.3) is a species of false philosophy that posits a variety of ultimate realities: for example, substantial Forms (eidê, either Aristotelian universalia en re or Platonic transcendent universalia ante rem); various powers and energies (e.g., Anaxagoran noûs and Empedoclean eros and eris); and basic matter (hylê, either Aristotelian ‘prime matter’, the basic ‘four elements’ of the ancient intellectual world, the ‘receptacle’ and original ‘matter’ of Platonism, or the ‘uncuttables’ of the atomists). Sceptics refuse all of these, just as Hume refuses the ‘unintelligible chimera of a substance’ (T 1.4.3.7, SBN 222). In addition to causal powers and a metaphysically independent real, Hume’s limiting inquiry to human experience and acceptance of human cognitive finitude also generates doubt about ‘final causes’ or telê. Hume tells Francis Hutcheson this directly when he writes, in a 17 September 1739 letter, that in his view final causes are metaphysically ‘pretty uncertain & unphilosophical’ (LT 1.33, #13). Anticipating Kant, however, Hume does acknowledge the explanatory utility that both human purposes and a strictly imagined or supposed natural purposiveness may play when investigating the nature of animals and plants. Hume elaborates in the Treatise: There is, however, another artifice, by which we may induce the imagination to advance a step farther [in attributing identity]; and that is,

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by producing a reference of the parts to each other, and a combination to some common end or purpose . . . But this is still more remarkable, when we add a sympathy of parts to their common end, and suppose that they bear to each other, the reciprocal relation of cause and effect in all their actions. This is the case with all animals and vegetables; where not only the several parts have a reference to some general purpose, but also a mutual dependance on, and connection with each other. (T 1.4.6.11–12, SBN 257)

Be that acknowledgement as it may, Hume nevertheless slyly prefigures Laplace in his exceedingly popular 1755 essay ‘Of Suicide’, by reducing natural events to nothing more than the general actions of observed lawful nature, thereby deflating the idea that divine intercession plays a causal role in the world (ES 581ff.). The trajectory of reasoning in ‘Of Miracles’ (E 11) moves towards a similar end. 7.3.1.2 Modern dogmatic philosophy. Hume explains modern false philosophy as a dogmatic resistance to the early modern ‘Way of Ideas’ that originated with Gassendi, who developed a revised version of the ancient atomists’ canonic (see §4.1.5.3 above). Speculating about what lies beyond the veil of perception, modern false philosophy falls into the same error as ancient dogmatism by metaphysically positing ta adêla that supposedly cause phenomena. The most characteristic ta adêla of modern false philosophy is what have come to be called primary qualities. Hume, in contrast, accepts the veil as a brake on metaphysics. 7.3.1.2.1 False philosophies of primary qualities. Descartes, writing in Principles 53, reworks something of Plato’s ‘receptacle’ and posits the primary quality of ‘extension in length, breadth and depth’ as ‘the nature of corporeal substance’.78 It is a view that Hume finds pervasive and characteristic of modern thought. He writes that for dogmatic moderns the primary qualities of ‘figure and motion’ constitute all that exists in the natural universe: ‘One figure and motion produces another figure and motion; nor does there remain in the material universe any other principle, either active or passive, of which [on this system] we can form the most distant idea’ (T 1.4.4.5, SBN 227). More cautiously than Descartes, but still positively, Locke emphasises that the correlates represented by perceptions of these primary qualities are ‘real existence’ or ‘external existence’, in contrast to purely ‘ideal existence’.79 It is a doctrine that Hume rejects.

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Hume calls the modern doctrine that primary qualities represent independent reality while secondary ideas do not represent anything that exists outside the mind the ‘fundamental principle’ of modern philosophy (T 1.4.4.3, SBN 226). He argues that primary qualities cannot be clearly abstracted from secondary qualities, and so if perceptions of secondary properties bear no epistemic import, then neither do the primary. It is a critique that Hume draws from Berkeley and possibly also Bayle and Foucher.80 Bayle identifies this critique in the Dictionnaire’s article on Pyrrho as characteristically Pyrrhonian: ‘For if the objects of our senses appear colored, hot, cold, odoriferous, and yet they are not so, why can they not appear extended and shaped, in rest and in motion, though they are not so?’81 Descartes is wrong, then, in the conclusion he draws from Meditation 2 that the mind possesses a purely abstract idea of extension, meaning by this extension without any secondary qualities: ‘’tis impossible’, writes Hume in rejoinder, ‘to conceive extension, but as composed of parts, endow’d with colour or solidity’ (T 1.4.4.8, SBN 228). Nor does the mind, contra Descartes, possess pure ideas of motion, shape or solidity, completely stripped of ideas of colour, texture and so on: ‘We may make the same observation concerning mobility and figure; and upon the whole must conclude, that after the exclusion of colours, sounds, heat and cold from the rank of external existences, there remains nothing, which can afford us a just and consistent idea of body’ in modern dogmatic philosophy (T 1.4.4.10, SBN 229). Indeed, in what Hume regards as a ‘decisive’ objection to the primary/secondary quality distinction, he finds that its collapse threatens to ‘annihilate all’ external objects (T 1.4.4.6, SBN 228). Because primary ideas are, in their content, nothing more than secondary ideas, relegating secondary qualities to the mind leaves ‘nothing in the universe which has such an existence’ – that is, the existence purportedly characterised by primary qualities (T 1.4.4.15, SBN 231).82 7.3.1.2.2 False philosophies of causal power. Besides substance and the external correlates of primary and secondary qualities, modern false philosophers also posit a variety of other ta adêla. Most notably, they posit natural laws, unobservable ‘forces’, a causal-substantial God, a metaphysically real connection or ‘power’ joining causes and effects, as well as other hidden ‘springs and principles’ composing the backstage of the apparent world. Locke, for example, for all his sceptical awareness, posits the existence of real

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essences and causal powers as metaphysical realities.83 Skeins of lingering ancient, medieval and Renaissance ideas live on in modern false philosophy, too. Newton still thought it worth his time to undertake an extensive study of alchemy, and ideas associated with neo-Platonic natural magic and Renaissance organic naturalism can be discerned in many early modern thinkers. Most prominent among the neo-Platonic natural magicians were Marsilio Ficino (Theologia Platonica de immortalitate animae, 1482), Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (900 Theses, 1486), Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim (author of the sceptical De incertitudine et vanitate scientiarum et artium atque excellentia, 1530; and De occult philosophia libri tres, 1531–33), Giambattista della Porta (Magia naturalis, 1558) and Thomas Vaughan (Anima magica abscondita, 1650, just a year after Gassendi’s Syntagma philosophiae Epicuri). Prominent among Renaissance organic naturalists were Bernardino Telesio (De rerum natura, 1565) and Tommaso Campanella (De sensu rerum et magia, 1591).84 All these intersecting streams of philosophy and science, along with enduring lines of Platonic, Aristotelian, magical and Hermetic thought, share a view of the natural world as infused with ta adêla that they called ‘occult’ (from the Latin for ‘hidden’ or ‘concealed’) powers, desires, energies, forces, spirits, souls and intentions. For dogmatic thinkers under the spell of these doctrines, teeming just beneath the surface of phenomenal nature lies a dynamic menagerie of hidden (adêlos) realities, realities over which they aspire to lay hold and exert some measure of control. These diverse antiquated naturalisms succumbed to modern ideas of nature, but the new dogmatisms often found it difficult to abandon the old schools’ appeal to hidden powers. In his 1682 Free Inquiry into the Vulgarly Received Notion of Nature, for example, Robert Boyle (1627–91) argued that the ‘vulgar’ term ‘nature’ itself ought to be shunned as far as possible and in its place philosophically sophisticated inquirers should substitute the more precise term ‘mechanism’.85 In response to the new mechanists, defenders of the timeworn model of internal essential power and causation scurried to devise new systems to preserve the old doctrines in new garb. Leibniz, for example, answered Boyle’s provocative mechanist broadside, as well as its defence in John Christopher Sturm’s Idolo naturae (1692), with an essay in the September 1698 issue of Acta eruditorum Lipsiensum sounding a defiant counterpoint. The article was called De ipsa natura – its complete title translated as ‘On Nature Itself, Or on the Inherent

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Force and Actions of Created Things’. Opposing Boyle, Leibniz writes: ‘the origin of this mechanism itself has come, not from a material principle and mathematical reasons alone, but from a higher, and so to speak a metaphysical source’ – in Leibniz’s case that source is the many monadic substances that undergird phenomena; ultimately it is God.86 One can find remnants of something like Aristotelian ideas about an inspiring prime mover as well as quasi-Platonic theories of emanation and anima mundi in Cartesians’ doctrine of continuous causation and in Spinozists’ theory of ‘immanent’ causation (causa immanent).87 For Cartesians, local motion in extension may be initiated by the will of a separable, external res cogitans, just as the original motion of the universe was initiated and is sustained by the will of an immaterial (hidden, adêlos) God who is separate from the universe, though He continually intercedes in it – a view that Hume explicitly rejects (E 7.25n16, SBN 73). To modern false-philosophical claims about having apprehended a metaphysically ‘real’ causal power, any other occult powers, or the metaphysical ‘source’ of observed causal sequences, Hume holds up his hand and, with rigorous sceptical epochê and aphasia, brings projective speculation to a halt. I am, indeed, ready to allow, that there may be several qualities both in material and immaterial objects, with which we are utterly unacquainted; and if we please to call these power or efficacy, ’twill be of little consequence to the world. But when, instead of meaning these unknown qualities, we make the terms of power and efficacy signify something, of which we have a clear idea, and which is incompatible with those objects, to which we apply it, obscurity and error begin then to take place, and we are led astray by a false philosophy. This is the case, when we transfer the determination of the thought to external objects, and suppose any real intelligible connexion betwixt them; that being a quality, which can only belong to the mind that considers them. (T 1.3.14.27, SBN 168)

The causal power – metaphysically speaking – is not only ‘unknown’ to us but is, like substance, strictly speaking ‘inconceivable’ (E 7.1.15, SBN 67).88 Based in his scepticism with regard to the senses, Hume’s critique is uncompromising. We face a severe conceptual and semantic constraint such that we cannot even ‘hope’ to apprehend the real causal power as the possibilities of our experience currently stand – as

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things now appear.89 In Kenneth Winkler’s phrasing: ‘Hume need not say that there is no such thing as objective connection; it is enough for him to say that we cannot in any way conceive of it, and that as a result we cannot believe it.’90 And how must we be disappointed, when we learn, that this connexion, tie, or energy lies merely in ourselves, and is nothing but that determination of the mind, which is acquir’d by custom, and causes us to make a transition from an object to its usual attendant, and from the impression of one to the lively idea of the other? Such a discovery not only cuts off all hope of ever attaining satisfaction, but even prevents our very wishes; since it appears, that when we say we desire to know the ultimate and operating principle, as something, which resides in the external object, we either contradict ourselves, or talk without a meaning. (T 1.4.7.5, SBN 266–7)

Accepting the absence of an apparent necessary connexion in the conjunctions of external perceptions undermines rationalist empirical science as well as metaphysical naturalism (as we saw in §5.1). Only observed regularities and our customary transition of ideas related to them can ground the meaning of causal linkages, and therefore inquirers must suspend judgement on how it stands among objects in themselves: ‘customary transition is, therefore, the same with power and necessity; which are consequently qualities of perceptions, not of objects’ (T 1.3.14.24, SBN 166). It is important to recall, however, Hume’s reminder that a ‘true sceptic will be diffident of his philosophical doubts, as well as of his philosophical conviction’ (T 1.4.7.14, SBN 273). That means here being diffident or modest about the truth of the copy principle, the doubts raised by Hume’s analysis of semantic constraint, and Hume’s critique of intelligibility. Inquirers must be careful not to infer fallaciously that 1) because it seems all one can know about external objects is what has so far appeared through sensible perceptions, it follows that 2) all one really can know about external objections is what has so far appeared through sensible perceptions.91 Hume acknowledges as much at T 1.4.5.20 (SBN 241): ‘As an object is suppos’d to be different from an impression, we cannot be sure, that the circumstance, upon which we found our reasoning, is common to both . . . ’Tis still possible, that the object may differ from it in that particular.’ Acknowledging that

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diffident OI-zetetic revisability, it would therefore be ‘immodest’ (a violation of Academic modesty) to rule out the very possibility of thinking about and even apprehending an independent real and a causal power.92 Hume adheres to Academic limits and as a good Pyrrhonian recollects the non-apprehensive lessons of the past. He recalls that nature ‘has afforded us only the knowledge of a few superficial qualities of objects’ – call those appearances – ‘while she conceals from us those powers and principles on which the influence of these objects entirely depends’ (E 4.2.16, SBN 33). Or so it has seemed. Regarding sceptical scientists and the hiddenness of the causal connection, causal power and ultimate causes, Hume writes: Hence we may discover the reason why no philosopher, who is rational and modest, has ever pretended to assign the ultimate cause to any natural operation, or to show distinctly the action of that power, which produces any single effect in the universe. (E 4.1.26, SBN 30)

We imagine independent, continuously existing objects to be the ‘secret cause’ of our perceptions, but we cannot know this to be the case (T 1.3.2.2, SBN 74). It is in the attempt to apprehend or posit the hidden that false philosophy is rooted, and it is in limiting inquiry to only what appears that Hume locates true philosophy.93

7.3.2 Internal Metaphysics Dogmatism is not just a matter of theories of the divine, the external natural world and society. There are also dogmatisms concerning the internal world. 7.3.2.1 The immateriality of the soul. Treatise 1.4.5 is entitled ‘Of the Immateriality of the Soul’, but it addresses the question of materialism as well. Hume undertakes there to refuse both metaphysical idealist and materialist accounts of mind, offering instead the simple acceptance of perceptions as appearances. Berkeley not only advanced, contrary to Humean scepticism, negative epistemological and metaphysical theses on the basis of his reasoning about perception (i.e., that external material objects cannot be known and that they cannot exist). He also advanced positive metaphysical claims about immaterial ‘spiritual substance’, about

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causation and about God. Treatise 1.4.5 is designed to undermine not only the obvious targets of Spinozism, Christian theology and Cartesianism. It also rejects Berkeley. Hume cites Malebranche and Spinoza specifically, and against standard Abrahamic theology he pointedly declares: ‘we have no idea of a being endow’d with any power, much less one endow’d with infinite power’ (T 1.4.5.31, SBN 248). Against Berkeley and others who theorise an immaterial mental substance, Hume argues that there is nothing about perceptions themselves that indicates a substratum, either material or immaterial. The contrariety of perceptual qualities diachronically and synchronically, moreover, suggests for Hume that there may be no single substance at all in which perceptions inhere or that unifies different perceptions together. There is also nothing about perceptions that indicates the ‘activity’ – in a way familiar to Leibnizians, Spinozists, Christians, Aristotelians and Kantians – of something more basic beneath them. Like the putative substratum of material objects, the substratum of the self is a posited adêlon of false philosophy. Even if there were a hidden basis to internal perceptions, there remains no reason to think it different from the basis of the perceptual objects composing the apparent external world. This means that, for Hume, a material basis to perception (internal as well as external) is just as likely as one that is immaterial.94 Indeed, to the extent that we at least observe a constant conjunction between the body and mind, there is, if not a decisive criterion, perhaps some ‘advantage to materialists above their antagonists’ (T 1.4.5.32, SBN 250). Hume’s contention that from an a priori or logical point of view ‘any thing may produce any thing’ (T 1.4.5.30, SBN 247) undercuts Cartesian anti-materialist arguments based upon the different essential qualities of thought and extension and opens a space for materialism, a gesture he may have encountered in Locke.95 Matter might, for all we know, cause mind. On the other hand, contrary to Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia’s criticism of Descartes, Hume recognises no interaction problem, so that for all we know mind might cause effects in matter. Hume’s attack on the Cartesian claim that indivisibility is a proprium or defining characteristic of mind pries open that space still further: ‘I have already prov’d, that we have no perfect idea of substance; but that taking it for something, that can exist by itself, ’tis evident every perception is a substance, and every distinct part

