Is there philosophy in Hume’s Essays? In this contribution, I argue that the form of the Essays implies an ongoing philosophical project with a significant sceptical difference from the systemic form of Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature. There is evidence in the Essays that Hume thought of himself thinking philosophically in these works, even if philosophy is narrowly conceived as the search for general principles associated with the ‘abstruse philosophy’ of the Treatise and Enquiries. The distinction between the forms of the Essays and the form of the Treatise indicates, however, that the Essays are not merely continuing the Treatise’s project. The pedagogy of the Essays, revealed in their form, teaches that philosophy is an ongoing project, a sceptical search that is sceptical even about its limits, rather than the system that the young Hume was confident could be completed within the boundaries of a treatise. There is not philosophy in the Essays. The Essays are philosophy.

Hume’s ‘four essays on happiness’ are distinctive in Hume’s oeuvre, and not merely in the 1741 volume of Essays, Moral and Political in which they appeared. They are written in the style of philosophical monologues, with Hume ‘personating’ a representative of each of the main, late Hellenistic philosophical sects in turn. Each such representative, however, engages critically with the philosophical positions staked out by his rivals and antagonists. The ultimate question each of the philosophical sects seeks to answer is: what is the true end (summum bonum) of human life, and where is true contentment to be found? Scholars have tended to be preoccupied with the question of which sect best articulates Hume’s own underlying philosophical commitments. This chapter argues that such an approach is mistaken, because Hume dismissed the quest for the summum bonum altogether. Hume presented all the late Hellenistic philosophical sects as capturing something important about human life, and about the purpose of philosophical activity. Yet ancient moral philosophers had ultimately failed to develop the ‘science of man’ that Hume took to be the greatest achievement of modern philosophy. The four essays, then, reveal Hume’s keen – and lifelong – interest in the history of moral philosophy, and his attentiveness to the distinctive (and superior) character of modern approaches to the discipline.

Assessments of Lucian’s attitude towards philosophy have tended to focus on how much he really knew about philosophy, which school he preferred, and if his texts can be read as philosophy. This chapter argues that Lucian’s attitude is best understood as reflecting the central position philosophy occupied in imperial elite culture. As Lucian satirises elite paideia from within that same paideia, criticising imperial philosophy implied assuming a philosophical stance or appropriating philosophical concepts and vocabulary. Lucian explores themes that were current in philosophical discourse of the Roman Empire, such as the expectation of matching doctrine and deed, salaries for philosophical education, and ancient wisdom. Whilst he shows awareness of technical terminology, his writings are mostly concerned with protreptic and the question if one has to dedicate oneself fully to a philosophical life. His ubiquitous satire, even in works deemed ‘more serious’, does not permit firm conclusions about Lucian’s own ideas and solicits multiple interpretations on the part of the reader.

This chapter examines the irony, complexity, and pleasure in rhetorical ingenuity evident in the satirical essay in English, taking as its central exemplars some of the key historical figures in that tradition in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, from the Irish authors Jonathan Swift and Maria and Richard Lovell Edgeworth through to the Romantic essayists Charles Lamb, Thomas De Quincey, and Thomas Love Peacock. It demonstrates how the prose essay became a powerful satirical form in the Georgian period, and discusses the tonal richness and ambiguity which render the satirical essay a key subgenre in the tradition of the prose essay in English. It pays particular attention to the links between satire, colonialism, the Gothic, and the sublime in the form of the essay.

The flourishing of the essay as a protean literary form in an age marked by growing interest in essaying systematic knowledge reflects a tension within eighteenth-century empiricism. Two divergent subgenres emerged from this tension. The conversational essay, first, drew upon a Montaignian tradition rooted in scepticism, dialogue, and performative rationality; these essays were associated with a form of pragmatic empiricism at ease with the idea of human knowledge as intersubjectively constituted in the public domain. On the other hand, the systematic essays of the Enlightenment, spurred on by John Locke’s attempt to establish ‘order’ in intellectual inquiry, deployed the essay as an instrument for establishing Universal Truth and what Leibniz termed ‘demonstrative knowledge’. In considering the epistemology of the eighteenth-century essay in Britain, this chapter explores not only how this bifurcated empiricism influenced the development of the essay, but also the ways in which the essay reconstituted empiricism itself.

In ‘Platonist Notions and Forms’, Mauro Bonazzi explores an aspect of the Platonists’ engagement with Stoic epistemology, namely the Platonists’ appropriation of the Stoic ennoiai, conceptions or notions, to show that Plato’s doctrine can provide a satisfactory answer to the problem of the foundation of knowledge, which Stoicism has proved unable to solve. The Stoic ennoiai, (conceptions) or phusikai ennoiai (natural conceptions) are notions naturally arising in the human mind and constituting the basic elements of human reason. They are ‘natural’ in the sense that humans are naturally disposed to acquire them, and they are koinai (common) in the sense that all humans have them or are disposed to have them. They are also invariably true and therefore can serve as criteria in order to increase knowledge, promote scientific understanding and contribute to the good life. It is these ennoiai that the Platonists integrate in their own reinvention of Plato’s epistemology and employ in their polemics against their principal rivals.

