Was Hume a Skeptic?
I hear skeptical atheists (as opposed to the logical variety) laud David Hume, the great 18-century Scottish philosopher, who is thought to have been a thoroughgoing skeptic. Hume famously wrote that "reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them." So I wonder whether these atheists would endorse this passage from Hume's An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding , section 12, part 1, in which he criticizes Descartes's proposed path to knowledge: There is a species of scepticism, antecedent to all study and philosophy, which is much inculcated by Des Cartes and others, as a sovereign preservative against error and precipitate judgement. It recommends an universal doubt, not only of all our former opinions and principles, but also of our very faculties; of whose veracity, say they, we must assure ourselves, by a chain of reasoning, deduced from some original principle, which cannot possib