Skepticism as ethos: David Hume’s response to the epistemological revolution

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article examines David Hume’s mitigated skepticism as enacted through an ethos that refashions moral philosophy’s public identity by appealing to the virtues of England’s transforming scientific community in the eighteenth century. More specifically, this article shows how Hume’s Enquiry, amid competing efforts to escape rationalistic dogmatism and an emerging bourgeois readership, refashions moral philosophy through an antithetical scheme that subverted the Enlightenment’s obsession with certitude. In doing so, Hume invites readers to understand the purpose of moral philosophy as the pursuit of doubt over truth, an idea designed to humble the scientific profession at the peak of the epistemological revolution. Moreover, I propose two conceptual takeaways that extend beyond my close reading of Hume’s work. First, I explain how Hume’s philosophical persona draws upon his interpretation of Renaissance humanism, an orientation that focalizes rhetorical ethos by contrasting Aristotelian argumentation with Ciceronian eloquence. Second, I provide historical commentary on Pyrrhonism’s decline during the Enlightenment and the broader political implications of arousing suspicion toward knowledge.