Matthew Duncombe’s chapter ‘Relative Concepts’ asks: what are relative concepts according to ancient philosophers? Duncombe argues that Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics have a clear concept of relatives, distinct from incompleteness approaches, which he calls ‘constitutive relativity’. The core idea of constitutive relativity is that a relative is constituted precisely by the relation it bears to an exclusive correlative. Duncombe discusses particular philosophers and schools in detail. The examination of Agathon’s speech in Plato’s Symposium illustrates that Socrates understands relative concepts in general and love in particular, on the constitutive model. Aristotle’s concept of relatives in Categories 7 draws on Plato, but Aristotle addresses a worry that relative concepts might be vacuous. Duncombe argues that a Stoic relative concept is the concept of a relative that relates exclusively to a correlative. He examines Sextus’ sceptical argument, which raises a worry about any conception of relativity where relatives relate exclusively to their correlatives.

The view of evidence, defeat, and suspension put forth here delivers the result that paradigmatic scepticism about knowledge and justification is an instance of resistance to evidence. This chapter argues that this result is correct. In order to do that, I look at extant neo-Moorean responses to purported instances of failure of knowledge closure (Pryor 2004, Williamson 2007) and warrant transmission and argue that they are either too weak – in that they concede too much to the sceptic – or too strong – in that they cannot accommodate the intuition of reasonableness surrounding sceptical arguments. I propose a novel neo-Moorean explanation of the data, relying on my preferred account of defeat and permissible suspension, on which the sceptic is in impermissible suspension but in fulfilment of their contrary-to-duty epistemic obligations.

Chapter 3 deals with the possible encounters of the West with Buddhism from Alexander the Great’s expedition to India in the fourth century BCE to Saint Jerome’s belief that the Buddha was born of a virgin in the fourth century CE. It deals in particular with the question of whether the Greek historians of antiquity were identifying Buddhists among the Indian philosophers that they encountered, the difficulties that we have in interpreting their words, and the care we need to take in coming to any conclusions that they were encountering Buddhism. It examines also what is unarguably the first reference to the Buddha in the West in Clement of Alexandria’s Stromateis (Miscellanies) and the importance of Alexandria in the Buddha’s coming to the West. It also examines the much-disputed question of the extent to which the Buddha may have influenced Greek philosophy and particularly Pyrrho, the traditional founder of Greek scepticism. In conclusion, the chapter looks at Saint Jerome’s awareness of the Buddha as the founder of a religion and the role of the tradition of the Manichees in bringing knowledge of Buddhism to the West.

“This chapter focuses on the two main philosophical questions raised by Swift in Gulliver’s Travels. First is the problem of perspectivism, the idea that objectivity is impossible because knowledge is circumscribed by human subject positions. Differences between the four parts of Gulliver’s Travels suggest that Swift recognized no stable relationship between truth ‘in itself’ and what individuals believe about the world, but only comparisons in quality or scope between different perspectives. Second is a question about the relative validity of two different positions in Christian ethics: the optimistic neo-Stoicism espoused by Swift’s friend Alexander Pope, and the pessimistic Augustinianism preferred by Swift himself. In Gulliver’s Travels, Swift gave eloquent expression both to his scepticism about the beneficence of God and nature and to his narrow estimation of the limits of human reason.”

Scepticism is the second approach to metaphysics that Kant considered an alternative to his ‘critical’ investigation. It is David Hume who plays the role of the paradigmatic representative of this viewpoint. I begin by analyzing three different readings of Kant’s understanding of Hume’s scepticism about causality. Hume’s scepticism is seen as posing a challenge to natural science and ordinary knowledge, as a problem that puts into question the possibility of general metaphysics, or as a ‘dialectical’ form of scepticism primarily directed against special metaphysics. I suggest that the first reading is implausible. I argue that the second and third readings are compatible once one distinguishes between the perspectives of transcendental philosophy and the critique of pure reason, respectively. Finally, I show that one objection that has been raised against the third reading can be silenced if we interpret Kant’s reading of Hume from the standpoint of his history of pure reason.

This chapter provides a broad overview of existing anthropological work on exemplars and proposes a new relational way of understanding exemplarity. Most existing philosophical and anthropological work on exemplarity has taken an explicitly functionalist approach. Academics have often valued exemplars because of their ‘articulatory power’ to connect the world of things with the world of ideas. This chapter advances this conversation by examining exemplarity as a relationship between persons and things rather than an attribute of either. In doing so, the chapter explores the social effort that is required to stabilize exemplars in the world, and it shows how the creation of exemplars always goes hand in hand with scepticism and critique. Finally, the chapter investigates whether the modern world has been overcome by scepticism towards exemplars such that we now face a ‘crisis of exemplarity’ in which only ‘everyday exemplars’ can be recognized.

Recent theorizing about cosmopolitanism has emphasized the need to embrace diversity as a constituent element informing the shared value of cosmopolitanism. This development suggests the need for an alternative genealogy from received accounts which typically trace cosmopolitanism from the Stoics through Kant, on the premise of moral continuities and consensus. My chapter explores the work of John Locke and his engagement with scepticism as a different way of encountering diversity with implications for a reimagined cosmopolitanism. But Locke’s inheritance is not straightforward and presents as many dilemmas as solutions to the challenge of reconciling difference with universal commitments. His acceptance, at some level, of diversity is not the prelude to an expression of human solidarity, framed around a nascent cosmopolitan ideal. Locke’s ultimate pessimism on these matters is a reminder of the difficulties involved in the contemporary project of accommodating divergent philosophical forces.