Hume and the Legacy of Pyrrhonian Scepticism

The last chapter of Part One’s historical quartet traces the development of Pyrrhonism across medieval, Renaissance, and early modern philosophy. Extending the work of Charles B. Schmitt, Richard H. Popkin, Luciano Floridi, et al., the chapter assesses the sceptical thought of Montaigne and devotes subsequent sections to the Pyrrhonian dimensions of work by François de La Mothe le Vayer, Pierre Gassendi, Pierre Bayle, and Pierre-Daniel Huet. Because Hume is typically understood to be anti-Pyrrhonian, Chapter Four develops a three-plank justification for attributing deeply Pyrrhonian dimensions to his work. Plank one is bibliographic and argues that Hume enjoyed access to Pyrrhonian texts and likely used them. Plank two argues for a hermeneutic of suspicion when reading Hume, largely grounded in the hostility he and others faced on account of their supposed scepticism. Plank three is conceptual and argues that Hume’s work exhibits philosophical qualities remarkably similar to those of historical Pyrrhonism. Synthesizing the results of Part One of Hume’s Scepticism, Chapter Four closes with a twelve-point General Framework defining scepticism generally.

Hume and the Legacy of Academic Scepticism

Chapter Two of Hume’s Scepticism charts the development of Academic scepticism from Cicero and Augustine, through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and into early modernity. The exposition is organized around sceptical ideas that anticipated or may have influenced David Hume, who describes himself an ‘academical’ sceptic. The chapter also sets out Cicero’s influence upon Hume, scepticism at the college in La Flèche where Hume wrote much of A Treatise of Human Nature, and Hume’s self-conception of Academic scepticism. Accounts of sceptical ideas in Marin Mersenne, Simon Foucher, John Locke, Pierre-Daniel Huet, and Pierre Bayle set the stage for Hume’s own Academicism. The chapter closes with a five-point General Framework defining Academic Scepticism.

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?...

Technai: Dogmatism and the Technologies of Doubt

Chapter Seven undertakes to articulate Hume’s scepticism with regard to the third dimension of the Pyrrhonian Fourfold—technê. More particularly, the chapter examines the instruments he deploys against dogmatism, that is his technologies of doubt. The chapter devotes special attention to Hume’s sceptical arguments regarding the epistemic capacities of reason and the senses, especially in regard to the primary/secondary quality distinction and what Hume calls ‘false philosophy.’ The text argues that Hume is an entirely radical sceptic who refuses all epistemic and metaphysical claims, including those related to personal identity, the immateriality of the soul, hidden substances, energies, and powers, including the causal power. The chapter explains what exactly counts for Hume as dogmatism and what is not consistent with scepticism. The chapter explores the import to empiricism of Hume’s Copy Principle.

Phûsis: The Fatalities of Appearance

Nature is the first component of the Pyrrhonian Fourfold; and Chapter Five argues that Hume’s naturalism is constitutive of his scepticism, rather than opposed to it or distinct from it. The chapter’s excursus describes a properly sceptical naturalism, a naturalism stripped of epistemic and metaphysical claims and import. Chapter Five grounds its argument first upon Hume’s ideas about animality and the association of ideas and proceeds to lay out the subtle interplay of necessity and contingency in Hume’s theories concerning causality, reason, perception, and imagination. The chapter interprets the reassertion of nature at the end of Treatise 1.4.7 as a crucially Pyrrhonian-Apelleticmoment moment that presents atûchikos finding about human fortune and fate. Nature more generally is rendered in Hume as the press of humanity’s fatedness to impressions or appearances in common life. The text compares Hume’s ideas with those of various rationalists, as well as with the work of Immanuel Kant, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Stanley Cavell.

Hume and Ancient Academic Scepticism

Chapter One of Hume’s Scepticism sets out a short history of Academic scepticism, tracing its development from Socrates and Plato’s ‘Old Academy’, through Arcesilaus’ ‘Middle Academy’, into Carneades’ ‘New Academy’, and Philonian scepticism, as well as Cicero and the divergent stream breaking off from the Academy that would become Pyrrhonist thought. Academic scepticism is set off from its stoic competitors. Chapter One crucially describes both the development of sceptical probabilistic thinking and, anticipating Hume, the non-dogmatic doxastic position developed by Clitomachus of Carthage in contrast to the dogmatic doxastic and probabilistic theory of Metrodorus of Stratonikiae, which anticipates Locke.

Pathê: Hume’s Non-Dogmatic Philosophy

Chapter Eight returns to the topics with which Chapter One ended, and it completes Part Two’s reading of Hume through the Pyrrhonian Fourfold. The chapter examines Hume’s so-called Title Principle and argues that Hume is a doxastic sceptic and that his sceptical theory of belief is very much like that of the non-epistemic, non-realist Academic scepticism articulated by Clitomachus of Carthage as he reinterpreted Carneades. The chapter argues furthermore that Hume’s theory of probability is pointedly non-epistemic and non-metaphysical. Comparing Hume’s non-dogmatic probabilism to Locke’s Metrodorian realism, Chapter Eight examines Hume’s so-called gentlemanly scepticism, as well as his understanding of scientific standardsand the non-dogmatic quality of common life.

Ethos: The Great Sceptical Guide

Custom is the second dimension of the Pyrrhonian Fourfold, and Hume positions custom and habit centrally in his thought. Chapter Five unpacks and weighs the philosophical import of Hume’s thinking about custom and habit. Chapter Six describes the way Hume’s use of custom and habit inform Hume’s theory of general ideas and anticipates hermeneutic philosophy, as well as howHume’s Copy Principle enacts the historicity of Pyrrhonian recollection. The text goes on to show how custom and habit inform Hume’s ideas about nature, contingency, reasoning, moral and aesthetic judgment, and the human self. The chapter then moves into an investigation of Hume’s political theory and his ideas about religion. The chapter shows how the complex and sometimes apparently inconsistent weave of Hume’s thinking about politics and religion is coherently organized around central features of scepticism. With an eye towards the various virtues and pathologies of politics and religion, Chapter Six explores Hume’s critical ideas about opinion, true religion, moderation, tranquillity, balancing, common life, metaphysics, faction, enthusiasm, and superstition.

Hume and Ancient Pyrrhonian Scepticism

Chapter Three charts the development of ancient Pyrrhonism, from its origins with Pyrrho of Elis through Timon of Phlius and Aenesidemus, concluding with the chronicling work of Sextus Empiricus. The chapter unpacks the conceptual apparatus of Pyrrhonism in some detail, including: scepticism as practice (agogê), its Fourfold way of observing appearances (phainomena), its observance (teresis) of the pre-theoretical understandings (prolepsis) of common life (ho bios ho koinos), its argumentative modes (tropoi, both Aenesidemus’ ten and Agrippa’s five tropes), its suspension of judgment (epochê), its practice of balancing oppositions (isosthenia), its non-assertive silence (aphasia) about what is hidden (ta adêla), its critiques of causality, its Apelletic method, its critical and inquiring openness (zetesis), its quasi-goal of tranquillity (ataraxia), and its anti-Platonic ideas about recollection. The chapter closes with a seven-point General Framework defining Pyrrhonian Scepticism.