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Hume's Internalist Epistemology in EHU 12[Note 1. In the references to Hume's texts throughout, ‘THN’ refers ...]
Author(s) -
Qu Hsueh
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
philosophy and phenomenological research
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.7
H-Index - 39
eISSN - 1933-1592
pISSN - 0031-8205
DOI - 10.1111/phpr.12367
Subject(s) - skepticism , internalism and externalism , parallels , philosophy , epistemology , naturalism , focus (optics) , economics , operations management , physics , optics
Much has been written about Kemp Smith's (1941) famous problem regarding the tension between Hume's naturalism and his scepticism. However, most commentators have focused their attention on the Treatise ; those who address the Enquiry often take it to express essentially the same message as the Treatise . When Hume's scepticism in the Enquiry has been investigated in its own right, commentators have tended to focus on Hume's inductive scepticism in Sections 4 and 5. All in all, it seems that Section 12 has been unduly neglected. This paper seeks to address Kemp Smith's problem from the standpoint of Hume's treatment of scepticism in EHU 12, and finds an interesting internalist account that makes sense both of Hume's discussion in EHU 12, and his aims in the Enquiry as a whole. Moreover, it is one that is of substantive philosophical interest, having intriguing parallels to contemporary epistemological accounts.