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of a perception a distinct substance’ (T 1.4.5.24, SBN 244); that is, our ‘perceptions are all really different, and separable, and distinguishable from each other, and from every thing else, which we can imagine’ (T 1.4.5.27, SBN 245). Because Hume finds an interaction problem in all causation, he finds no less reason to conclude metaphysically that a causal connection exists between perception and matter than between perception and something immaterial. It is important to see, however, that it does not follow from 1) the possibility that Hume opens up for materialism or 2) the ‘advantage’ of materialism over immaterialism that he recognises that 3) Hume accepts metaphysical materialism as an ultimate explanation of perception. As a sceptic, Hume suspends judgement. For Hume, ‘we are in no position to declare perceptions to be modifications of any sort of substance, material or immaterial’.96 A Humean theory of mind, therefore, can accept a rich empirical brain science of perception, but not a science that purports to settle or to have settled metaphysical questions about the ultimate reality of mind or soul: ‘To pronounce, then, the final decision upon the whole; the question concerning the substance of the soul is absolutely unintelligible’ (T 1.4.5.33, SBN 250). 7.3.2.2 Personal identity. Hume is well known for refusing not only a substantial basis for the self but also a logical connection or singular principle of identity. In what should now be a familiar gesture, Hume rejects the way false philosophers theorise about a fictive metaphysical posit to account for the identity of persons and things amid the changing, disjointed stream of perceptions: For when we attribute identity, in an improper sense, to variable or interrupted objects, our mistake is not confin’d to the expression, but is commonly attended with a fiction, either of something invariable and uninterrupted, or of something mysterious and inexplicable, or at least with a propensity to such fictions. (T 1.4.6.7, SBN 254)

Hume wishes to strip away false fictions of this sort, fictions that pretend to an apprehension of the metaphysically real; but he does not wish to eliminate what is fictitious entirely from human existence. There are ‘true’ fictions – fictions that are true to the human condition as it appears and not matters of metaphysical pretence. Among them is the fiction of self-identity: ‘The identity,

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which we ascribe to the mind of man, is only a fictitious one, and of a like kind with that which we ascribe to vegetables and animal bodies’ (T 1.4.6.15, SBN 259). The human self is just like the rest of the natural order so far as we can discern it. It is a fiction rooted not, as we have seen, in a metaphysical ground but rather by acts of imagination and by the natural principles of association that we examined in Chapter 5. The self comes to be for Hume as a fiction generated by two factors: 1) the non-rational ‘resemblances’ and ‘causation’ the imagination recollects (T 1.4.6.18–19, SBN 260–1) and 2) the ‘sympathy’ (T 1.4.6.12, SBN 257) and self-regarding ‘passions’ (for example, ‘pride’) we feel among those perceptions (T 2.1.5.5, SBN 286–7). We feel the identical self, we imagine it; it is built up through habit and natural association. We do not know the self as an object of metaphysical science. Like his theory of the natural order, Hume’s theory of personal identity and the self is profoundly sceptical. It figures the absence of a logical and substantial grounding for the self in classically sceptical terms by relating it to the problem of the criterion. There is simply ‘no just standard’, no criterion for identifying the human self (T 1.4.6.21, SBN 262). Since metaphysical question about the self are undecidable, ephectic suspension results: The whole of this doctrine leads us to a conclusion, which is of great importance in the present affair, viz. that all the nice and subtile questions concerning personal identity can never possibly be decided . . . (T 1.4.6.21, SBN 262)

Hume’s bundle theory is not metaphysical. The self and its self-identity is, for Hume, adiaphora (indifferent), astathemeta (undecided) and anepikritos (indeterminate; see §3.1.1 above). It is also the human fate. Hume’s refusal of a false philosophical escape from the ungrounded self exposes him again to philosophical disappointment, like the disappointments of T 1.4.7. For a moment he loses ‘hope’ in philosophical ‘theory’. In an exhibition of his sceptical integrity, Hume in the Appendix to the Treatise confesses finding himself troubled by his inability to explain the ‘principle of connexion’ (AP 20, SBN 635) among perceptions in the self. Theory itself seems hopeless: ‘The present philosophy, therefore, has so far a promising aspect. But all my hopes vanish, when I come to explain the principles, that unite our successive perceptions in our

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thought or consciousness. I cannot discover any theory, which gives me satisfaction on this head’ (A 1.20.400, SBN 635–6; emphasis mine) – even the theory of natural association and sceptical naturalism. Hume’s response to this sense of hopelessness, however, is not to abandon philosophical reflection for vulgar opinion or to flee into the arms of one of the posits of false philosophy (as Kant, for example, does with his idea of a transcendental ego, or Schopenhauer with metaphysical Will, or Berkeley with spirit). Instead, Hume confesses his dissatisfaction but stands fast in his sceptical integrity and modesty, accepting the angst as well as the ataraxia characteristic of sceptical admissions of ignorance and perplexity.97 Explaining his stance, Hume shifts to a personal and characteristically qualified sceptical voice: For my part, I must plead the privilege of a sceptic, and confess, that this difficulty is too hard for my understanding. I pretend not, however, to pronounce it absolutely insuperable. Others, perhaps, or myself, upon more mature reflection, may discover some hypothesis, that will reconcile those contradictions. (A 1.21.400, SBN 636)

Kant vainly and falsely fancies himself a philosopher of ‘more mature reflection’ and argues for a more robust theory of the self. Kant argued that the unity of consciousness – what he called the ‘transcendental unity of apperception’ – is best understood to have been spun by a rational and autonomous ‘transcendental ego’, even if not grounded in a substance, because it is, by Kant’s argument, a transcendental condition for the possibility of any experience: ‘the thoroughgoing identity of the self’, Kant claims, is a transcendental requirement for the identification of objects ‘in all possible representations’.98 In more expansive terms, Kant asserts: (The principle of the necessary unity of apperception.) It must be the case that each of my representations is such that I can attribute it to my self, a subject which is the same for all of my self-attributions, which is distinct from its representations, and which can be conscious of its representations.99

Kant’s objective is to craft a way of conceiving the self that avoids claiming to know it as a metaphysical entity, but also somehow

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retains a self that is self-identical and abiding. Even that sort of transcendental gesture, however, marks a step too far for Humean scepticism. Without substantial or logical or transcendental anchorage, the Humean self remains at sea, like Theseus’ continuously reassembling ‘ship’ (T 1.4.6.11, SBN 257), moving ever onward over ‘immense depths’ on the ‘current of nature’ as if flowing along with Emerson’s and Heraclitus’ ‘river’ of flux (T 1.4.6.14, SBN 258; see §5.2.2 above). As Hume wryly puts it: ‘But setting aside some metaphysicians . . . I may venture to affirm of the rest of mankind, that they are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement’ (T 1.4.6.4, SBN 252). Hume’s fluxing bundles, however, compose not just human minds. As a counterpoint to the mind–body dualism common to his time, Hume describes a fluctuating collection of perceptions bundling body and mind together. Hume’s bundle is therefore an embodied self – the metaphysically ungrounded ‘mind and body’, simply as they appear – as it appears (T 2.1.9.1, SBN 303; emphasis mine). Moreover, Hume’s sceptical bundle is not simply the mind-cumbody as it appears to human consciousness in a moment but also over time historically in habit, custom and tradition, as well as in action (see §6.1 above, esp. §6.1.2). The self is that ‘individual person, of whose actions and sentiments each of us is intimately conscious’ (T 2.1.5.5, SBN 286). Call this the metaphysically disappointed but honest self of Hume’s true sceptical philosophy.

7.4 Conclusion Interpreting Hume as a thinker who practises philosophy through the Pyrrhonian Fourfold requires showing how his theory enacts a deference to nature, custom, technical arts and the passions. Chapter 5 examined Hume’s sceptical naturalism, and Chapter 6 unpacked the extensive way in which, for Hume, custom is the ‘great guide of life’. Hume defers to technai as matters of instrumentality in many ways – in morals, in politics and in natural philosophy, for example. Here in Chapter 7 we have undertaken to scrutinise the way theory itself is, for Hume, an instrument, and what technologies he deploys to undermine theoretical dogmatism. The destructive moment produced by the sceptical technai that Hume has deployed against dogmatism is OC-zetetic. It positively

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opens philosophical inquiry to something new and clears a space for the OI-zetetic hope that another kind of inquiry may be developed. The way our perceptions of the world can still feed a sceptical understanding and belief in the real is the topic of the next chapter, the conclusion of this book.

Notes 1. Quoted by Hume at D 1.8. Hume quotes from Paradise Lost in the Dialogues three times. In addition to the stanza at D.1.8, Hume presents these passages: ‘The two great sexes of male and female, says MILTON, animate the world’ (D 5.10; Milton, Paradise Lost, 8.151); and, later in the Dialogues, Demea offers a longer quotation portraying the suffering of human beings as they exist in the world (D, 10.13; Paradise Lost, 11.484–93). Paradise Lost is the only source Hume quotes more than once in the Dialogues. My thanks to David Purdie for bringing Hume’s references to Milton to my attention. See also Dendle, ‘Hume’s Dialogues and Paradise Lost’, and Sedley, Sublimity and Skepticism in Montaigne and Milton. 2. Norton, David Hume, p. 238. 3. Cf. EM 9.4, SBN 270–1; EM 9.12, SBN 276–8; EM 9.17, SBN 280; EM App1.2–3, SBN 285–6; EM Dial.37, SBN 336. 4. Consider also: ‘since no moral excellence is more highly esteemed [than justice], we may conclude, that this circumstance of usefulness has, in general, the strongest energy, and most entire command over our sentiments’ (EM 3.48, SBN 203–4). Cf. EM 4.2, SBN 205; EM 5.1, SBN 212–13; EM 5.39, SBN 225–6; EM 6.7, SBN 236; EM 6.9, SBN 237. 5. Kail, Projection and Realism, pp. 68, 68n9. Kail cites Àrdal, Passion; Owen, ‘Philosophy and the Good Life’; and Owen, Hume’s Reason, 220ff.; see also Kail, ‘Hume’s Ethical Conclusion’. 6. Huet, Treatise, 3.11, pp. 191–2. See also Plato’s Republic, Book 10, 596e–608b; cf. Gorgias 448c and Protagoras 312d. 7. Sextus offers a similar caveat – in contrast to Hume’s backwardlooking historical remark – at the opening of the Outlines of Pyrrhonism, when he tells the reader: ‘our task is to outline the skeptical agogē, first premising that of none of our future statements do we positively affirm that the fact is exactly as we state it’ (PH 1.1.4). A bit later (PH 1.7.15), Sextus writes: ‘If then, while the dogmatizer posits the matter of his dogma as substantial truth, the Sceptic enunciates his formulae, so that they are virtually cancelled by

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8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19.

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Hume’s Scepticism themselves, he should not be said to dogmatize in his enunciation of them. And, most important of all, in his enunciation of these formulae he states what appears to himself and announces his own impression in an undogmatic way, without making any positive assertion [diabebaioumenos] regarding external underlying things [exôthen hypokeimenon]’; trans. modified with gratitude to Roger Eichorn. Cavell, Senses, p. 54. Garrett, ‘Hume’s Conclusions’, p. 173. See Livingston, Hume’s Philosophy, pp. 40–1 for a discussion of this structure. Cf. Ainslie’s readings of the organisation of T 1.4.4–6; Ainslie, True Scepticism, pp. 9–10, esp. p. 10n10. Boswell, ‘An Account’, p. 227. See also Harris, David Hume, p. 49. Popkin, ‘Hume and Jurieu’, pp. 161ff. Harris, David Hume, p. 51. Neto, Paganini and Laursen (eds), Skepticism in the Modern Age, p. 324. Neto, Christianization of Pyrrhonism, pp. 1–64; Neto, ‘Bayle’s Academic Skepticism’, p. 267. Popkin, ‘Bayle and Hume’, p. 154n14. Compare Hume’s discussion in the Dialogues of the neo-Platonist Plotinus’ ‘total extinction of all our faculties’ in the ‘most perfect’ acts of religious worship (D 3.12), perhaps indicating a point of congruence between scepticism’s (non-)assent to the external world and a kind of sceptical religious (non-)assent. Quoting the anti-Pyrrhonian Calvinist Jean la Placette, Bayle writes about scepticism in Note B of the article on Pyrrho in the Dictionnaire: ‘It is the total extinction not only of faith but of reason; and nothing is more impossible than to rescue those who have carried their wild meanderings to this extent’ (Bayle, Dictionary [1991], p. 207). Harris reads Hume’s remark about ‘total extinction’ as a momentary but only apparent ‘vindication of the Pyrrhonist’ in Hume’s text; Harris, David Hume, p. 92. In Note G of Bayle’s article on Academic Arcesilaus, he writes about Pyrrhonism thus: ‘An attempt to run down all science and to reject not only the testimony of sense, but that of reason, too, is the boldest that ever was formed in the Republic of Letters. It is like that of the Alexanders, and other conquerors who would subdue all nations’; quoted by Passmore, Intentions, p. 132. See Descartes, Principles of Philosophy 4.205; see also Descartes’ provisional moral or practical code of Part 4 of the Discourse on Method (AT 6.37–8). See also Schmitt, Hume’s Epistemology, pp. 68–9, 81;

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20. 21.

22.

23.

24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

32.

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305

Perinetti, ‘Ways to Certainty’, pp. 268ff.; Ariew, ‘New Matter Theory’, pp. 43ff.; Dear, ‘From Truth to Disinterestedness’, pp. 622ff.; Casson, Liberating Judgment, p. 118n63; Shapiro, Probability and Certainty, p. 271. See Huet, Treatise, 1.1; Locke, Essay, 4.16.8; quoted by Norton and Norton, ‘Editors’ Annotations’, 2.745. Strawson, Scepticism and Naturalism, p. 9. The term ‘metaphysics’ in Hume’s time had something of a different extension from its usage today and could mean simply abstract theory. A theory of mind, for example, might be called a ‘metaphysics’ of mind. Hume accordingly writes: ‘But as the matter is often carried farther, even to the absolute rejecting of all profound reasonings, or what is commonly called metaphysics, we shall now proceed to consider what can reasonably be pleaded in their behalf’ (E 1.7, SBN 9). About the importance of reflective reasoning in Hume, see Norton, David Hume, ch. 5, part 2; de Pierris, Ideas, Evidence, and Method, p. 89. In this passage, I take ‘’tis impossible’ and the universal ‘any’ in the qualified sense described by Hume’s caveat and reminder at T 1.4.7.15, SBN 274. Contrary to de Pierris, Ideas, Evidence, and Method, p. 107. I am indebted to Kevin Meeker’s fine work, Hume’s Radical Scepticism, for much of my account of the detail of Hume’s arguments against reason’s epistemic warrant. Morris, ‘Descartes’s Natural Light’, pp. 170ff. See also D’Onofrio, ‘Metaphor of Light’. Wilson, ‘Origins of Hume’s Sceptical Argument’. Baxter, Hume’s Difficulty, pp. 9, 101. Contra Plantinga, Warranted, p. 82. Albert, Critical Reason, pp. 21ff. My thanks to Roger Eichorn for this reference. See also Popper, ‘On the Sources of Knowledge’. See Popkin’s note on Bayle, Dictionary (1991), ‘Pyrrho’, pp. 199–200n, for an account of then-contemporary ideas of l’évidence – for example, from Furetière’s 1727 Dictionnaire universel, this definition attributed to Pierre-Daniel Huet, a possible influence on Hume: ‘Manifest certainty, the quality of things that makes them clearly visible and knowable, as much to the body’s eyes as to its mind.’ Bayle, Dictionary (1991), ‘Pyrrho’, p. 199. Bayle’s sceptical argumentative strategy balances revealed truths of religion, such as the Trinity, against self-evident principles in deductive reasoning (e.g., that two things equal to a third are equal to each other), a strategy that seems to target either religion or at least rational theology.

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33. 34.

35. 36. 37. 38.

39. 40.

41. 42.

43. 44. 45.

46. 47.

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Hume’s Scepticism Revelation in Bayle’s argument shows that what is self-evident can be false; for Hume, experience and sceptical recollection show this. Meeker, Hume’s Radical Scepticism, p. 29; Meeker, ‘Hume’s Iterative Probability Argument’. Coleman, ‘Baconian Probability’, p. 198, observes that this understanding of minimal probability marks Hume’s alignment with Baconian rather than Pascalian ideas of probability: ‘Pascalian scales take the lower extreme of probability to be disprovability or logical impossibility; the Baconian scale takes the lower extreme to be only non-provability or lack of proof.’ Quoted by Owen, ‘Hume’s Scepticism with Regard to Reason’, p. 114. Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, p. 3. Bayle, Dictionary (1991), ‘Pyrrho’, p. 206; cf. p. 197. Ibid., pp. 205–6. Contra Turri and Klein, Ad Infinitum; Klein, ‘Infinitism’. Perhaps infinitism properly embraced might be understood as a kind of Pyrrhonism; see Klein, ‘Failures of Dogmatism’. My thanks to Roger Eichorn for this reference. Bayle, Dictionary (1991), ‘Zeno of Elea’, pp. 363ff. Cf. Hume uses the phrase ‘intuitively or demonstratively certain’ at only one other point – when discussing the certainty of the relations of ideas involved with ‘Geometry, Algebra, and Arithmetic’ (E 4.1, SBN 25). Meillassoux, After Finitude, p. 86. Huet, Treatise 3.5, p. 175: ‘Objection 5. That when we say that there is nothing either true or false, or that there is no Demonstration, we do condemn our selves.’ Ibid., 3.13, p. 202. Huet also appeals on p. 201 to the ‘Asystates’ argument, where someone dreams that she ought not to believe dreams. Ibid., 3.11, p. 195. Luciano Floridi writes: ‘As Sextus Empiricus well knows, that scepticism is self-defeating is not an argument against scepticism itself, but a further proof that any form of dogmatism is untenable’; Floridi, ‘Problem of Justification: Part II’, p. 46n31. My thanks to Roger Eichorn for this quote. Huet, Treatise 3.13, p. 202. See also PH 2.13.185–92 and ADO 2.463–81 [M 8.463–81]; cited by Ribeiro, ‘Philosophy and Disagreement’, p. n31. Bury recommends cf. Against the Logicians, ADO 2.480. The whole of PH 2.13 is devoted to sceptical proofs, while 1.28 elaborates 1.7.14–15, exploring sceptical formulations and rhetoric. Bailey cites PH 2.130–3,

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48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56.

