One curious aspect of Stanley Cavell’s investigations into skepticism is his relative neglect of one of philosophy’s most important skeptics, David Hume. Cavell’s thinking about skepticism is located in relation to Wittgenstein, Kant, Emerson, Austin, and others. But while Hume is occasionally mentioned, those encounters are brief and generally dismissive. In “Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy,” for example, Cavell remarks that while “Hume is always a respectable place to begin,” Kant is “deeper and obscurer” (MWM, 88). The important Cavell scholar Timothy Gould follows Cavell in this, writing that: “Hume’s tactic of playing billiards as a relief from the melancholy of reflection and skepticism is a relatively unsophisticated strategy, compared to some that I know of.”
