Brian Ribeiro

While Hume is famous for his development and defence of various arguments for radical scepticism, Hume was bothered by the tension between his ‘abstruse’ philosophical reflections and ordinary life: If he often felt intensely sceptical in his study, he nonetheless felt genuinely unable to take these sceptical views seriously when he returned to the concerns and activities of everyday life. Hume's published work shows a deep and ongoing preoccupation with this tension, and I believe it also shows that Hume's view about the ‘durability’ of scepticism (that is, the extent to which sceptical insights can have an abiding impact on our cognitive lives) underwent an evolutionary development throughout the course of his publishing career. In this paper I propose to trace these textual developments in detail. In particular, I will argue that Hume's concern for intellectual stability is what drives the evolution, as he struggled to understand the ‘durable value’ in scepticism

Recent literature on skepticism has raised a nearly univocal voice in condemning skeptical argumentation on the grounds that such argumentation necessarily involves our adopting some nonordinary or unnatural perspective. Were this really so, then skeptical conclusions would not speak to us in the way in which skeptics think they do: We would be "insulated" from any such conclusions. I argue that skeptical argumentation need not rely on any nonordinary or unnatural standards. Rather, the skeptic's procedure is to offer a critique from within. Having given my argument for this claim (which I call the 'continuity argument'), I consider and respond to two important objections. I conclude that the skeptic has a powerful meta-argument to be deployed in defending the legitimacy of his skeptical conclusions against the slings and arrows of (those I call) the half-true theorists.