"Soluzione scettica": modestia, curiosità e piacere (secondo Hume)”

“Sceptical solution”: Humean modesty, curiosity and pleasure. 1. The pleasure of philosophy. 2. Sceptical abstruseness: the check of the passions. 3. Dogmatic passions: the check of scepticism. 4. False humility and modesty. 5. The faith in diffidence. 6. Philosophers or hunters? Passions save us from (unlimited) scepticism, and (limited) scepticism save us from passions. Pleasure is the origin of sceptical philosophy. Curiosity and ambition, and the necessity to destroy false metaphysics and superstition, lead the “true” sceptic into abstruse speculations. He is always cautious, but temporarily assertive. He follows his inclination. He may praise modesty and diffidence (“be sober and remember to be diffident”), but rejects humility and mortification (“monkish virtues”). “Curiosity, or the love of truth” is the source of all his enquiries. There cannot be three passions “more nearly resembling each other” than those for hunting, gaming and philosophy. During our whole life our actions depend on each other: Hume used to fire at magpies (when he was young); he was a complete adept at whist (when he was older); and he was always busy in the discovery of truth, “if truth be at all within the reach of human capacity”.