Skepticism and Naturalism: Hume revisited

Abstract

Skepticism, Naturalism and Transcendental Arguments Strawson's interest in Kant did not end with the publication of The Bounds of Sense in 1966. He continued to give regular graduate seminars on Kant for the following twenty years, and, in a series of articles, he both amended and developed the views he had established in that book. Kant had said that it was Hume who had awakened him from his “dogmatic slumber” and set him on the path to his critical philosophy. While Strawson continued to see Kant as the greatest of the moderns, he has also been prepared to see Hume as his hero on particular issues of continuing interest. He can view Hume as both a naturalist and a sceptic, with a tension between those two outlooks that in some ways is reminiscent of the tension he finds between Kant's empirical realism and his transcendental idealism. Strawson gave form to his reflections on Hume in the Woodbridge Lectures at Columbia University, subsequently published under the title Skepticism and Naturalism: Some Varieties (1985). As the theme of this work, Strawson appropriately takes a quotation from Gibbon: “The satirist may laugh, the philosopher may preach; but reason herself will respect the prejudices and habits, which have been consecrated by the experience of mankind”.