Hume described himself as an Academic skeptic and aligned himself with the skepticism of Socrates and Cicero. I argue, though, that Hume transformed the meaning of Academic skepticism by associating it with an experimental rather than dialectical method. In this essay, I distinguish between those aspects of Cicero’s Academic skepticism that Hume adopted and those he discarded in his presentation of mitigated skepticism in the first Enquiry. I then consider the implications of Hume’s transformation of Academic skepticism for Hume’s polite eloquence in the Essays, particularly the essays on happi­ness, which are often described as possessing “Ciceronian” and “dialectical” elements. Hume’s transformation of Academic skepticism is essential to helping readers understand not only Hume’s alleged neo-Hellenism, but also the aims of his philosophical project.

Hume’s theory of pride has been dismissed due to the contingent relation between passion and object. But why did Hume state the theory as he did? Why did he give two accounts of pride, one holistic and one atomistic? This paper considers Hume’s reasons for giving two accounts, and how he unified them. The holistic account enables Hume to explain how moral distinctions are made, whereas the atomistic allows him to anchor morality in human nature. The accounts are unified by the distinction of feeling pride and being proud: a steady passion of pride would not count as that if it did not contain feelings of pride identified by their introspective quality, and would not be a state of pride without the causal relation of ideas.

I suggest that Hume’s recantation, in the Appendix to the Treatise, of his ac­count of the idea of personal identity in section 1.4.6 hinges on the contrast between the first-personal cognitive roles of that idea and its imagination-based explanation. In stark, if implicit, contrast with Locke, Hume’s account divorces personal identity from consciousness, considering oneself as oneself. But, later in the Appendix, Hume realized, if imperfectly, that something was missing from the idea of self he had constructed. I suggest that what is missing is the intimate consciousness of ourselves that idea should allow us to achieve. While Hume despaired to find a solution to this problem, a change in the background of his earlier theory—a change he had available and which is perhaps alluded to in a letter to Kames—could have made his original account consistent with the first-personal features of the idea of self.

In this paper I argue that Hume’s decision to include an account of curiosity within his theory of the passions is what gives Book 2 of the Treatise its distinctive shape, in which an account of what Hume calls “indirect” passions precedes an account of the nature of the will, which is itself followed by an account of the “direct” passions, then curiosity. On my reading, Hume concludes his theory of the passions with an account of curiosity because this is where it ought to go, given how Hume understands the love of truth to arise in human nature. Not only this, but I contend that Hume’s need to account for the nature of curiosity within his theory of the passions can explain his decision to open Book 2 with a discussion of the indirect passions, rather than the direct passions.

A previously overlooked letter written by David Hume to the Comtesse de Boufflers in 1766, read alongside an unpublished letter to Hume from the British official John Roberts, sheds important new light on Hume’s views on race. The letters concern a famous episode in eighteenth-century history, the enslavement and redemption of the “African Prince,” William Ansah Sessarakoo, and his subsequent time as a celebrity in London in 1749–50. Hume’s account of these events, based on Roberts’s letter but re­shaped through a pattern of strategic omissions, additions, and prejudicial commentary, conveys an unmistakable attitude of contempt toward Africans. Hume’s letter, which is his longest piece of writing on any African topic, shows that the racist views stated in the notorious footnote on human “species” or “kinds,” added to the essay “Of National Characters” in 1753–54, were not isolated or incidental, but rather the expression of a settled attitude. Hume’s letter likely also represents his critical response to a lost play by Boufflers, based on a story in The Spectator that attributed qualities of nobility to slaves in the New World.

In this paper, I examine the epistemological positions of Philo and Cleanthes in the Dialogues. I find that Philo’s attitude towards skepticism mirrors that of the first Enquiry, most notably in its endorsement of mitigated skepticism, and its treatment of religious reasoning as distinctly discontinuous with science and philosophy. Meanwhile, Cleanthes’s epistemological framework corresponds to that of the Treatise, most notably in its adoption of something like the Title Principle, and its treatment of some forms of religious reasoning as broadly continuous with science and philosophy. It is not merely that the epistemological systems of the Treatise and Enquiry are echoed in Cleanthes’s and Philo’s positions respectively; these frameworks seem to clarify, provide a substantive basis for, and render more complete their somewhat piecemeal statements on this topic in the Dialogues. Thus, Philo’s and Cleanthes’s dispute is not limited to the theological, but extends to the epistemological.

Since its relatively recent publication (1995), Hume’s Fragment on Evil has re­ceived little sustained analysis. References to the Fragment tend to be scarce, and at best, only parts of the Fragment are cited at any time. This essay presents an interpretation of the Fragment that considers the text in its entirety, emphasizing its overall argumentative features and structure. This essay begins by providing an introduction to the background of the Fragment, arguing that Hume was likely responding, in part, to Butler’s Analogy. It then examines the aims and methodology of the Fragment. In this, it considers Hume’s naturalistic and experimental epistemology, and his mitigated skepticism. The Fragment is presented as a discussion about our ability to know the moral attributes of God. The rest of the essay discusses the three strategies Hume employs to answer this question. Further, it considers Hume’s own distinction between a philosophical response to the question (its foundation in reason) and a psychological one (its origin in human nature). Throughout the essay, I provide an evaluation of Hume’s key arguments and point out several connections the Fragment has with other texts in Hume’s corpus. I conclude by suggesting that these connections indicate that the Fragment represent Hume’s own views.