57.

58.

59.

60. 61. 62.

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307

ADO 1.7.440–4 [M 7.440–4], ADO 2.278–9 [M 8.278–9] and ADO 3.204–6 [M 9.204–6] as passages where Sextus addresses the question of self-refutation in relation to T 1.4.1.12 (SBN 186–7); Bailey, Sextus, p. 14. My thanks to Roger Eichorn for this reference. Cf. Russell, Riddle, pp. 221–2; Greenberg, ‘Naturalism’, p. 731n9. Ainslie, True Scepticism, pp. 2–5. See also Levers, ‘Method in Hume’s Madness’. Stroud, The Significance, p. 33; cf. T 1.2.6.8, SBN 67–8. My thanks to Domenic K. Dimech for this quote. Harris, David Hume, p. 89. De Pierris, Ideas, Evidence, Method, ch. 2.1. See p. 79 for the ‘evidential gap’. Atherton, ‘Berkeley and Skepticism’, pp. 371ff. De Pierris, Ideas, Evidence, and Method, p. 79. Wade Robison interprets Hume as holding the position that it is irrational for us to believe in a persistent and independent external world but that we must do so anyway; Robison, ‘Naturalist and Meta-sceptic’, p. 48. Laing, David Hume, pp. 152–3, notices, too, that Hume allows for the possibility that perceptions may continue to exist outside any particular, given bundle of mind. Berkeley may have held the related metaphysical position that ideas (if not perceptions) may exist separately from individual minds; Kail, Berkeley’s Treatise, pp. 62–9. Berkeley writes in his Dialogues that ‘the colors are really in the tulip which I see, is manifest. Neither can it be denied, that the tulip may exist independent of your mind or mine; but that any immediate object of the senses, that is, any idea, or combination of ideas, should exist in an unthinking substance, or exterior to all minds, is in itself an evident contradiction’; Berkeley, Three Dialogues, p. 31. For a contrasting view, see Garrett, ‘Hume’s Naturalistic Theory’, pp. 305ff.; and see Ainslie, True Scepticism, pp. 107–8, where Ainslie argues that, for Hume, perception carries epistemic and metaphysical import even though mediated, just like television images. Ayer, Hume; Ayer, Language, Truth, and Logic, p. 137. See also T 1.2.6.8, SBN 67–8; T 1.2.6.9, SBN 68; T 1.4.2.2, SBN 187–8; LG 7, 1.421–3. Baier, Death and Character, p. 140. Ariew et al., Descartes’ Meditations: Source Materials, p. 168. In a memorable passage, Norton, ‘Academical or Sceptical Philosophy’, p. 374, writes: ‘if all we ever experience are representations, how do

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63.

64. 65.

66.

67.

68. 69. 70.

71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80.

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Hume’s Scepticism we know that there are corresponding objects that are the source of these representations, or, should there be such, that the representations actually resemble the objects that give rise to them? Our situation is something like Dorothy’s as she listens to the unseen Wizard of Oz. We receive perceptual messages, but we don’t know the reality behind these messages. We don’t even know that there is anything beyond the message.’ Arnauld, Traité des vrayes & des fausses idées, attacks Malebranche’s version of this argument directly in its chapter 28. See also Bayle, Dictionary (1991), p. 198n13. Mounce, Hume’s Naturalism, p. 49. Holden, ‘Modern Discipline’, pp. 168–9, esp. p. 185n17: Drummond, Academical Questions, pp. 362; cf. pp. 166–7, 374–7, 408–9. Cf. Stroud, ‘Skepticism’, p. 8. ‘This here is not the real’ – not the independent, metaphysical real beyond perception. Magritte’s painting depicts a pipe, under which is written, ‘Ceci n’est pas une pipe’ or ‘This here is not a pipe’, often more simply, ‘This is not a pipe.’ Laing, David Hume, p. 151, agrees; belief in permanent objects ‘has its source in the operations of the imagination’; it is feigned (p. 153). More recently, Stefanie Rocknak has developed the same thesis, though she also imports a proto-Kantian doctrine of transcendental object; Rocknak, Imagined Causes, pp. 111, 111n7, 84. Ainslie, True Scepticism, p. 113. For a list of precedents, see Norton and Norton, ‘Editors’ Annotations’, 2.784–5. Flage, ‘Hume’s Relative Ideas’, pp. 55–71. This remark appears in a footnote that Hume added to the first Enquiry, appearing first in the 1750 edition. It was, it seems, an emendation that he thought it important to make. Flage, ‘Hume’s Relative Ideas’, p. 67. Cf. Garrett, ‘Hume’s Conclusions’; and see Owen and Cohon, ‘Representation’, pp. 54–5. Berkeley, Principles, p. 29. Berkeley, Three Dialogues. Locke, Essay, 2.23.2. Norton, David Hume, pp. 79–80n42. Harris, ‘The Epicurean in Hume’, p. 168; quoted by Susato, Hume’s Sceptical Enlightenment, p. 16. Descartes, Principles of Philosophy, §53 (AT 8a.25). Locke, Essay, 4.1, 4.4.6, 2.8.8–10, 2.17.16. Popkin, ‘L’Abbé Foucher’; Bayle, Dictionary (1991), p. 197n11.

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Technai: Dogmatism and the Technologies of Doubt 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93.

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Bayle, Dictionary (1991), ‘Pyrrho’, p. 197. Cf. Baier, Progress of Sentiments, p. 194. Locke, Essay, 3.3.15; cf. 2.8.9–10 and 2.8.23. Merchant, Death of Nature, pp. 105ff., 307n8, 312n17; Yates, Giordano Bruno, chs 2–5. Walters, ‘Hume’s Challenge’, pp. 35–6. Leibniz, ‘On Nature Itself’, p. 499. Descartes, Meditation 3; Malebranche, Search, 6.2.3; Spinoza, Ethics, 1.18. Winkler, ‘New Hume’, pp. 566ff.; Harris, David Hume, p. 87. For a contrasting view, see Wright, ‘Hume’s Causal Realism’. Clatterbaugh, ‘Attempted Alignment’, p. 204, quoted by Kail, ‘Is Hume a Realist?’, p. 442. Winkler, ‘New Hume’, p. 576; second emphasis mine. See Kail, ‘Conceivability and Modality’, p. 53. Cf. Kail, Projection and Realism, pp. 124–6; Kail, ‘Efficient Causation’, pp. 245–55. For causal realists, there seem in Hume’s texts to be a persuasive number of references to hidden powers that he claims exist, that humans can think about, but that humans cannot apprehend (e.g., T 1.3.15.11, SBN 175). At T 1.3.14.27, SBN 168, again, Hume writes: ‘I am, indeed, ready to allow, that there may be several qualities both in material and immaterial objects, with which we are utterly unacquainted; and if we please to call these power or efficacy, ’twill be of little consequence to the world.’ As Kenneth Winkler has observed in response to realist readings of this passage, Hume appended a footnote to the 1750 edition of the first Enquiry qualifying his use of the word ‘power’ in order to emphasise that he is not using the term there in a metaphysical, precise or scholarly sense: ‘The word, Power, is here used in a loose and popular sense. The more accurate explication of it would give additional evidence to this argument. See Sect. 7’ (E n7, SBN 33); Winkler, ‘New Hume’, p. 545. Cf. Kail, ‘Is Hume a Realist?’, p. 449. Contrary to Winkler and the Old Hume reading, John Wright maintains that ‘The central problem with the “Old Hume” interpretation of Hume’s philosophy’ – that is, the reading of Hume as a thoroughgoing, anti-realist sceptic – ‘is that it fails to acknowledge that Hume held that there is a natural instinct which saves us from this Pyrrhonian doubt, and which returns us to the common sense supposition that there are genuine powers in nature which cause the regular effects we perceive in the world around us’; Wright, ‘Scepticism’, pp. 138–9.

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94. Laing, David Hume, p. 155, suggests that Glanvill’s Scepsis scientifica may be the source of this idea in Hume. In a related way, Sextus writes that ‘the body is a kind of expression of the soul’ (PH 1.14.85), a view that anticipates Wittgenstein, who remarks that ‘The human body is the best picture of the human soul’ (Philosophical Investigations, II, iv, p. 178). 95. Locke, Essay, 4.3.6. 96. Falkenstein, ‘Theory of Perception II’, p. 365; emphasis mine. Hakkarainen agrees, ‘Why Hume’, p. 143. 97. Cavell, Claim, p. 115. 98. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B 131–2. 99. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A116/B131–2, B134–5.

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Pathê: Hume’s Non-Dogmatic Philosophy

An idea assented to feels different from a fictitious idea. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 1.3.7.7

We are now approaching the end of our voyage. To complete our account of the way Hume philosophises through the Pyrrhonian Fourfold observances, as well as the way he develops a Clitomachian Academic scepticism, we must examine in more detail how the passions, feeling and sentiment figure into his thought. Hume is well known, perhaps infamous, for understanding reason in terms of the passions. He maintains that reason ‘is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them’ (T 2.3.3.4, SBN 415). The idea of reason’s subordination to passion was not, however, entirely original with Hume. Hobbes had before him written in Leviathan about how ‘Thoughts are to the Desires, as Scouts, and Spies, to range abroad, and find the way to the things Desired.’1 In the Dictionnaire’s entry on Ovid, Bayle writes about reason having been placed at our births in enslavement to the passions: ‘la raison étoit revenue escalave des passions’. Bayle quotes from Cicero’s lost De re publica, via Augustine’s Contra Julianum Pelagianum, in pinpointing the source of this idea about reason’s enslavement. In the context of that quotation, Bayle knowingly describes the idea as a sceptical rejection of the stoic view that reason can both dominate the passions and act independently of them. The philosophe de Rotterdam understood that the ‘empire of reason’ was, for many of his contemporaries, the realm of stoicism.2 As a sceptic, however, Bayle recognises another ‘empire’ challenging reason’s authority – not the ‘empire of the imagination’ that we examined in §5.1.2 (A 35, SBN 661–2), but rather the related empire of the passions, an empire ruling under the auspices of nature. Passion’s,

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and therefore nature’s, powerful empire eclipses and dominates intellect and reason. Bayle writes: [Was it not in Cicero’s] words from the third book of the Republic which Saint Augustine has preserved for us, and which contains so vivid a description of the soul’s slavery under the empire of the passions? Homo non ut a matre . . . [‘Man was brought into being not by a mother, but by a step-mother, Nature. He had a body which was naked, frail and infirm. Moreover, he had a mind which grew anxious when troubles arose, abject when fears struck, weak when there was any toil, inclined to lusts, a mind in which a certain divine spark of inner intellect and spirit was, as it were, eclipsed . . .’] Did he have no insight, nor any suspicion of the astonishing change which takes place within man when reason becomes enslaved to the passions?3

While Hobbes and Mandeville present immediate antecedents to Hume’s passion-based philosophical psychology, and while the Pyrrhonian Montaigne presented a similar gesture, one also rooted in Cicero and the ancient Academics’ contest with the stoics, Hume’s claim that reason is the slave of the passions may be reasonably understood to be a manifestation of his Academic scepticism.4 To the extent that it is consistent with Augustine’s thought, Hume’s portrait of reason is also congruent with the AugustinianCalvinist milieu that he inhabited. Moreover, if Augustine had been influenced by the Academics (see §2.1.1 above), then the Calvinist influence upon Hume may also be regarded as the indirect influence of ancient Academic scepticism upon him. Not only does Hume depict reason as enslaved to the passions, he more radically collapses the distinction between the passions and reason when he writes in the Treatise that ‘all probable reasoning is nothing but a species of sensation’, and sensation is a kind of feeling (T 1.3.8.12, SBN 104; emphasis mine).5 Hume goes so far as to describe reason itself as a ‘calm or tranquil passion’, a clutch of passions and a set of ‘affections’: What we commonly understand by passion is a violent and sensible emotion of mind, when any good or evil is presented, or any object, which, by the original formation of our faculties, is fitted to excite an

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appetite. By reason we mean affections of the very same kind with the former; but such as operate more calmly, and cause no disorder in the temper: Which tranquility leads us into a mistake concerning them, and causes us to regard them as conclusions only of our intellectual faculties. (T 2.3.8.13, SBN 437)

Hume’s remarks at T 2.3.8.13 are especially revealing, because they show how his theories of reason-as-sensation and reason-astranquil-passion connect him doubly to the Pyrrhonian tradition as well as to the Academics. Not only do these remarks exhibit his philosophising within the terms of the Pyrrhonian Fourfold’s deference to the passions; Hume’s criticism of enthusiasm and violent emotion in favour of calmness and tranquillity is also an instance of his having adopted the Pyrrhonian telos of ataraxia (see §3.4.4 above). For Hume, however, reason is not just a tranquil passion. It is also tranquillising.6 Hume poses the calm passions of reasoning against violent passions in normative ways, and his doing so is an instance of his Academic project of reflectively methodising and correcting (rather than just passively acquiescing to) common life: ‘’tis often found, that the calm ones [i.e., passions], when corroborated by reflection, and seconded by resolution, are able to controul them [i.e., the violent passions] in their most furious movements’ (T 2.3.8.13, SBN 437–8).7 More generally, passion, sentiment and feeling are of course not only basic to Hume’s ideas about reasoning; they also play central roles in his theories of morals, aesthetics, politics and religion. Hume is famously a moral sentimentalist: ‘this affection of humanity . . . being common to all men, it can alone be the foundation of morals’ (EM 9.6, SBN 273). In the course of weaving the actual practices of moral judgement together, natural sympathy and sentiment mix for Hume with custom and the technai of language and reason: ‘The intercourse of sentiments, therefore, in society and conversation, makes us form some general inalterable standard, by which we may approve or disapprove of characters and manners’ (T 3.3.3.2, SBN 603).8 In aesthetics, too, Hume is a sentimentalist, writing that ‘beauty and deformity, more than sweet and bitter, are not qualities in objects, but belong entirely to the sentiment’ (ST 241). We have seen how central matters of passion and feeling are in politics and religion for Hume (see §6.2–3 above). Even perception itself is, for him, a kind of feeling (T 1.1.1.1, SBN 1–2).

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While the passions, feeling and sentiment pervade Hume’s oeuvre, our investigations in this chapter will focus on an issue directly related to his epistemic and metaphysical scepticism – namely, beliefs about the world. Section 8.1 undertakes to show how Hume develops a sceptical doxastic theory. That doxastic theory makes it possible for Hume to craft a sceptical conception of the real in a way that is consistent with holding beliefs about an external world of independent, continuously existing and causally interacting objects. In this way, Humean philosophy achieves a positive doxastic position about the real that entails neither what is standardly understood to be epistemological nor metaphysical realism – nor, for that matter, dogmatic anti-realism. Understanding belief as a matter of feeling rather than thinking or judging is the navigational key that brings us full circle back to Chapter 1 and the conceptual framework we set out there for a radically sceptical kind of belief – that is, Clitomachian, non-epistemic, Academic and sceptical beliefs.

8.1 Hume’s Doxastic Scepticism and Non-Dogmatic Philosophy In sections 1.2–3, we saw that Cicero described the Hellenistic Academic sceptic Carneades of Cyrene as having argued for a nondogmatic doxastic theory (ACD 2.48.148). We saw, too, that this way of reading doxastic matters was taken up after Carneades by a stream of Clitomachian-Philonian Academic sceptics in opposition to a different, more dogmatic Metrodorian current. In addition, we saw that Clitomachian theories of non-dogmatic belief jibe well with Pyrrhonian non-dogmatic recollective and descriptive, rather than indicative, forms of expression – especially Pyrrhonism’s recollective pharmakon or therapy for dogmatism (see §3.4.2 above). Clitomachian scepticism is consistent with non-dogmatic Pyrrhonian Apelletic philosophical findings, too (see §3.4.1 above). In fact, for Hume, Clitomachian doxastic theory is the bridge that unites his Academic with his Pyrrhonian scepticisms.

