Meet David Hume: The Cheerful Skeptic

Le bon David

Hume's Treatise 'fell dead-born from the press,' as he put it, laughing. He kept writing anyway, and his gentle demolitions — causation as habit, reason as the slave of the passions, belief owed only in proportion to evidence — rebuilt philosophy. His enemies couldn't even hate him; he was too kind at dinner.

Dying well

When Boswell visited the dying Hume expecting a deathbed conversion, he found instead perfect cheerfulness — a skeptic serene without certainties. Even his critics conceded the point: how you hold your beliefs matters as much as which ones you hold.

Why they belong at your table

Seat him to calibrate belief to evidence — and to learn how to disagree so pleasantly that everyone keeps thinking.