348 Book Reviews Donald C. Ainslie Hume’s True Scepticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Pp. xiv + 286. isbn 978-0-19-959386-6. Donald C. Ainslie’s Hume’s True Scepticism presents the first book-length treat- ment of Book 1, Part 4 of the 1739 A Treatise of Human Nature by David Hume (1711–1776). In doing so, the volume represents an important accomplishment, and one can reasonably expect it to become required reading for those wishing to come to terms with Hume’s skepticism. Treatise 1.4 marks perhaps the most literary account of skeptical crisis in the western philosophical corpus—and also one of its most difficult. It is perhaps for this reason that the crisis is not reprised in the Enquiries or other later texts. Unpacking the logic and upshot of the dense passages of T 1.4 remains one of the most controversial but also one of the most important tasks of Hume studies, as well as of the study of skepti- cism per se. Ainslie’s contribution to that work is considerable. Ainslie’s line of interpretation is in the first place biographical. In 1734, Hume wrote to an unnamed physician in London how he had suffered “the Disease of the Learned,” brought on by his immersion in philosophical work, and that he had sought therapy from his intellectual paralysis in “Business & Diversion” (Letter 1:14, #3, in Hume 1932). In Ainslie’s view, the exposition of Treatise 1.4 was “inspired by the personal experiences detailed in” that letter (5). “The cli- max” of T 1.4, in Ainslie’s medicalized reading, “amounts to a nervous break- down” (218). Ainslie shows how “Medical theorists, from the Greeks onwards, linked scholarliness to melancholia” (12), and that “Hume would have known of a general link between melancholy, hypochondria, and the life of study from a variety of sources, both popular and more specialized” (13)—perhaps George Cheyne’s The English Malady (1733) or, in John Wright’s (1980) view, Mandev- ille’s 1730 Treatise on the Hypochonodriack and Hysterick Diseases (Mandeville 1976). Hume would have also known that exercise and sociable concourse were commonly prescribed remedies. The idea that skepticism marks a kind of self- induced madness has also been advanced recently by Lisa Levers (2015), which for her explains why Hume answers the skeptical moment not with argument but with therapy. More philosophically, Ainslie distinguishes his own reading from four other general lines of interpretation that have characterized the Hume literature. (1) “Skeptical” readings, such as that of James Beattie and most of Hume’s earli- est interpreters have in Ainslie’s nomenclature argued that the skeptical sub- version of reason and the senses is correct and that therefore we ought not to invest what they show us with belief—even though we cannot do so. (2) “Naturalistic” readings such as those of Norman Kemp Smith (1905) and Don © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi 10.1163/22105700-20181303Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 07:24:16AM via free access <UN> Book Reviews 349 Garrett (1997) are, in contrast, anti-skeptical. In their view, Hume invests the way nature overwhelms skepticism’s negative conclusions with positive epis- temic significance. Nature, properly mixed with reason, entitles reason and be- lief. (3) Dialectical readings such as those of Annette Baier (1991) and Donald W. Livingston (1984, 1989) read the skeptical crisis as a moment on the way to a better non-skeptical view. (4) Moral interpretations of Hume’s skepticism, such as those of Michael Ridge (2003) read Hume as advocating skepticism not because it is logically compelling but instead because it serves the moral projects of opposing religious and political pathologies. Ainslie’s more “philosophical” interpretation of Hume’s true skepticism reads it as making positive discoveries about the epistemic and logical limits of philosophical inquiry that nevertheless endorse reason, science, and the vulgar beliefs of common life. Ainslie argues that Hume discovers that the traditional philosophical project of self-understanding through “reflection” is intrinsically problematic, that it cannot transcend common life and that at- tempts to surpass those limitations inevitably lead to incoherence, crisis, and “false philosophy.” It is a moral Ainslie emphasizes by placing François Lem- oyne’s 1728 painting of “Narcissus” staring into his own reflection on the jack- et of the book. Ainslie’s is, however, not an entirely new line of interpretation. Barry Stroud preceded Ainslie in 1977, writing in a similar albeit narrow- er vein that for Hume, “Philosophical reflection on the nature of perception inevitably leads to scepticism” (115). Yves Michaud concurred in 1985 report- ing that while he found at first blush that Hume’s “skepticism stemmed from the defects in the analysis of natural beliefs and from the deliberate attack against metaphysical systems,” he later came “to realise that it also is the result of this self-reference of