8.1.1 Belief and Reality’s ‘Title’ It is crucial to see how Hume follows his non-dogmatic theory of perception with a non-dogmatic theory of belief. For Hume, no beliefs about the world bear intrinsic metaphysical commitments.

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Rather, belief in the world is embedded in a system of perceptions, memories and imaginings that compose human experience of the real, and beliefs acquire metaphysical import for Hume not by themselves individually but only as part of a specific kind of system, where they are related in specific ways to other ideas and beliefs – only, that is, as part of a metaphysical theory. Not all systems of the real are metaphysical, however, and the system of common life is one such system. Common life reality (CLR), for Hume, does not originate in perceptions themselves as they impress humans with the force and vivacity of belief: ‘’tis neither upon account of the involuntariness of certain impressions, as is commonly suppos’d, nor of their superior force and violence, that we attribute to them a reality, and continu’d existence, which we refuse to others, that are voluntary or feeble’ (T 1.4.2.16, SBN 194). We ‘feign’ unified, invariant, continuous and independently existing objects (T 1.4.6.22, SBN 263); ‘there is nothing in any object to persuade us that they are either always remote [i.e., independent] or contiguous’ (T 1.3.2.2, SBN 74). In other words, that we ordinarily ‘suppose’ (T 1.4.2, SBN 195–9) what we perceive of the world to be ‘real’ is not grounded in qualities of a present perception itself; and that perceptions possess the force and vivacity of belief does not, for Hume, entail that they are about the metaphysically real. Just as ancient Academic sceptics argued against the stoics that no qualities intrinsic to perceptions make them indubitable or true, Hume argues that no qualities intrinsic to perceptions or beliefs indicate that they are perceptions of or beliefs about a metaphysical real beyond them. Human beings do not simply perceive metaphysical reality. There is no perceptual criterion indicating a commitment to the metaphysically real to be discerned in the content of experience and no criterion indicating a metaphysical or epistemic commitment in belief qua belief.9 Metaphysical commitments are additive or supplementary in relation to ordinary experience. Like the world of the ‘porter’ that Hume describes at T 1.4.2.20, the CLR system is composed of two subsystems of impressive ideas – 1) memory and 2) judgement – in confluence with each other and connected to 3) present impressions. Alternatively, one may think of the CLR as a single system composed of ideas flowing from two different sources (memory and custom) conjoined to

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present impressions. That is to say, ordinarily external reality, as we perceive it, is for Hume composed not only of: 1. present impressions of sensation composing experiences but also by 2. the system of memories associated with or related to these present impressions of sensation and also by 3. the system of ideas customarily associated, especially through causal inference or judgement, with present impressions and memories. The force and vivacity of belief is, of course, not irrelevant to our experience of the real, but belief is not per se about the real. The real is a system of ideas and impressions, present and not present. By all this, Hume shows that our ordinary reality is not only an empirical matter in the sense that it is not only a matter of present observation; it is also a matter of what we imagine, infer, recollect and suppose to lie beyond present perception. Human reality is, in a sense, a natural-habitual-felt product of present perceptions associated with not-now-present perceptions: ’Tis evident, that whatever is present to the memory, striking upon the mind with a vivacity, which resembles an immediate impression, must become of considerable moment in all the operations of the mind, and must easily distinguish itself above the mere fictions of the imagination. Of these impressions or ideas of the memory we form a kind of system, comprehending whatever we remember to have been present, either to our internal perception or senses; and every particular of that system, joined to the present impressions, we are pleas’d to call a reality. But the mind stops not here. For finding, that with this system of perceptions, there is another connected by custom, or if you will, by the relation of cause or effect, it proceeds to the consideration of their ideas; and as it feels that ’tis in a manner necessarily determin’d to view these particular ideas, and that the custom or relation, by which it is determin’d, admits not of the least change, it forms them into a new system, which it likewise dignifies with the title of realities. The first of these systems is the object of the memory and senses; the second of the judgment. ’Tis this latter principle, which peoples the world, and brings us acquainted with such existences, as by their removal in time and place, lie beyond the reach of the sense and memory. By means of it I paint the universe in my imagination . . . (T 1.3.9.3–4, SBN 107–8; cf. E 5.2.12, SBN 50)

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In this way, the ‘reality’ of our lived experience arises from imaginatively and inferentially ‘spreading out in’ one’s ‘mind the whole sea and continent’ around us – indeed the whole universe beyond our present sensations (T 1.4.2.20, SBN 196).10 For this reason, reality cannot be properly evident.11 It is this system of feeling, habit, thinking and imagination – in addition to immediate perception – that grounds what Hume calls the ‘title’ of reality that humans confer upon the world.12 Dogmatic error enters our conceptions of the real when we forget, avoid or fail to realise that the real for us, as it appears, is a composite of this sort, and when we pretend instead to have apprehended the real simpliciter (as, among others, Common Sense philosophers do). The Humean, however, does not forget. Pyrrhonism understands that the human relationship to the world is best accepted as aesthetic and historical (felt, recollected and imagined) rather than as cognitive. Hume accordingly theorises the apparent world as a felt, recollected, imagined and projected artwork (painting). It is important for our purposes here to see that a system of ideas and impressions that is non-dogmatic can support non-dogmatic beliefs, for example beliefs restricted to what appears rather than to what is hidden and metaphysically real. Philosophers such as Locke, Descartes and various Aristotelians are dogmatists in their theories of perception not because those theories endorse beliefs, but because they connect impressions of sensation to conceptual systems of substance and primary quality representationalism in webworks of belief. Like other animals, on the other hand, people in common life do not concoct connections of that sort, and neither does the Humean true sceptic, for whom substance, like purely abstract primary qualities, is an unintelligible chimera (cf. T 1.4.3.4, SBN 220). Dogs do not hold dogmatic metaphysical theories, pigs do not hold dogmatic metaphysical theories, and neither do humans in common life. This insight – that belief can be non-dogmatic and non-metaphysical – is a crucial element of Hume’s sceptical thought. 8.1.1.1 Belief is sensitive not cogitative. If one starts from the position that belief in an object – such as a hat or a shoe, for example (T 1.4.2.31, SBN 201–2) – necessarily bears within it a metaphysical claim about the nature of the object’s existence, then it is easy to mistake the resurgence of belief in the wake of Hume’s sceptical arguments as a resurgence of dogmatism. It is the conceit of many philosophers that believing as well as thinking is propositional and

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that ordinary beliefs are not only theory-laden but laden with philosophical theory, a conceit to which Hume is opposed.13 The idea that common life beliefs are laden with metaphysical theory – call it the dogmatic theory of belief – ignores something crucial about Hume’s doxastic theory, something wrapped up in his theory of human animality. Hume’s sceptical animalising of the human includes his theorising belief so that it is not understood to be an act of the ‘intellect’ or determination per se of reason.14 Rather, in opposition to the doxastic accounts of dogmatic rationalists, scholastics and even empiricists, Hume advances the innovative and sceptically radical idea ‘that belief is more properly an act of the sensitive, than of the cogitative part of our natures’ (T 1.4.1.8, SBN 183).15 In the first Enquiry, Hume reiterates this point, writing that ‘the difference between fiction and belief lies in some sentiment or feeling’ (E 5.11, SBN 48). And in the ‘Appendix’, again: Did not the belief consist in a sentiment different from our mere conception, whatever objects were presented by the wildest imagination, wou’d be on an equal footing with the most establish’d truths founded on history and experience. There is nothing but the feeling, or sentiment, to distinguish the one from the other. (AP 2, SBN 624)16

Tying his sentiment-based theory of belief directly to the sceptical problem of the criterion, Hume writes: by what criterion shall I distinguish her [truth], even if fortune shou’d at last guide me on her foot-steps? After the most accurate and exact of my reasonings, I can give no reason why I shou’d assent to it; and feel nothing but a strong propensity to consider objects strongly in that view, under which they appear to me. (T 1.4.7.3, SBN 265; emphasis mine)

To believe is to feel. It is to experience an impression or an idea with more or less of the press of nature, with simply more or less degree of ‘force and vivacity’. ‘Thus it appears upon the whole’, writes Hume, ‘that every kind of opinion or judgment, which amounts not to knowledge’ – and, as we saw in Chapter 7, for Hume no kind of opinion or judgement ultimately amounts to knowledge – ‘is deriv’d entirely from the force and vivacity of the perception, and that these qualities constitute in the mind, what we call the BELIEF of the existence of any object’ (T 1.3.13.19, SBN 153–4,

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emphasis mine; E 2.1, 2.3, 3.6). This is why Hume says that true scepticism is closer to the ‘sentiments’, not to the philosophical theories, of the ‘vulgar’ (T 1.4.3.9, SBN 222–3). The vulgar, qua vulgar, hold no metaphysical theories – though in ‘sick’ cultures, as we have seen, metaphysical false religion and false philosophy can, indeed, poison common life, transforming it by measures into something false, philosophical and theological. Certainly, metaphysical and epistemological theses associated with a perception may increase or diminish a belief’s intensity. But theses of that or any sort are not entailed or necessarily associated with any idea or impression at all; and they are ordinarily not associated with the perceptions and beliefs of common life. They are, for Hume, extraneous to ordinary thinking and believing: ‘to form the idea of an object, and to form an idea simply is the same thing; the reference of the idea to an object being an extraneous denomination, of which in itself it bears no mark or character’ (T 1.1.7.6, SBN 20). 8.1.1.2 Belief in existence. Part of what this feeling-based doxastic theory means is that an idea does not change in content when it is believed and then not believed. ‘When you wou’d any way vary the idea of a particular object, you can only encrease or diminish its force and vivacity. If you make any other change on it, it represents a different object or impression’ (T 1.3.7.5, SBN 96). Altering the doxastic register of a belief does not, for Hume, alter the content of the belief. To borrow Kant’s example, there is no difference between the conception of an imaginary one hundred thalers and the conception of an existent one hundred thalers. In this Hume sceptically anticipates Kant’s criticism of Anselm’s (1033–1109) apologetic ontological argument by agreeing that existence is not an additive to an idea; it is not a predicate of whatever is conceived.17 Every idea, for Hume, is in a sense conceived as existing, though belief about the metaphysical nature of that ‘existence’ is something else again: ‘we never remember any idea or impression without attributing existence to it’ – that is, to the intentional object of the idea or impression (T 1.2.6.2, SBN 66). More comprehensively: The idea of existence, then, is the very same with the idea of what we conceive to be existent. To reflect on any thing simply, and to reflect on it as existent, are nothing different from each other. That idea,

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when conjoin’d with the idea of any object, makes no addition to it. Whatever we conceive, we conceive to be existent. Any idea we please to form is the idea of a being; and the idea of a being is any idea we please to form. (T 1.2.6.4, SBN 66–7)

In the Dialogues, Hume revises this language to clarify the claim that ideas themselves carry no metaphysical implication, that metaphysical judgements must be brought to them from the system in which they are embedded. In particular, the idea of God as a necessary existent is just the idea of God: Nothing is demonstrable, unless the contrary is a contradiction. Nothing, that is directly conceivable, implies a contradiction. Whatever we conceive as existent, we can also conceive as non-existent. There is no being, therefore, whose non-existence implies a contradiction. Consequently there is no Being whose contradiction is demonstrable. (D 9.5)

There is no more reason to attribute metaphysical realism to ordinary beliefs about the world than any other metaphysical theory of the world, such as idealism, solipsism or other non-realist beliefs. Common life beliefs are not beliefs of metaphysical realism: in common life ‘we do not suppose them [i.e., external objects] specifically different [from what philosophers understand that we perceive]; but only attribute to them different relations, connections and durations’ (T 1.2.6.9, SBN 68). Metaphysics merely offers different theories about what in common life we perceive, conceive or suppose simpliciter as the world. The external world may be conceived in metaphysically idealist terms – as the Veil of Maya, as phenomenal copies of Platonic Forms, as manifestations of Schopenhauerian Wille, as Hegelian Vernunft, as the manifestation of Schelling’s Absolut, as bundles of predicates, or as just the bundle of my own solitary perceptions. Or the world may be conceived in a metaphysically materialist way – as Cartesian extension, as Lucretian atoms, as Galilean corpuscles, as the neurological activity of some brain in a vat, or as Einsteinian space-time knots of mass-energy. Metaphysical and epistemological theses may be associated with the impressions and with ideas of objects composing the world; or theses of either sort may not be associated with those impressions and ideas. The world of common life is not intrinsically bound up with dogmatic accretions. It is without essential dogma, and Hume rejects the dogmatic theory of belief.

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8.2 Three Kinds of Assent Hume describes three kinds of assent that correspond to each moment of the dialectic of true philosophy that he lays out in Book 1 of the Treatise (see §7.1.2 above). That dialectic culminates in philosophical resources that, in conjunction with those he had already developed, make it possible to conceive a radically sceptical kind of assent and a radically sceptical way of advancing philosophical and scientific theories.

8.2.1 Hume’s Gentlemanly Scepticism At the close of Book 1 of the Treatise, Hume describes ‘honest gentlemen’ who are engaged in common life but not with philosophical theory (T 1.4.7.14, SBN 272). Acknowledging both that honest gentlemen have no truck with philosophical theory and that he sees no imperative to change that, Hume writes that ‘of such as these I pretend not to make philosophers’.18 Hume’s task is not to make philosophers out of ordinary honest gentlemen – perhaps by demanding that they recognise that they already hold philosophical theories. Rather, his project is to make, after a fashion, honest people out of philosophers, to help philosophers abandon false, deceptive dogmatisms and thereby to become honest and true to common life.19 On my reading, one may interpret Hume doxastically as an ‘urbane’ or ‘gentlemanly’ Pyrrhonian who maintains epochê about all dogmatic matters but not about common life, because common life is per se free from dogmatism. Common life beliefs and what might be called ‘true philosophical belief’, which is the result of true sceptical reflection, are both non-dogmatic. True philosophical belief emerges (perhaps exclusively) through a reflective, sceptical self-understanding about human doxastic and epistemic life (T 1.4.2.52, SBN 214–16). If this reading is right, then we may distinguish three kinds of assent in Hume: 1. Non-dogmatic common life assent 2. Dogmatic philosophical assent 3. Non-dogmatic philosophical assent (cf. ‘undogmatic assent’, PH 2.10.102). Hume’s true, non-dogmatic sceptical philosophy cultivates beliefs of the third kind.

