It is in Hume's Essays and History that we find the reporter of all sides, the doubter of exclusive claims, the distruster of systems, the person determined to find some possible truth in a variety of viewpoints and exclusive and absolute truth in none.
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Monday, September 14, 2020
The Reporter of All Sides
Andrew Sabl, "David Hume: Skepticism in Politics?," in John Christian Laursen
and Gianni Paganini, edd., Skepticism and Political
Thought in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015), pp. 149-176 (at 151):