Hume's two views of modern scepticism

Hume's position in the history of philosophical scepticism can hardly be questioned. But the nature of his own philosophical scepticism is a matter of contention in both the historical and philosophical literatures. In this essay, I argue that a philosophical reconstruction of Hume's scepticism needs to pay attention to the way in which Hume and his contemporaries understood the place of sceptical thinking in the history of modern philosophy. When looked at in this context, Hume's philosophy of knowledge and the understanding is self-evidently sceptical. It is so, because it develops both a critical and a positive view of what a sceptical attitude implies. From a critical perspective, Hume aims to show that human reason is incapable of being its own foundation. From a more positive perspective, Hume sketches a phenomenology of the understanding by developing a probabilistic and self-referential view of philosophical knowledge, one which is not different from common knowledge and which relies on the workings of human nature and the imagination to make sense of the world and of our actions.