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8.2.2 Academic Belief Attending to the manner rather than to the scope and content of belief, Hume’s account of the true philosopher’s doxastic life seems at first blush close to what Michael Frede finds in Pyrrhonian epochê, in so far as it permits one of just ‘two kinds of assent’ – namely, 1) the distinctively passive kind of assent that Frede thinks is characteristic of Pyrrhonism, rather than 2) dogmatically grounded assent.20 In Frede’s account, Pyrrhonians passively accept not only common life beliefs but also beliefs that emerge in non-common contexts, even philosophical contexts, when those beliefs are forced upon them by the pathê of life: ‘for we yield to those things which move us emotionally [pathetikos] and drive us compulsorily to assent’ (PH 1.20.193).21 In Richard H. Popkin’s well-known reading, Hume, for this Pyrrhonian reason, also accepts some dogmatic beliefs.22 Pyrrhonians practising epochê, in Frede’s view, refrain only from actively taking positions, advancing conclusions and entering claims. Hume’s view seems similar to this, in so far as he yields to the natural press of ordinary belief in contrast to the dogmatic beliefs that false philosophers wish to position actively through their metaphysical and epistemological First Philosophies of the Real (T 1.4.3.9, SBN 222–3). In light of these considerations, then, we may refine the account of the three kinds of assent set out in my initial rendering as follows. 1. Common life beliefs, which are non-dogmatic, unreflective and independent of metaphysical dogma. 2. False philosophical beliefs, which are reflective, fleeting and generated by dogmatic philosophical reasoning. 3. True philosophical beliefs, which are the result of sceptical reflection and not generated by dogmatic philosophical reasoning. True philosophical beliefs arise through reflective sceptical inquiry and self-understanding. Contra Frede and Popkin, however, I wish to argue that they are never dogmatic. Furthermore, Humean true philosophical beliefs differ from the passive assent that Frede and Popkin attribute to classical Pyrrhonism because they do not simply arise in passive ways, according to whatever inclinations happen to strike us. Reflection may itself, of course, be engaged in active ways. More than that, Hume departs from Pyrrhonian passivity by crafting Academic technologies of doxastic management that sceptical

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philosophers can use consciously, actively and affirmatively to ‘methodize and correct’ beliefs (E 12.25, SBN 161). These Humean technai, guided by the self-understanding of sceptical reflection, can be used to discipline beliefs, to limit them, to attenuate them, and to temper and tranquillise them emotionally. Hume undertook just this project in his engagement with politics and religion. Hume’s rules for judging of causes and effects (T 1.3.15) along with various principles he articulates – such as the copy principle and proportioning belief to the evidence (E 10.4, SBN 110) – are clear examples of this practice. Hume follows Carneades, who, as we saw in §1.3.2, developed techniques for actively discriminating phenomena that are 1) merely ‘persuasive’ (pithanê) from those that are both 2) persuasive and ‘undiverted’, as well as from those that are 3) persuasive, undiverted and also ‘thoroughly explored’ or scrutinised, especially by considering the assessment of other inquirers (ADO 1.242–3 [M 7.242–3]). Many who argue that Hume dogmatically accepts metaphysical realism apprehended through various justifying procedures hang their claims upon remarks such as one he made in an 18 February 1751 letter to Gilbert Elliot of Minto. Just three years after publishing the first Enquiry and the same year he would publish the second, Hume writes to Elliot about ‘legitimate Grounds for Assent’ (LT 1.155, #72).23 We are now in a position to understand that ‘legitimate’ grounds of assent are not, for Hume, grounds for dogmatic assent.24 Hume’s non-dogmatic pithanon establishes a radically sceptical, non-dogmatic and legitimate ‘title’ for belief and judgement.25 In a chapter explaining the difference between Pyrrhonians and Academic sceptics, Sextus writes about the deliberate doxastic choice that Academics make in contrast to Pyrrhonians: And although both the Academics and the Sceptics say that they believe some things, yet here the difference between the two philosophies is quite plain. For the word ‘believe’ has different meanings; it means not to resist but simply to follow without any strong impulse or inclination, as the boy is said to believe his tutor; but sometimes it means to assent to a thing of deliberate choice and with a kind of sympathy due to strong desire, as when the incontinent man believes him who approves of an extravagant mode of life. Since, therefore, Carneades and Cleitomachus declare that a strong inclination accompanies their credence and the credibility of the object, while we say

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that our belief is a matter of simple yielding without any consent, here too there must be a difference between us and them. (PH 1.33.229–30; emphasis mine)

In short, Sextus distinguishes Pyrrhonian from Academic belief by associating ‘deliberate choice’ and ‘strong impulse or inclination’ with Academicism and ‘simple yielding’ with Pyrrhonism (see §1.3.2 above; cf. PH 1.33.226–7). Hume’s way of understanding some habits and customs as ‘active’, however, partially elides the distinction between (passive) Pyrrhonism and (active) Academicism. That habits can be active means, for him, that the activities of sceptical reflection and methodising and correcting common life do not entail a departure from the Fourfold of common life in the way of First Philosophy of the Real. Even Sextus, for all his emphasis on passivity, does not accept common life uncritically. In his view, ordinary people (idiotai) are subject to dogmatic disturbances about the nature of bad or evil – both by apparently bad ‘affections themselves [pathon auton] and, in no less a degree, by the belief [dokeîn or opinion] that these conditions are evil by nature [physei]’ (PH 1.12.30).26 Common life is also, according to Sextus, the site of diaphônia or disagreement (PH 1.15.165). To these conditions, Sextus does not prescribe passive acquiescence. As with philosophical life, common life is subject to pathologies for which Pyrrhonian scepticism is the remedy. In both Pyrrhonian and Academic terms, therefore, Hume actively advances a positive therapy to treat the ‘dogmatical spirit’ (T 1.4.7.15, SBN 273–4; PH 3.32.280) – that recurrent ‘malady’ (T 1.4.2.57, SBN 218) into which people fall and are tempted to fall by false philosophy. He labours, too, to treat the related pathologies of common life. Hume sceptically recollects (see §3.4.2 above) the ‘barren rock’ on to which the aspirations of dogmatic false philosophy stranded him, the weakness of his faculties, about how natural reason subverts itself, and how sensation limits us (see §7.2 above; T 1.4.7.1, SBN 263–4). In the face of false philosophy and dogmatism, he deploys aphasia, isosthenia and epochê in the service of ataraxia and moderatio. Hume accepts appearances passively and self-consciously as they appear, but he also actively methodises and corrects beliefs, resisting assent to dogmatic claims about ta adêla (PH 1.7.13).

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It is true that, for Hume, all belief, even the beliefs generated through science and philosophy, draw their doxastic force ultimately from a natural press that neither philosophy nor science can autonomously generate. Chapter 5 explained how Hume conceives that natural press in non-dogmatic terms. For the Humean sceptic, those beliefs can nevertheless be sculpted through critical Pyrrhonian technai and Academic pithana. That critical shaping underwrites the Clitomachian, non-dogmatic ‘probable’ that Hume adopts.

8.2.3 Probability as Pithanon: Hume the Clitomachian That ordinary beliefs about the world generated through the natural and customary press of common life are not intrinsically dogmatic or metaphysical is the key to identifying Humean probabilism as Clitomachian rather than Metrodorian in character.27 The Hellenistic controversy between Metrodorus and Clitomachus repeats itself in the evolution of early modern philosophy. As Hume is to Clitomachus, so Locke is to Metrodorus; and, more generally, as the Hellenistic sceptics are to the stoics, so Locke and Hume are to the early modern rationalists. As we saw in §7.2, Hume deploys a series of arguments against principles underwriting putative claims to the acquisition of knowledge, concluding first that ‘all knowledge degenerates into probability’ (T 1.4.1.1, SBN 179) and subsequently that all probability decays until it is totally extinguished. When probability, proof and demonstrative certainty are naturally and fatefully restored in the wake of those sceptical arguments, what sort of probability is it? If probability were to be understood in a Metrodorian sense, Hume would remain, even in the face of those unrefuted sceptical arguments, an epistemological dogmatist. He would be a qualified dogmatist, who holds that humans can achieve limited epistemic gains but not perfect knowledge.28 It would render Hume a dogmatist concerning knowledge of the natural world in the way that Locke is a dogmatist.29 That reading, however, would be mistaken. 8.2.3.1 Locke’s twilight probabilities. As we saw in §2.1.3.6, Locke is sceptical about apprehending ‘real essences’. Unlike Hume and like William Chillingworth, however, he nevertheless remains a Metrodorian probabilist about knowledge of the external, natural world. While Locke differs from Hume in arguing that we are capable of

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proper knowledge of God and morality (by demonstration) and the self (by intuition), the two are in superficial agreement that the external world of natural science stands available principally as a matter of probability. Locke writes: ‘Therefore, as God has set some things in broad daylight; as he has given us some certain knowledge, though limited to a few things in comparison . . . so, in the greatest part of our concernments, he has afforded us only the twilight, as I may so say, of probability.’30 ‘Twilight’ is strikingly similar to an image employed by Huet, who compares our epistemic condition to seeing by the reflected (probabilistic) light of the moon rather than by the direct (knowing) light of the sun, a metaphor Huet uses to a Pyrrhonian end (see §4.1.5.5 above).31 Locke, however, is only a limited sceptic. He remains committed to a dogmatic metaphysics of hidden powers that necessarily connect causes and effects.32 While he agrees that the deep metaphysical structure of those powers is unavailable to human beings, for Locke, unlike Hume, the difference between what we apprehend in the bright light of day and what we apprehend in the partial light of dusk is only a matter of degree. In other words, probability for Locke is a kind of partial knowing; it advances positive epistemic content, albeit of an imperfect kind. Locke’s primary/secondary quality distinction reflects that partial epistemic capacity, and his probabilism is properly understood as a kind of limited epistemic realism, an affirmative apprehension of external reality. Hume’s probabilism is not. Hume rejects the illuminationist tradition in its entirety, including the twilight or partial light to which early modern dogmatists such as Locke still cling. For Hume, theology and First Philosophy of the Real lead inquirers not into light, even partial light, but rather into a kind of darkness, a ‘shadowy’ realm of benighted ‘shade’ (E 1.3, SBN 7; E 12.21, SBN 159; N 12.15). Locke’s justification for his limited scepticism is, of course, theological, hinged to the dogmatic belief that humans have been created by a hidden being and invested with epistemic powers proper to their situation. In the Essay, Locke writes that even if the sceptic’s arguments are right, the less-than-‘comprehensive knowledge’ our faculties acquire is nevertheless knowledge sufficient to our needs, at least enough to protect us from apraxia: I must desire him to consider that if all be a dream, then he doth but dream that he makes the question; and so it is not much matter that a waking man should answer him. But yet, if he pleases, he may dream

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that I make him this answer, that the certainty of things existing in rerum natura [the nature of things], when we have the testimony of our senses for it, is not only as great as our frame can attain to, but as our condition needs. For our faculties being suited not to the full extent of being, nor to a perfect, clear, comprehensive knowledge of things free from all doubt and scruple, but to the preservation of us . . .33

God wishes, for Locke, ‘to check our over-confidence and presumption’ but not to stifle our scientific efforts completely.34 It comes as no surprise, then, to find Locke in Book 4 of the Essay distancing himself from Pyrrhonism when he contrasts the apprehension of ‘real probabilities’ against sceptical ‘epechein’ or suspension.35 Epochê and Pyrrhonian finitude are, for Locke, more radical than his twilight probabilities can tolerate. 8.2.3.2 Hume’s departure from Metrodorian twilight probabilism. Hume, in contrast, adopts that radically sceptical conception that Locke could not bear. What is more or less probable in Hume’s postcrisis ‘true philosophy’ is not a matter of more or less epistemic light grounded in God’s purposes. ‘Probability’, for Hume, does not register epistemic apprehension of the real, even of a limited, crepuscular kind. Like belief, Hume tellingly figures ‘probability’ simply in terms of feelings that manifest the non-dogmatic natural force and vivacity with which an idea connects to a conclusion, the strength with which it presses upon other ideas, passions and conduct. This makes Hume’s conception of probability non-Metrodorian and fundamentally different from Locke’s, as well as from those of other dogmatic epistemologists. Hume’s probabilistic theory is, however, similar in its methodising and correcting activity to the Academics’ pithanon. Like Locke et alia, probability, says Hume ‘is still attended with uncertainty’ (T 1.3.11.2, SBN 124; see §7.2.3.1.1 above). By the end of T 1.4, however, the sceptic can recollect that even the certainties of ‘knowledge’ and empirical ‘proof’ are vulnerable to sceptical doubt. That is in part because of the scope of the sceptical technai that we examined in Chapter 7, and it is also in part because of the recognition of possible relevant alternatives, a recognition that is an aspect of Hume’s zetetic practice: ‘there is no probability so great as not to allow of a contrary possibility; because otherwise ’twou’d cease to be a probability, and wou’d become a certainty’ (T 1.3.12.14, SBN 135). In reasoning about matters of fact, the mind, for Hume, transfers the press of past experience into the future, magnifying our

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present conclusions: ‘All our reasonings concerning the probability of causes are founded on the transferring of past to future’ (T 1.3.12.19, SBN 137). Despite Hume’s argument against apprehending the soundness of inductive reasoning, consistency and repeated confirmation increase probability in terms of the pathê of force and vivacity.36 So does reinforcement of a conclusion after review using what Hume calls general rules of a ‘second influence’ (T 1.3.13.12, SBN 149–50). Humans ordinarily fail to achieve perfect ‘proofs’ (the ideal of inductive inference) because 1) their experiences are ‘imperfect’, in the sense of being limited, and 2) human experiences are often ‘contrary’ to one another. Because, moreover, the present and the future are not identical with the past, human empirical reasonings are always matters of ‘analogy’ (T 1.3.12.25, SBN 142), and analogies are intrinsically imperfect: ‘All our reasonings concerning matters of fact are founded on a species of Analogy’ (E 9.1, SBN 104). Of course, the sceptical arguments of T 1.4, E 4 and E 12 magnify this doubt and reduce probability to nothing. In stripping probability of its epistemic import, Hume follows Sextus, who says that Pyrrhonian equipollence aims to undermine claims to epistemic probability: ‘Equipollence we use of equality in respect of probability [pístin] and improbability [apistía], to indicate that no one of the conflicting judgements takes precedence of any other as being more probable’ or ‘proven’ [pistôteron] (PH 1.4.10; see §3.3.2 above). In the return to common life of Hume’s ‘true philosophy’, probability is restored, but it is crucial to understand that the restored, or rather recovered, forms of probable reasoning are of a Clitomachian not a Metrodorian kind. The kinds of science, politics, morals and aesthetics that Hume develops are also, therefore, Clitomachian rather than Metrodorian. Hume’s is a Carneadean philosophy of suasive force and vivacity, of what is pithanê, consistent with Cicero’s reading of Clitomachus on the probabile criterion (see §1.2.2 above). Probabilistic inferences for Hume rest upon a ‘presumption’ and upon a Pyrrhonian or Apelletic self-understanding of human natural fatalities, not upon the pretence of epistemic apprehensions. Since Hume’s sceptical arguments remain undefeated, the sort of probabilism that he embraces cannot be an epistemic probabilism (nor, in practice, can his certainties be epistemic certainties). His philosophy is not, like Locke’s or Pascal’s, one that pretends to have apprehended ‘real probabilities’. That one idea or proposition or

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claim is more ‘probable’ for Hume cannot mean the apprehension of some reality of the external or logical world. Humean probability is not a measure of how closely an inquirer has satisfied epistemic criteria. It is, rather, a measure of how the ‘sensitive’ part of the mind interacts with the ‘cogitative’ dimension of the system of ideas in the artful ‘universe of the imagination’ (T 1.2.6.8, SBN 67–8; LG 7).

8.3 Sceptical Science and Dogmatic Hidden Standards A curious passage from Hume’s 1742 essay ‘The Sceptic’ – a component of his idiosyncratic quartet on happiness that also includes essay portraits of ‘The Platonist’, ‘The Epicurean’ and ‘The Stoic’ – seems in its temporal proximity to shed light on the Treatise. Taken out of context, the passage suggests a metaphysically realist reading of Hume’s thought. Apparently affirming epistemic ‘apprehensions’ of the ‘real’, the passage reads: If I examine the PTOLOMAIC and COPERNICAN systems, I endeavour only, by my enquiries, to know the real situation of the planets; that is, in other words, I endeavour to give them, in my conception, the same relations, that they bear towards each other in the heavens. To this operation of the mind, therefore, there seems to be always a real, though an often unknown standard, in the nature of things; nor is truth or falsehood variable by the various apprehensions of mankind. Though all human race should for ever conclude, that the sun moves, and the earth remains at rest, the sun stirs not an inch from his place for all these reasonings; and such conclusions are eternal false and erroneous. (ES 164)37

Like Hume’s account of ‘two different systems of beings’ at T 1.4.5.21 (SBN 242–3) and a ‘harmony between the course of nature and the succession of our ideas’ (E 5.21, SBN 54), this powerful set of remarks from the Essays seems to suggest a Metrodorian probabilism of the sort developed by Pascal, Arnauld and Locke.38 Later, Hume seems to tie this apparent realism to the passions and feeling when he writes about sentiment, matters of fact and reason as ‘plain & obvious Standards of Truth’ in a 1751 letter to Gilbert Elliot (LT 1.151, #71). As compelling as the Metrodorian realist reading of this passage is, however, Hume’s use of the sceptically qualifying word ‘seems’ (meaning ‘is apparent’) pivots in a different direction and deflates

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the apparently dogmatic remarks that follow. The dogmatic valence of those remarks themselves may be attenuated still further by recollecting Hume’s pre-emptive caveat against moments of dogmatic excess at the close of Book 1 of the Treatise (T 1.4.7.15, SBN 273–4; see §7.1 above). The conceptual space opened through the Academic debate among Metrodorian and Clitomachian interpretations of to pithanon, moreover, offers resources for interpreting this provocative passage in a non-dogmatic way and for situating it more generally in the sceptical traditions. As we saw in Chapter 5, Hume’s Apelletic empiricism shows that we are fated to believe in a world beyond us, but, as we have seen here in Chapter 8, that belief is non-dogmatic. Chapter 7 reminds us how for Hume it must be non-dogmatic. Sextus Empiricus pivots in a similar way: The criterion, then, with which our argument is concerned has three several meanings – the general [or common, coenôs], the special [idiôs], and the most special [idiaetata]. In the ‘general’ sense, it is used of every standard of apprehension [catalêpseôs], and in the sense we speak even of physical organs, such as sight, as criteria [phusica . . . criteria]. In the ‘special’ sense it includes every technical [technicon] standard of apprehension, such as the rule and compass. In the ‘most special’ sense it includes every technical standard of apprehension of a non-evident [adêlou] object; but in this application ordinary standards are not regarded as criteria but only logical [logica] standards and those which the Dogmatists employ for the judging of truth. (PH 2.3.15)

