Self and Intersubjectivity
This chapter argues that Ciceronian, ‘Academic’ scepticism provides a model for Hume’s attempts to harmonise rationality and sentiment. It enables Hume to engage in the language game of reader participation through which essayists such as Addison and Steele had already begun to model a sociable public sphere. Hume’s conversion from ‘difficult’ to ‘easy’ empiricism is connected to a broader tension within Enlightenment thought between the value systems associated respectively with modern Newtonian science and classical ideas of virtue and eudemonia. While Hume bases judgement upon feelings rooted in custom and habit, common-sense thinkers such as Thomas Reid ground it in a form of intuition that is philosophically foundational. Cutting across this difference, however, is a shared belief that society underpins rationality. In Hume’s ‘intercourse of sentiments’, Reid’s ‘prescience’ and Stewart’s notion of the ‘stamina’ of intellect, sociability, conversation, association, and correspondence become the natural and social conditions of meaningful thought.