Hume's meek philosophy among the Milanese

The article looks closely at the interpretation of Hume’s ideas and character in the Parisian letters of Alessandro Verri to his brother Pietro. Alessandro interprets Hume’s philosophy as a mitigated (“meek”) acceptable version of the militant scepticism he encounters among the philosophes. As he is in dispute with Beccaria (and partly with Pietro), he sees Hume’s dispute with Rousseau as a perfect parallel, where Alessandro plays the British modest philosopher against the French boastful enthusiasts. He also offers his version about the French Holbachian attitude towards Hume’s style of thought in religious matters. By a series of Humean vignettes the essay reconsiders Hume’s approach to religion, his topic of the “vicious religionist” and his supposed and famous denial of ever having met an atheist. It also tells us something about the ways in which Hume’s philosophy is apt to be appropriated by “cutting off its noble parts”: by philosophers and historians of philosophy today as well as by Alessandro Verri yesterday

In and out of the well: flux and reflux of scepticism and nature

The article tries to capture the style of Hume's scepticism and to offer hints on its nature as a process. Hume wrote that "If truth be at all within the reach of human capacity, 'tis certain it must lie very deep and abstruse", and that "Philosophy would render us entirely Pyrrhonian, were not nature too strong for it". The article considers these expressions of scepticism, their sources and their double-edged structure throughout Hume's works, and shows that philosophical scepticism, insofar as it is an abstruse philosophy, can only be intermittent