As Sextus puts it in Book 1 of Against the Logicians, if no dogmatic ‘standard’ (canomos) or criterion is found, dogmatic boasts to having apprehended ‘the true reality of things’ (alêthian tôn pragmatôn hyparxeôs) must be abandoned (ADO 1.27 [M 7.27]). The unknown standard of ‘The Sceptic’ is not found and remains unknown. Even as a matter of thought and belief, that standard can be, for Hume, only the projective artwork of human imagination and feeling. In this, Hume’s unknown standard is very much like the ‘imaginary’ but ‘natural’ standards of musicians, painters and physicists he describes at T 1.2.4.24 (SBN 47–9) and in his essay ‘Of a Standard of Taste’. That Hume writes in ‘The Sceptic’ about a standard imagined to exist independently is no more evidence for his dogmatic realism or his adopting a Metrodorian probabilism than for his yielding undogmatically in a gentlemanly, Pyrrhonian way to beliefs in the objects of the world that true philosophy imagines to

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exist but that cannot be known to exist. For the Humean sceptic, the metaphysically real world remains ‘immeasurable’ (astathmeta, D 12.7), and about it in metaphysical terms he remains silent, suspensive and ‘indifferent’ (adiaphora). In a telling remark that might have been written about Hume’s real but unknown standard, Sextus writes: ‘For whereas the dogmatizer posits the things about which he is said to be dogmatizing as really existent, the Sceptic does not posit these formulae in any absolute sense’ (PH 1.7.14). The sceptic may, however, cogently posit them in another sense – in a non-dogmatic way. The ‘harmony’ between the order of ideas and the order of nature is an imagined or presumed harmony. Sceptical scientific inquirers accept what appears and limit themselves to it. While suspending judgement, they remain zetetically open to the possible epistemic apprehension of a metaphysically real in some possible future. Humean philosophy is a zetetic philosophy of ‘hope’ animated by curiosity and ‘love of truth’ (E 5.1.34, SBN 41), but it is a philosophy that makes no dogmatic claims to scientia/epistemê. In its zetetic, adiaphoractic hope, Humean true sceptical philosophy maintains a disciplined and radically sceptical integrity, remaining non-apprehensive and ‘indeterminate’ (aneprikritos). In its actual practice, including the practices of methodising and correcting common life, true scepticism employs rigorous Academic probabilistic standards of belief and reason – but only of a Clitomachian sort. Humean true sceptical philosophy understands that, because the still-unknown standard, if there be such a standard, is not known to have been apprehended and may never be apprehended, the ‘best’ that humans accomplish scientifically may only be what is ‘satisfactory to the human mind’ itself and what stands ‘the test of the most critical examination’ – in other words, what meets the satisfaction conditions of the internalist standards of our own minds in practice as we engage the universe of human theoretical imagination and the ‘science of man’ (T 1.4.7.14, SBN 272–3).39

8.4 Conclusion: An End to the Voyage In this chapter, we have cinched together the philosophical resources developed across our excursus to assemble a vision of Hume’s true sceptical philosophy. We have done so by examining how Hume as a true sceptic understands humanity’s relationship to the world and how he articulates a theoretical way of conceiving of that world

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and inquiring into it. Our investigation of Hume’s true sceptical philosophy has now sailed full circle. Part I of this volume assessed the way Hume’s work fits into the historical currents of Academic and Pyrrhonian scepticism that preceded him. Part II unfolded an inquiry into the way Hume adopts the Pyrrhonian Fourfold observances as well as into the theoretical and doxastic possibilities opened up by the Academic sceptics. Chapter 8 undertook a focused examination of Hume’s sceptical doxastic theory and the standards or satisfaction conditions upon which he stakes his philosophical hope. To understand Hume as a thoroughgoing sceptic, it is not enough to show that his epistemological and even metaphysical theories are sceptical. It is necessary to show in addition that, in both common life and when practising philosophy, the kinds of beliefs that sceptical inquiry generates are thoroughly sceptical too. This investigation has therefore endeavoured to show that, as a truly radical and coherent sceptic, Hume is a doxastic as well as an epistemological and metaphysical sceptic. As Hume sallies forth into those ‘immense depths’ of philosophical inquiry in his ‘leaky weather-beaten vessel’, he remains through and through a radical Pyrrhonian and Academic sceptic.

Notes 1. Hobbes, Leviathan, 8.53; quoted by Merrill, Hume and Politics, p. 90. 2. Bayle writes in the Dictionnaire’s entry on Ovid about the ‘empire of reason’ recognised by the stoics. Perhaps Hume set his own phrases about the empire of imagination against this remark; Bayle, Political Writings, p. 227. 3. Bayle, Political Writings, pp. 228, 228n30=77; Bayle’s note reads: ‘See Fragments de Cicero . . . collected by André Patricius. He cites this passage as taken from Saint Augustine, bk 4, Contra Pelagium [Against Pelagius].’ Cicero, De re publica, 3.1; and Augustinus, Contra Julianum (Pelagianum), Book 4.60. 4. Montaigne, Complete Works: Essays, ‘Caesar’s Methods of Making War’, 2.34, p. 562: ‘Passion rules us much more tyrannically than reason.’ See Botwinick, Oakeshott’s Skepticism, pp. 149–53, comparing Oakeshott and Hume. 5. Kemp Smith, ‘Naturalism of Hume’, p. 150; Stroud, ‘Constraints of Hume’s Naturalism’, p. 340. 6. Immerwahr, ‘Hume on Tranquilizing’, pp. 294ff.

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7. Michaud, ‘How to Become’, pp. 42, 44; Norton, ‘Academical or Sceptical Philosophy’, p. 386. Curiously, since ‘reflection’ corroborates the calm passions or reason, it would seem that reflection is distinct in some sense from reason – or at least from particular species of reason. Indeed, in some sense consciousness is itself the event of reflection: ‘consciousness is nothing but a reflected thought or perception’ (AP 20, SBN 635). 8. This appeal to natural-but-also-other-regarding sentiment aligns Hume, like Adam Smith, against moral egoists such as Hobbes and Mandeville; Smith, Moral Sentiments, pp. 129, 135. 9. Although her interpretation portrays a more dogmatic Hume, my view roughly aligns with Weintraub et al.’s account of the vulgar as ‘neutral’ in their metaphysical commitments. Weintraub writes: ‘According to the third, Neutralist, interpretation (Allison 2008 [Custom and Reason], 235; Garrett 1997 [Cognition], 210; Loeb 2002 [Stability and Justification], 138–39; Pears 1990 [Hume’s System], 152–53; Stanistreet 2002 [Hume’s Scepticism], 180n9; Wright 1983 [Sceptical Realism]), the vulgar fail to draw the distinction between material objects and perceptions: “Hume inadvertently represents [the vulgar] as confusing two kinds of thing, when what he really means is that it never occurs to them to distinguish them or to name them in a way that would indicate their different categories” (Pears 1990 [Hume’s System], 153; original italics). The vulgar ascribe a continuing existence to the immediate objects of sensation . . . without committing themselves to any assumption about their nature’; Weintraub, ‘Humean Bodies’, p. 375. 10. Compare the way that, for Hume, humans project 1) external reality generally with 2) the projection of the feeling of necessity on to customary conjunctions of perceptions and 3) the projection of perceptions of tasted qualities on to extended external bodies – for example, the taste of a fig on to the extended object we call a ‘fig’ (T 1.4.5.13, SBN 238). 11. De Pierris, Ideas, Evidence, and Method, p. 5. 12. In addition to 1) the ‘title’ that imagination, habit and feeling confer upon what people ordinarily call ‘realities’, Hume also writes about 2) the ‘title’ that the imagination bestows upon the identity of objects (T 1.4.6.21, SBN 262; T 1.4.3.5, SBN 221) and 3) the ‘title’ that habit, imagination and feeling confer when we denominate events as ‘cause or effect’ (T 1.3.2.5, SBN 75). As it goes for assent, causes, effects and object identities, so it goes for reality. Neither

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13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19.

20.

21. 22.

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Hume’s Scepticism reason, intellect, sensation nor noetic intuition as conceived by First Philosophy of the Real – with all their epistemic and metaphysical pretensions – underwrite what we experience as reality. A subordinate and limited role for reason does emerge when Hume recognises a ‘title’ for ‘assent’ on those occasions when imagination and feeling properly mix with reason (T 1.4.7.11, SBN 270). Reason plays a similar role to the passions in moral judgement. Broughton, ‘Naturalism’, p. 432, for example, mistakenly accuses Hume of ‘building into’ the vulgar view ‘fragments of the philosophical view’ such that the vulgar view represents a philosophical position, indeed a kind of dogmatic realism. Butler, ‘Hume on Believing’, p. 237. Owen, Hume’s Reason, ch. 7; Bell, ‘Belief and Instinct’; and Stroud, Hume, p. 117. Cf. Norton, David Hume, p. 212n34. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A599/B627; Anselm, ‘Proslogion’. More completely, Hume writes: ‘I am sensible, that these two cases of the strength and weakness of the mind will not comprehend all mankind, and that there are in England, in particular, many honest gentlemen, who being always employ’d in their domestic affairs, or amusing themselves in common recreations, have carried their thoughts very little beyond those objects, which are every day expos’d to their senses. And indeed, of such as these I pretend not to make philosophers, nor do I expect them either to be associates in these researches or auditors of these discoveries’ (T 1.4.7.14, SBN 272). This roughly aligns Hume with the ‘urbane’ sceptic described by Jonathan Barnes as well as the ‘gentlemanly’ sceptic described by Myles Burnyeat. On Barnes’s ‘urbane’ rather than ‘rustic’ sceptic, see Barnes, ‘Beliefs of a Pyrrhonist’, pp. 61–2. In support of his categorisation, Barnes in that text (at p. 61n13) cites Galen on ‘agrarian-Pyrrhonism’ (diff. puls. 7.711K; praenot. 14.628K). Burnyeat’s ‘gentlemanly’ sceptic resembles both Montaigne and Gassendi; see Burnyeat, ‘Sceptic in his Place and Time’, p. 99. Note that Burnyeat does not endorse the ‘country gentleman’ interpretation of Pyrrhonism (pp. 104ff., esp. pp. 114–15). Frede, ‘Two Kinds of Assent’; Frede, ‘Skeptikers Meinungen’. Cf. Perin, ‘Scepticism and Belief’. I thank Don Baxter for this insight about Pyrrhonism. Cf. ACD 2.20.66. Cf. Coleman, ‘Hume’s Alleged Pyrrhonism’, p. 466. Popkin, ‘David Hume: Pyrrhonism and Critique’.

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23. For example, Norton, David Hume, p. 201n18; Wright, ‘Scepticism’, pp. 130ff; Kail, Projection and Realism, pp. 66ff., 69. For an example of Hume’s use of the term ‘legitimate’ in a strictly rational or ‘logical’ but not necessarily dogmatic way, see T 1.3.13.1, SBN 143. 24. Kail writes that, for Hume, the human ‘commitment’ to a world of external objects ‘cannot be justified by reason: but it does not follow that the commitment cannot accrue justification from some other source’; Kail, Projection and Realism, p. 67. Following a more Wittgensteinian line, Kripke writes that ‘a sceptical solution of a sceptical philosophical problem begins . . . by conceding that the sceptic’s negative assertions are unanswerable. Nevertheless, our ordinary practice or belief is justified because – contrary appearances notwithstanding – it need not require the justification the sceptic has shown to be untenable’; Kripke, Wittgenstein, p. 66; quoted by Millican, ‘Comments’, p. 1. Johnsen, Righting Epistemology, finds an epistemically dogmatic anticipation in Hume of ‘reflective equilibrium theory’. Contra Kail’s, Kripke’s and Johnsen’s dogmatic implications, however, the sort of ‘justification’ that accrues through critical, inquisitive and reflective philosophy is, for the Humean-Clitomachian sceptic non-dogmatic, making no claim to having apprehended the truth or the real. 25. A non-dogmatic title contrasts with Don Garrett’s epistemic ‘Title Principle’, drawn from T 1.4.7.11, SBN 270. As Baxter acutely responds: ‘Liveliness and propensity can yield, at best, ersatz epistemic warrant. There is no reason to regard them as evidence of truth’; Baxter, Hume’s Difficulty, p. 101n16. 26. As Thorsrud writes: ‘Sextus sometimes presents himself as the champion of scepticism in opposition to ordinary life as well as dogmatism. Sceptics are indifferent to the opinion of the many (M 1.5) – indeed, Pyrrho is a model of sceptical eccentricity. More importantly, ordinary people are only marginally less likely to be disturbed than philosophers (e.g. PH 1.30). Interminable controversy is not the exclusive domain of intellectuals (PH 1.165). Ordinary people disagree about which gods exist; whether health, wealth or wisdom is the greatest good ([ADO 5.49] M 11.49), unless it is sex, gluttony, drunkenness, or gambling (PH 3.180); and even whether apparent things are intelligible or perceptible ([ADO 2.355] M 8.355)’; Thorsrud, Ancient Scepticism, p. 179. 27. Baxter has called this non-dogmatic doxastic position a ‘Pyrrhonian facsimile of Academic probability’; Baxter, Hume’s Difficulty, p. 9; cf. p. 101n9. See Brittain’s ‘Introduction’ to Cicero, On Academic

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28. 29. 30. 31.

32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

37. 38.

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Hume’s Scepticism Scepticism, pp. xxvi–vii; and see Brittain, ‘Cicero’s Sceptical Methods’. Brittain connects Carneadean/Clitomachian scepticism to Pyrrhonism on just this point (‘Cicero’s Sceptical Methods’, pp. 19–20): ‘Like the Sextan sceptic we meet in PH I, the Carneadean follows impressions as a practical criterion of life, not as a dogmatic – or as a provisional [i.e., mitigated] – criterion of truth.’ Cf. ACD 2.32.104–5. This interpretive line is pursued by Johnsen through the lens of analytic philosophy; Johnsen, Righting Epistemology. Wright, ‘Hume’s Academic Scepticism’, p. 419; Meeker, Hume’s Radical Scepticism, p. 94. Locke, Essay, 4.14.2. The metaphor of ‘twilight’ also seems to anticipate Friedrich Nietzsche’s 1888 Twilight of the Idols (Götzen-Dämmerung). If so, perhaps we might think of the emergence of ‘twilight’ probabilities in Locke as signalling the twilight of early modern dogmatism and the idols of its First Philosophy of the Real, perhaps of religious dogmatism too. Nietzsche does, after all, write in Anti-Christ (1888), echoing ACD 2.3.8–9 and our discussion of scepticism as liberating at §2.1.2: ‘Make no mistake about it: great spirits are sceptics. Zarathustra is a sceptic. The vigour, the freedom that comes from the strength and super-strength of spirit proves itself through scepticism. Where basic issues about value or lack of value are concerned, people with convictions do not come into consideration. Convictions are prisons’ – dogmatic convictions; Nietzsche, Anti-Christ, p. 184, §54; cf. §55. Perhaps Hume might be read along these lines as anticipating Nietzsche. See Kail, ‘Nietzsche and Hume’. My thanks to Roger Eichorn for insightful thoughts about this passage and, more generally, Hume, scepticism and Nietzsche. De Pierris, Ideas, Evidence, and Method, pp. 150ff. Locke, Essay, 4.11.8. Ibid., 4.14.2. Ibid., 4.20.7; Rogers, ‘Locke among the Sceptics’. Howson, Hume’s Problem, untangles the way Hume accepts the validity of inductive inferences even while arguing that their soundness or cogency cannot ultimately be established by reason. See Wright, ‘Hume’s Academic Scepticism’, pp. 407–8ff., for Wright’s realist reading of this passage. Buckle and Wright do so, Buckle making an explicit connection between Humean philosophy and the Academic ‘plausible’ criterion; see Buckle, Hume’s Enlightenment Tract, p. 117; Wright, ‘Hume’s Academic Scepticism’, pp. 407–35. De Pierris, Ideas, Evidence, and Method, and Fogelin, Hume’s Skepticism, hold Metrodorian views.