philosophical research: we do not know how to assess our philosophical beliefs themselves” (36). Michaud followed this claim with another similar to Ainslie’s about Hume’s return to common life, maintaining that turning away from reflection “implies that we stop insisting on the radical unsteadiness of beliefs and that we do not scrutinize any longer the puzzling self-reference of philosophical statements. Actually, …the escape from pyr- rhonism requires a relative blindness to the question of the nature of philo- sophical inquiry and, on the contrary, a renewed dogmaticism [sic] concerning the certainty of the science of human nature qua empirical science” (46). Mar- tin Bell in 2002 also diagnosed “the reflective standpoint” itself as the cause of “sceptical doubts” (184), but he maintained that at least in “one species” of philosophy (i.e., the natural science of the “anatomist”) “natural belief can be harmonized with profound reflection” (185). Ainslie’s exposition exceeds these precedents, however, not only in the detail and complexity of his textanalyse but also in the way he distinguishes international journal for the study of skepticismDownloaded 8 (2018) from 343-353Brill.com09/27/2021 07:24:16AM via free access <UN> 350 Book Reviews Hume’s account of reflection from Locke’s. While others such as Malebranche hold that reflection can take a (a) detached, virtually transcendent position (b) in relation to the field of perception as a whole, Ainslie finds (§4.3) Hume arguing instead that reflection discovers that it can achieve no such position. Instead reflection must remain “immersed” (133, 253). Ainslie finds in this remark from the “Introduction” to the Treatise a prefig- uring summary of what he determines to be Hume’s limiting objective in T 1.4: “Moral philosophy has, indeed, this peculiar disadvantage, which is not found in natural, that in collecting its experiments, it cannot make them purposely, with premeditation, and after such a manner as to satisfy itself concerning ev- ery particular difficulty which may arise. When I am at a loss to know the ef- fects of one body upon another in any situation, I need only put them in that situation, and observe what results from it. But should I endeavour to clear up after the same manner any doubt in moral philosophy, by placing myself in the same case with that which I consider, ’tis evident this reflection and premedi- tation would so disturb the operation of my natural principles, as must render it impossible to form any just conclusion from the phaenomenon” (Intro 10, in Hume 2007). Cicero had maintained along similar lines that “it is possible that [the organs of the body] are changed by the process of dissection and uncov- ering” (Academica [Acad.] 2.39.122, in Cicero 2006); and so it goes for Hume’s anatomy of the mind. The proper lesson Hume draws from this insight, Ainslie concludes, is that we should both (a) retreat from philosophical self-reflection into a standard, dogmatic, empirical science and (b) abandon the philosophical attempt to justify or locate an ultimate ground for our epistemic claims about the world. The negative theses about reason and the senses are not the lessons of skepti- cism. Rather, escaping through the horns of the so-called “dangerous dilemma” (T 1.4.7.6), the true skeptical upshot is a gain in self-understanding that philo- sophical self-reflection is internally incoherent but that empirical science is epistemically sound (204), even though it must remain ultimately unjustified. We must suffer an “irremediable vulgarity” about perception (241; a position influenced by Livingston 1984), while also accepting that we cannot penetrate into nature “beyond human experience” (242; following Kenneth Winkler’s 1991 anti-New Humean position). Ainslie argues that for Hume the vulgar are guilty of a “constitutive” but not an “epistemic” error with regard perceptual objects. Mistaking the image of a man on a television screen for the real man it depicts is a constitutive “illu- sion” but not an epistemic error, since one nevertheless, says Ainslie, does in that situation still know the real man (107–108). Of course, one can know the real man in such a situation—or not. Ainslie does not explain how we can international journal for the study of skepticismDownloaded from 8 Brill.com09/27/2021 (2018) 343-353 07:24:16AM via free access <UN> Book Reviews 351 decide whether or not the vulgar actually do know the real man. In the case of a television screen, one can go to the studio and check. One can compare the television-screen-man with the actual-man. With the screen of perception, however, as Hume acknowledges, one cannot (T 2.2.6.2). As Hume famously writes: “Let us fix our attention out of ourselves as much as possible: Let us chace our imagination to the heavens, or to the utmost limits of the universe; we never really advance a step beyond ourselves, nor can conceive any kind of existence, but those perceptions, which have appear’d in that narrow compass.