system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Why don't most Hume scholars view him as a skeptic?

My understanding is that the dominant position in Hume scholarship at present is that he was an epistemological naturalist.

Now, the evidence I have that Hume was a skeptic, is:

1. Hume calls himself a skeptic in the *Abstract* to the *Treatise*.

2. The passage about our being rendered Pyrrhonian at the end of the first book of the *Treatise*.

3. He argues that our beliefs in the external world, induction, and reason itself cannot be rationally supported.

Given all of this, what is the case for saying Hume was a naturalist?
gpt
It's probably best to think of this shift as being one of emphasis.  No one thinks that Hume's philosophy doesn't involve a lot of skeptical maneuvering.  The question is this: is his philosophical program in service of the skepticism or is the skepticism in service of his philosophical program?

Folks studying Hume today think the latter - i.e. that Hume's skepticism is in service of his naturalism.  Unlike the Pyrrhonian, Hume does seem to think that we can know quite a bit, but what we can know is less reliant on traditional metaphysical arguments and less grounded in reason than those he was attacking believed.