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39. Externalist readings of Hume, arguing to the contrary, appear in Dauer, ‘Skeptical Solution’; Bohlin, Groundless Knowledge; Greco, ‘Agent Reliabilism’; Greco, Putting Skeptics in their Place; as well as Schmitt, Hume’s Epistemology. For a compelling critique of externalist readings of Hume, see Meeker, review of Hume’s Epistemology in the Treatise. Cf. Johnsen, Righting Epistemology, p. 79n9; Price, Hume’s Theory of the External World, p. 124.

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Index

a priori, 8, 91, 96, 98, 190–1, 196–9, 201, 204, 221, 256, 298 Abelard, P., 42 abstruse, 47, 193, 244, 245, 251, 269–71 Académie Française, 51, 61, 136 Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, 51 Académie Parisienne, 53, 54 Académie du Physique, 61 Academy, 19, 30, 34, 62, 80 Middle Academy, 23–6, 41, 62, 146 New Academy, 23–6, 41, 146 Old Academy, 20–6, 29, 41, 146 Addison, J., 228 adêla, 94–5, 103, 109, 110, 125, 138, 148, 151, 170, 288, 292–4, 324 non-evident, 94–5, 102, 109, 121, 170, 253n9, 330 adiaphora, 82, 112n13, 300, 331 adoxatos, 86, 103, 109, 110, 170, 217, 261; see also doxa Aenesidemus, 25, 83 Agathias Scholasticus, 118 Agrippa, H. C. von H., 294 Aikenhead, T., 134 Ainslie, D. C., 7–9, 283 akatalêpsía, 28–30, 33, 34, 62, 67, 92, 94, 138, 141, 170, 196 Albert, H., 275 Al-Farabi, A. N., 25 Al-Ghazali, A. H. M., 121 Allestree, R., 265 Al-Razi, F., 120 alternative explanation, 98, 106, 131–3, 285, 327 Ambrose of Milan, 40 Ammonius, 118 Anderson, G., 163 anepikritos, 83, 109, 278, 300 Annas, J., 2–3, 13n20 Anselm of Canterbury, 319; see also ontological argument

Antiochus of Ascalon, 25–6, 42, 61 Apelles, 99–101, 105, 109, 170 Apelletic, 99–102, 107–10, 145, 170, 202, 209–10, 218, 285, 314, 328, 330 aphasia, 94–6, 103, 109, 110, 138, 170, 192, 198, 295, 324 aporia, 22, 83, 100 aporetic, 112n10, 118, 142, 147 appearance, 3, 20, 29, 33, 34, 38n34, 40–1, 70, 77, 79, 85–8, 91, 95–8, 100–1, 104–5, 109–11, 139, 147–9, 151, 170, 187, 189, 200, 209, 220, 261, 262–3, 267, 273, 278, 283, 287, 291, 297, 324 Aquinas, T., 120, 256, 272 Arcesilaus of Pitane, 23, 24, 26–9, 41, 61, 65, 80–2, 92, 146, 193 Aristocles of Messene, 82 Aristotle, 23–4, 44, 61, 80, 88, 94, 118, 132, 138, 192, 207, 223, 225, 242, 272 Aristotelianism, 25, 26, 42, 46, 49, 82, 86, 100, 118, 120, 121, 123, 126, 131–3, 138, 150, 219, 272, 291, 294, 295, 298, 317 Arnauld, A., 11, 53, 66, 266, 329 astathmeta, 82, 109, 331 ataraxia, 65, 107–10, 115, 170, 233–5, 238, 252, 261, 301, 313, 324; see also tranquillity Aufhebung, 100–1 Augustine, 24, 25, 31, 38n31, 40–3, 48, 58, 63, 100, 115n51, 117, 160, 251, 266, 311–12, 332 Aulus Gellius, 112n16 Austin, J. L., 267 Autrecourt (Ultricuria), Nicholas of, 121 Avicenna, 41 Ayer, A. J., 285 Bacon, F., 22, 44, 56, 133–4, 136, 208, 263 Baier, A., 5–6 Barbeyrac, J., 59

371

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Barnes, J., 108 Baumgartener, F., 131 Baxter, D. L. M., 3, 38n34, 335n25 Bayle, P., 3, 13, 51, 52, 58, 63–7, 80, 104, 128, 134, 138, 140–6, 148, 156, 159–60, 169, 172, 192–4, 265, 268, 275, 277, 278, 280 Beattie, J., 167, 198–9, 283 Bede, V., 118 Bell, M., 9 Belot, J., 131 Berkeley, G., 4, 53, 56, 60, 64, 95, 145, 158, 205, 216, 284–301 Beza, T., 48 Biscop, B., 118 Blacklock, T., 117 Blumenberg, H., 106 Boethius, 25 Bolingbroke, H. St J., 51 Bonar, J., 162 Bosc, J. du, 152 Boswell, J., 168, 248, 265 Bouhours, D., 175n56 Boyle, R., 50, 139, 257n58, 294–5 Brahe, T., 131 Broughton, J., 6–7 Brown, J., 165 Brown, T., 4 Brués, G. de, 49 Bruno, G., 134 Burnet, G., 237 Butler, J., 223, 225, 227 Butler, S., 106 Calvin, J., 41 Campanella, T., 294 Camus, A., 267 Camus, J.-P., 130 Carneades of Cyrene, 3, 24–34, 43, 47, 50, 61, 66, 86, 92–4, 127, 146, 156, 238, 314 Castello, S., 48 catalepsis (katalêpsis) or cataleptic impressions, 27–30, 48, 56, 204, 275; see also akatalêpsía causal connection, 98, 121, 150, 190–1, 240, 279, 288, 292–3, 296–9, 320; see also necessary connection causal power, 5, 12, 96–8, 150, 198, 230, 241, 272, 288, 290–7 Cavell, S., 205–6, 208–9, 230–1 certainty intuitively and demonstratively certain, 306n40 moral, 268 Charron, P., 130 Chatton, W., 119

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Chillingworth, W., 60, 325 Chouet, P. & J., 52, 133–4, 154–6 Chrysippus of Soli, 26, 126 Cicero (Marcus Tullius), 21–5, 29–31, 39–47, 48, 52, 60–70, 78, 80, 81, 83, 84, 92–3, 117, 123, 137, 149, 156, 239, 311–12, 314 Clarke, S., 239, 256–7n58 Cleanthes of Assos, 26–7, 47, 79, 240–1, 257n63 Clitomachus of Carthage, 3, 19, 24, 29–31, 34, 61, 86, 93–4, 127, 156, 325, 328 closure, 105–7 common life, 3, 7, 9, 10, 13, 20–3, 46, 67–9, 87, 100–3, 109–10, 113n23, 129–30, 145–52, 170, 189, 205–10, 215–17, 227–34, 242–50, 260, 270–1, 277–8, 288, 315, 318–31, 332; see also fourfold observances common notions, 218, 253n13 contingency or contingent, 98, 120, 191, 196, 198, 199–202, 205–6, 207, 209–10, 225–8, 235, 242 Copernicus, N., 124, 131 copy principle, 95, 104, 296, 323 cosmological argument, 197, 239, 256 Crates, 23 criterion or criteria, 32, 38n34, 20, 32–3, 69, 87, 123, 130, 146–7, 170, 267, 276, 329–30 Cromwell, O., 106 Crousaz, J.-P., 140, 145–6 Cudworth, R., 257n64; see also logomachy cure, 88, 108, 125, 146, 248, 267; see also therapy curiosity, 22, 77, 96, 331 custom 3, 10, 86–9, 97, 109, 110, 123, 125–6, 128, 139, 141, 143, 147–9, 170, 195–6, 198, 210, 215–33, 237–9, 241, 246, 248, 252, 280, 290, 296, 302, 313, 315–16, 324–5; see also habit; tradition cynicism, 243 Cyrene, 3, 23, 24, 61, 314 Dalrymple, D., 156 Davy du Peron, J., 131 deduction, 100, 190, 192, 195, 200, 204, 207, 209, 237, 268, 271, 274, 277, 279, 305 Defoe, D., 228 delirium, 108, 146, 149, 243, 244 demonstration, 1, 28, 49, 54–5, 57–8, 60, 62, 92, 132, 138, 143, 195, 197, 200, 208, 222, 251, 256–7, 273–6, 279–82, 325–6

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Index Derrida, J., 115n51 Descartes, R., 5, 27, 41, 50–61, 68, 81, 121, 128, 130, 133–4, 136, 137, 139, 144, 190–3, 202, 204–6, 223, 267–8, 272, 285–6, 292–3, 298, 317 design, argument from, 64, 98, 239–40 Desmaizeaux, P., 145, 178n133 dialectic, 5, 19, 20, 27, 41, 49, 93, 100, 144, 264, 321 diaphônia see tropoi Dilthey, W., 222 Diodati, É., 137 Diogenes the Cynic of Sinope, 243 Diogenes Laërtius, 25, 26, 43, 51, 77, 80, 85, 90–3, 118, 122, 193, 215 Diogenes of Smyrna, 80 disease, 8, 108, 245, 283 Dostoevsky, F., 247 double existence, 285 doxa, 29, 83, 107, 232–3, 238, 241, 262; see also adoxatos dream, 41, 78, 81, 121, 248, 267, 326 Asystates argument, 306n43 Drummond, W. Lord, 287 Dryden, J., 152 Duboi-Reymond, E., 95–6 Durland, K., 6 Emerson, R. W., 205, 208, 302 empiricism, 4, 58, 125, 150, 188, 202–7, 209–10, 217–18, 222, 230, 228, 330 enthusiasm, 53, 162, 164, 171, 227, 243, 246–7, 249, 313 Epicurean, 45, 81, 86, 108, 139, 202, 329 Epicureanism, 26, 198 ephectic, 83, 93, 109, 112n10, 118, 127, 142, 170, 289, 300 epochê, 30, 67, 105, 88, 92–5, 99, 103, 105, 108, 109, 110, 126, 141, 156, 170, 192, 198, 199, 240, 295, 321, 322, 324, 327 Erasmus, 48 eros, 105, 181n175, 291 Estienne (Stephanus), H., 124, 133, 155 eudaimonia, 82 eulogon, 28; see also pithanon Eusebius 82 evidence or evident, 2, 25, 43, 58, 64, 66–7, 79, 90, 94–6, 102, 106, 109, 119, 121, 128, 145, 147, 162, 165, 166, 193, 197, 218, 221, 222, 235, 266–9, 217, 274–7, 279–80, 298, 309n93, 316, 323, 330, 335n25; see also non-evident evidential gap, 284 self-evidence, 27, 143–4, 208, 275–6, 305

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373

external world, 264–5, 286–90, 293, 315–20 externalism, 337n39; see also internalism extraordinary, 236, 243–4, 247; see also ordinary; common life eyeball experiment, 89, 113n26, 137 Fabricius, J. A., 154–6 fallibilism, 23, 28, 107, 274–5; see also zetetic revisability fate, 3, 7, 12, 108, 204, 208–9, 218, 231–2, 241–2, 252n2, 284, 300, 325, 330 Favorinus, 83 Fénelon, F. de, 51 Ficino, M., 25, 226, 294 fideism, 42, 47, 49, 56, 122–5, 130, 136, 138, 143–4, 152, 170, 172 Filelfo, F., 122 final causes, 191, 291 finding, 99–100, 110, 205, 209, 231, 314; see also Apelles, Apelletic First Philosophy of the Real, 20, 25, 28, 59, 101, 139, 202, 223, 225, 270, 284, 324, 326, 336n31; see also realism Floridi, L., 39, 113n31, 117, 188, 119, 120, 121 Fludd, R., 54, 137 Fogelin, R. J., 10 Formey, J.-H., 145 Fortuna, 100 fortunate or fortune, 100 Foucher, S., 53, 55–8 fourfold observances, 3, 34–5, 86–7, 109–10, 128, 141, 145, 148, 170–1, 187, 210, 215, 229–31, 252, 260, 301, 311, 313, 324, 332; see also common life Frede, M., 322 Galen, 83, 112n18, 228 Galileo, G., 54, 132–4, 137, 139, 151, 206 Garrett, D., 6 Gassendi, P., 46, 54, 66, 81, 134–41, 286, 292, 294 Glanvill, J., 150 God, 4, 21, 36, 40, 49, 50, 59, 94, 96, 98, 115n51, 119, 120, 121, 125, 128, 143, 155, 211n14, 239–40, 242, 247, 256–7n58, 266, 286, 288, 293, 295, 298, 320, 326–7; see also ideas, of God Goethe, J. W., 224 Goodman, N., 11 Green, T. H., 4 Grotius, H., 237 Guise, Charles de, 49

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habit, 3, 10, 93, 121, 170, 195, 215–16, 218–19, 221–32, 238, 243–4, 246, 252, 261, 263, 300, 302, 312, 316–17, 324; see also custom; tradition active and passive habits, 225 Hakkarainen, J., 12 Halevi, J., 121 Hamilton, W., 4 Harrington, J., 235 Harris, J. A., xi, 3, 259n75, 259n87, 266, 284, 291, 304n18 Harvey, W., 133–4 Hegel, G. F. W., 6 Henry of Ghent, 43, 100 Heraclitus, 61, 206–7, 215, 302 Herbert of Cherbury, 137 Hervet (Hervetus), G., 49, 124–5, 133, 154–5 Hobbes, T., 54, 134–6, 139, 141, 189, 238, 311–12 Homer, 35n1, 93, 228 Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus), 5 Howson, C., 10, 336n36 Huart, C., 156 Huet, P.-D., 58, 60–3, 65, 120, 143, 146–50, 160, 169, 172, 261, 280, 281, 326 Hutcheson, F., 44, 114, 226–7, 290–1 hypothesis, 11, 22, 65, 131, 151, 224, 262; see also tropoi idea, 28, 51, 56, 59–60, 81, 92, 95, 97–9, 140–1, 148, 189–210, 210n8, 214n40, 216–23, 225–6, 231, 235, 236, 240, 243, 253n13, 260–1, 264, 268, 273–5, 278, 284–90, 292–8, 311, 315–17, 318–20, 327–9, 331, 333; see also causal power; copy principle; external world; substance idealism, 4, 284–5, 289, 297, 320 ideas abstract, 216, 293 clear and distinct, 268 general or universal, 216 of God, 96, 119, 256–7n58, 288–9, 320; see also God harmony between the course of nature and the succession of, 329–31 relative, 98, 287–8 Way of Ideas, 140, 289, 292 identity, personal, 299–302; see also self ignorabimus Streit, 96 illumination, 101, 149, 204, 272, 275, 326 natural light (lumen naturale), 62, 74n85, 100, 144, 191, 272, 275; see also inner light; twilight probabilities

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impression, 27, 56, 81, 95, 97, 104, 148, 195, 196, 199–200, 203–4, 209, 211n16, 217, 219–21, 269, 284, 286, 288, 296, 315–20 induction, 10, 92, 100, 151, 204, 208, 237, 271, 278–80, 328 infinite or infinity, 57, 64, 89, 90–1, 97–8, 125, 127, 193, 272, 276–8, 283, 298 inner light (inner persuasion), 48–9 internal relations, 190 internalism, 33, 274, 331; see also externalism intuition, 59, 100, 200, 204, 267–8, 272, 275, 286, 326; see also illumination noêsis, 99, 100 noûs, 99, 100, 272, 291 inversion, 7, 68, 101, 126, 191, 194 Apelletic inversion of First Philosophy of the Real, 101 of humans and animals, 126, 191–4 of Platonic phenomena, 219 of Platonic theory of the real, 285 of religious doctrines and morals, 265–6 of universals, 216 isosthenia, 92–3, 100, 107, 108, 109, 110, 138, 141, 170, 199, 233, 281, 283, 285, 324 iterative probability argument (infinite regress), 272–7; see also tropoi, regress Jansen, C., 266 jeux, 66–7, 77, 176n88 John Philoponus, 118 Johnsen, B., 10–11 Jurieu, P., 63, 66, 140, 265 Kail, P. J. E., 12–13 Kames (Home), Lord H., 160–2, 238 Kant, I., 8, 50, 98, 167, 196–8, 201–2, 205–7, 223, 231–2, 277, 286, 291, 298, 301, 319 Kemp Smith, N., 5, 9, 12, 13, 188, 204, 208 Kepler, J., 54, 132 King, W., 145 Knox, J., 41 La Mothe Le Vayer, F. de, 136–9, 143, 172 Lacydes of Cyrene, 23 Laird, J., 3 Laplace, P. S. de, 292 Law, E., 145 Law, W., 190 LeClerc, J., 157

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Index

375

Lee, H., 59 Leibniz, G. W., 27, 36, 58, 66, 190–2, 202, 294, 298 Levers, L., 8 Lévesque de Pouilly, L.-J., 51 Livingston, D. W., 7, 10, Locke, J., 4, 50, 58–61, 66, 80, 134, 139, 141, 152, 157, 189, 191–2, 198, 221–3, 267, 289, 290–3, 298, 317, 325–9 Loeb, L., 10 logomachy, 257n64 Lucian, 51, 72n30, 244, 259n77 Luther, M., 48, 122, 207

modesty, 43, 57, 59, 70, 77–8, 152, 169, 171, 220, 262–3, 296–7, 301 Montaigne, M., 46, 53, 63, 71, 93, 120, 124–30, 131, 136, 137, 140, 152, 172, 192–4, 206, 228, 266, 312 Montesquieu, C.-L., 237 moral, 22, 23, 40, 44, 45, 50, 59, 64, 66, 70, 110, 131, 135, 140, 141, 143, 150–5, 163, 170–1, 194, 198, 223–4, 226–9, 233–4, 236–7, 239, 241, 243, 245, 247–8, 258n67, 261, 265–6, 268, 302, 313, 326, 328; see also certainty, moral; truth, moral Mounce, H. O., 188

Machiavelli, N., 135, 176n82, 233 madness, 8, 81, 129–30, 136, 146, 190 Maimonides (Moses ben Maimon), 119–20 malady, 125, 248, 324; see also pathology Malebranche, N., 52, 53, 55, 57, 66, 154, 179–80n164, 189, 272, 286, 298 Mandeville, B., 64, 101, 141, 190, 228, 312 Marandé, L., 136 matters of fact, 150, 268, 273–4, 327, 328–9 Medina, B. de, 131 Meeker, K., 12, 179n146 Meillassoux, Q., 279 melancholy, 108, 146, 149, 243, 244 Melanchthon, P., 48 memoria, 115n51; see also recollection Mersenne, M., 53–5, 58, 65, 134, 137, 152 method, 32, 67, 84, 96, 99–102, 105, 109, 111n3, 128, 130, 133, 138, 150–1, 170, 190, 194, 208–9, 223, 233, 234, 237, 262, 270 methodise and correct, 102, 189, 222, 225, 233, 248, 260, 267, 313, 323–4, 327, 331 metriopatheia, 108, 234–5, 238, 252; see also moderation Metrodorus of Chios, 80–1, 139 Metrodorus of Stratonikeia, 3, 19, 31, 34, 61, 325 Michaud, Y., 9 Mill, J. S., 4, 194 Millican, P., 192 Milton, J., 205, 303n1 Mirandola, G. P. della, 123, 138, 225–6, 294 Mirecourt, John of, 119 Mnesarchus of Athens, 25 moderation, 69, 121, 129, 229, 233–4, 238, 324; see also metriopatheia modes, 88, 90, 92, 96, 97, 109, 126–7, 156, 170; see also tropoi

Nārājuna, 111n5 Nashe, T., 157 naturalism, 5, 7, 9, 29, 150, 170, 187–9, 191, 195–8, 202–4, 207–8, 210, 215, 294, 296, 301–2 Naudé, G., 137 necessary or necessity, 8, 10, 28, 42, 55, 46, 54, 55, 78, 93, 98, 99–100, 108, 121, 189–202, 203–10, 220, 225, 261, 296, 333n10 necessary connection, 97, 121, 198, 220, 240 neo-Pythagoreanism, 25 Neto, J. R. M., 69, 169, 266 New Hume debate, 5, 12, 38n32 Nicole, P., 11, 53, 266 Nietzsche, F., 211n21, 246, 266, 336n31 nisus, 204, 207, 213n40 nominalism, 59, 119, 122, 170, 216 Norton, D. F., 12 Numenius of Apamea, 25

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Ockham, W., 119 ontological argument, 239, 319 ordinary, 5, 8–9, 11–12, 78, 80–1, 87, 103, 113n23, 115n50, 129–30, 149, 187, 236, 248, 268, 288, 315–16, 318–19, 321–2, 324–5, 330; see also common life; extraordinary orthopraxy, 123, 125 Osiander, A., 131 other minds, 201, 206, 229, 240 Owen, D., 10 Paduan Averröists, 49, 122 painting, 26, 80, 81, 99, 101–3, 220, 261, 287, 308, 316–17, 330 Parmenidean, 28, 199, 202, 207 Parmenides, 28, 61, 207; see also Parmenidean Pascal, B., 5, 29, 124, 130, 141, 215, 232, 266, 328–9

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passions, 3, 79, 86, 108–10, 128, 145, 162, 170, 190, 201, 210, 219, 221, 224–5, 227, 241, 243–7, 251–2, 255n6, 266, 300, 302, 311–14, 327, 329 pathology, 7, 146, 246; see also malady Patin, G., 136 Patrizi, F., 174n29 Paul, St, 120, 143 perception, 9, 12, 49, 55, 57, 81, 89, 92, 95, 98, 106, 119, 137, 145, 150, 195–7, 202–4, 216, 219, 221, 225, 264, 274, 283–320 Perinetti, D., 155 Philo of Alexandria, 113n25 Philo of Larissa, 24, 26, 30, 31, 93; see also scepticism, Philonian Photius, 83, 94, 118, 122 Pierris, G. de, 10 presentational-phenomenological model, 284 Pindar, 126 pithanon, 28–33, 40, 66, 69, 86, 262, 323–30; see also probability Plato, 19–29, 34, 55, 61–2, 70, 78, 89, 103, 105, 216, 219, 272, 285, 292; see also Platonic philosophy or Platonism Platonic philosophy or Platonism, 19–35, 41, 54–5, 61–2, 70, 78, 89, 93, 100–5, 118, 121, 132, 137, 216–19, 226, 246, 272, 285, 291–5, 320, 329 Middle Platonism, 25–6, 41 neo-Platonism, 25, 118 Plotinus, 25, 304n18; see also Platonic philosophy or Platonism, neo-Platonism Plutarch, 20, 23, 24, 25, 27, 42, 44, 117, 253n13 Polemo, 23 Pope, A., 101 Popkin, R. H., 3, 11–12, 39, 117–18, 124, 135, 139, 322 Porta, G. della, 294 possibility, 8, 57, 63, 65, 106–7, 135 152, 154, 205, 231, 233, 251, 266, 276, 280, 285, 289, 297, 299, 301, 306n34, 307n57, 327 pre-established harmony, 285 press, 3, 79, 114n47, 203–10, 240, 318, 322, 325, 327 Pringle, J., 21 probability (probabilia) or probabilism, 20–34, 42–3, 31–4, 37n29, 54, 57, 59–67, 62, 65, 68, 69, 83, 91, 93, 94, 99, 103, 123, 127, 130, 131, 143,

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145, 146, 148–9, 171, 191–2, 195, 210, 221, 268–81, 306n34, 312, 325–31 moral probabilism, 131 Proclus, 25; see also Platonic philosophy or Platonism, neo-Platonism prolepsis, 217–18, 232, 237, 278 proof, 62, 74n80, 92, 94, 147, 200, 270, 274–6, 279–81, 325, 327, 328 pseudo-Dionysius, 24; see also Platonic philosophy or Platonism, neo-Platonism Ptolemy, 175n75 Pufendorf, S., 59 Pyrrho of Elis, 26, 157 Pythagoreanism see neo-Pythagoreanism qualified description, 104–5 Quine, W. V. O., 269 Rabelais, F., 123 Raleigh, W., 157 Ramsay, A. M., 51 Ramus, P., 49, 137 rationalism, 28, 49–50, 55, 97, 120, 140, 190–2, 196–8, 198, 201–3, 218, 222, 231, 239, 272, 287, 296, 318, 325 realism, 29, 150, 159, 203, 314, 320, 323, 326, 329–30, 333n9; see also First Philosophy of the Real Academic sceptical non-realism (ASN), 31, 34 Academic sceptical realism (ASR), 32, 127, 149, 329–30 causal power, 5, 295–7 sceptical, 9–11, 12, 32, 34 see also New Hume debate reality, 7, 20, 27, 33–4, 50, 69, 78–80, 97–8, 126, 170, 189, 191, 199–200, 261, 267, 293, 299, 314–17, 326, 329, 330 recollection, 41, 44, 100, 102–5, 107, 109, 110, 170, 216–17, 263–4, 297, 300, 314, 316–17, 324, 327, 330; see also memoria Reid, T., 223, 267, 283 relations of ideas, 159, 190, 200, 202, 225, 273–4, 278 relativism, 89, 126 relativity see tropoi religion, 3, 10, 24, 26, 40, 47, 55, 64, 66, 79, 87, 104, 107, 123, 135, 138, 143, 149, 158–68, 194, 220, 227, 238–52, 261, 264, 266, 313, 319, 323

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Index report, 67, 104–5, 115n52, 170, 180; see also qualified description rapporteur, 67 reportage, 280 representation, 56, 64, 267, 285–7, 301, 317 Riboutet, I.-F., 155, 180n167 Rimini, Gregory of, 119 Robison, W., 6 Robortello, F., 123 Rochester (Wilmont), Lord, 152 Rohault, J., 58 Rosa Joannes, 43 Rousseau, J.-J., 165–6 Russell, B., 4 Russell, P., 10 Sadoleto, J., 49 Salisbury, John of (Johannes Parvus), 42–3 Sanches, F., 124 Savonarola, 123 sceptic, 1–14, 23, 34, 54, 82, 84, 86, 90, 118, 121, 124, 139, 151, 167–8, 171, 199, 206, 224, 227, 231, 233–5, 248, 251, 262, 270, 275–6, 281, 283, 289–91, 296, 299, 301, 311, 317, 325–7, 329–36 Academic, 34, 38n33, 45–7, 69, 129, 187, 314; see also scepticism, Academic akratic, 208, 213n51 country gentleman, 334n19 gentlemanly, 321 mitigated, 4; see also scepticism, mitigated Pyrrhonian, 79, 86, 94, 99, 101–2, 106, 108, 110, 153, 193, 237; see also scepticism, Pyrrhonian synonymous with atheist, 75n99, 168 true, 5, 296, 317, 331; see also scepticism, true urbane and rustic sceptics, 334n19 scepticism Academic, 3, 19, 21, 23, 24, 27, 31–5, 39, 41–3, 48–50, 54–5, 58–9, 65, 67–70, 77, 80, 96, 107, 109, 120, 121, 123, 130, 146, 149, 158, 168–71, 195, 260, 265, 311–12, 322 Clitomachian, 3, 31–4, 35, 171, 210, 272, 311, 314, 325, 328, 330–1 Metrodorian, 31–4, 43, 60, 62, 127, 149–50, 272–3, 314, 325, 327–30; see also realism, sceptical mitigated, 4, 10, 12, 32, 68, 168–9, 243; see also realism, sceptical Philonian, 24, 29–31, 314

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377

Pyrrhonian, 23, 26, 32, 62, 65, 67, 69, 78, 80, 86, 93, 96, 109, 110, 117, 137, 138, 149, 170–1, 232, 332 true, 5, 8, 317, 319, 331; see also sceptic, true Schmidt, C., 9 Schmitt, C. B., 39, 43, 117, 122 Scotus, D., 43 self, 50, 59, 142, 218–19, 264–5, 290, 298–302, 326; see also identity self-reflexive and self-subverting argument, 4, 144, 147, 280–3 Seneca, 44 sentiment, 109, 147, 160, 165, 170, 223–8, 243, 247–8, 260–2, 302, 311, 313–14, 318–19, 329 Servetus, M., 48 Sextus Empiricus, 3, 23–6, 29, 83–110, 126–9, 193, 199, 217, 237, 238, 278, 282, 323–4, 328, 330–1 Shaftesbury, A.-A. C., 1st Earl of, 59 Shaftesbury, A.-A. C., 3rd Earl of, 152, 190, 228 Sidney, A., 236 Sidney, P., 157 Simplicius, 118 skeptikos, 105, 109, 111, 170 Smith, A., 164, 166, 244 Sobrière, S., 136 Socrates, 20–6, 42, 61, 63, 78, 93, 100, 103, 146, 149, 163 sophists, 26, 93, 167, 239 Speusippus, 23 Spinoza, 53, 64, 100, 128, 134, 159, 190, 202, 207, 298 Stanley, T., 157 Stephanus, H. see Estienne (Stephanus), H. Stewart, D., 4, 2834 Stewart, M. A., 9 stoic, 24–8, 32, 41, 44–5, 47, 70, 88, 94, 102, 108, 155, 193, 218, 227, 232, 275, 311, 312, 315, 325, 329 stoicism, 25–8, 27, 34, 61, 227, 311 Strawson, P. F., 82, 208, 268–9 Stroud, B., 9, 284 Stuart D., 150 Sturm, J. C., 294 substance, 55, 60, 95, 99, 219, 230, 264–5, 282, 285, 289, 290–301, 317 superstition, 53, 162, 243–51, 270–1, 288 Susato, R., 223 Tacitus, 159 Talon, O., 43, 49 technê, 22, 233, 235, 260, 302, 322

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378

Hume’s Scepticism

technical, 3, 86, 109, 170, 210, 260–1, 302, 330 technology, 3, 110, 235, 260–1, 312 teleology, 239; see also final causes Telesio, B., 294 telos, 107, 115n60, 291, 313 Teresa of Ávila, 121 têrêsis, 87, 109, 170, 216–18, 237 Tertulian, 120 tétrade, 137; see also Diodati, É.; Gassendi, P.; La Mothe Le Vayer, F. de; Naudé, G. Thales, 22, 228 therapy, 8, 131, 266–7, 314, 324; see also cure Timon of Philius, 82 title principle, 6, 15, 314–17, 323, 334n12, 335n25 total extinction, 79, 144, 268, 272, 304n18 tradition, 1, 2, 5, 6, 8, 10–11, 19, 26, 33, 41, 45, 69, 79, 80, 86, 90, 96, 107, 109, 110, 119, 120, 123, 127, 128, 147, 153, 169, 170, 188, 194, 195, 204, 209, 215, 220, 238–40, 246, 265, 267, 272, 275, 280, 302, 313, 326, 330; see also custom; habit tranquillity, 147, 234, 313; see also ataraxia trilemma, 90, 137, 170, 277; see also tropoi tropoi (tropes), 88–92; see also modes Aenesidemus’ causal tropes, 96–8, 109, 285 Aenesidemus’ ten tropes, 83, 88–90, 126, 129, 287 Agrippa’s five tropes, 90–2, 97–8, 109, 113n30, 123, 127, 132, 137, 151, 170, 272–3, 283 Agrippa’s Trilemma, 90, 137, 170, 277 circle (diallelus), 90, 92, 113n31, 127, 174, 277, 279 diaphônia, 90–1, 93, 98, 108, 121, 123, 127, 132, 153, 234, 245, 324; see also alternative explanation hypothesis (hypotheseôs), 90, 142, 151–2, 194, 301 regress (regressus), 90–2, 97–8, 127, 271–7, 280, 283; see also iterative probability argument relativity (pros tí), 88–91, 98, 113n28, 141 Sextus’ two tropes, 92

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truth, 11, 21, 29, 32, 34, 35, 40, 41, 50, 55, 57, 58, 65, 68, 69–70, 76n112, 91, 94, 101, 105, 106, 108, 120, 123, 126, 127, 130, 139, 142–4, 146–9, 170, 171, 189, 191–3, 200, 209, 212, 221 moral, 49; see also moral political, 233–6, 251, 262, 266–8, 270–3 religious, 49, 56, 66, 273, 275–6, 280, 283, 296, 318, 329–31 tûchikos, 99, 108, 209; see also fate; Tyche Ṭūsī, N., 120 twilight probabilities, 60, 149, 325–7; see also probability Tyche, 100; see also tûchikos; Fortuna Tycho see Brahe, T. Ursus, N. Reimarus, 132 Valentiae, P., 49 Vaughn, T., 294 Vives, J. L., 137 Voltaire, 140 Warburton, W., 163–4 Whitman, W., 187 Williams, M., 11 Windelband, W., 150 wisdom, 20–2, 38n30, 40, 44, 99, 117, 120, 172–3n12, 193, 249, 260, 335n26 Wishart, W., 162 Wittgenstein, L., 8, 205, 269, 282, 310n94 Wolley, J., 157 Wright, C., 204 Wright, J. P., 10 Xenocrates, 23 Zeno of Citium, 26–7 Zeno of Elea, 53, 61, 65, 140, 277 zêtesis/zetetic, 105–7, 109, 110–12, 118, 127–8, 131, 170, 142, 262, 269, 271, 285, 297, 302–3, 327, 331 ongoing-critique zêtesis, 107, 110, 131, 302 ongoing-inquiry zêtesis, 106–7, 109, 110, 127, 131, 142, 297, 303 zetetic revisability, 107, 109, 170, 269, 297; see also fallibilism

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