1 For academia.edu readers: this essay was commissioned for a special issue of Cosmos + Taxis, on ‘Hume’s political epistemology’ (ed. Elena Yi-Jia Zeng). This is the pre-proof version, and may be revised prior to its eventual publication. I will upload the published version once it’s available, but should you wish to cite it in the meantime, please contact me directly (tim.stuart-buttle@york.ac.uk). John Dewey and the ‘sceptical and revolutionary’ Humean tradition Tim Stuart-Buttle (University of York) Introduction: the reconstruction of a Humean tradition In reconstructing the intellectual development of a philosopher, it can be illuminating to mark those points at which they appear to position themselves in a new relation to past philosophers and philosophical traditions. As an example, one might consider Derek Parfit. Parfit’s moral theory, as articulated in Reasons and Persons (1984), acknowledged its debt to Henry Sidgwick’s Outlines of the History of Ethics (1886) as the best work ever written on that subject, and ‘could hardly have been more anti-Kantian’ (Darwall 2014, p. 80). By On What Matters (2011), conversely, Kant is placed alongside Sidgwick as the greatest of western moral theorists, and as an equally important inspiration for, and interlocutor in, Parfit’s enterprise. In such cases, a past philosopher who was once considered irrelevant or even actively hostile to one’s method or central lines of argument is newly-recognised to be an ally – as one who is especially worth listening to, and engaging with. This essay argues that John Dewey’s intellectual development is marked by a similar shift in relation to a predecessor who, he came to think (and argue), offered valuable resources that had remained largely untapped by contemporary philosophers (including his earlier self). If Parfit’s lifelong admiration for a nineteenth- century philosopher (Sidgwick) was later accompanied (and qualified) by an esteem for an eighteenth-century predecessor (Kant), so in the case of Dewey an initial (and abiding) attraction to Hegel was later supplemented (and qualified) by an appreciation for David Hume’s phil osophy. Dewey’s claim that his early admiration for Hegel left ‘a permanent deposit in his thinking’ has recently received scholarly attention (J.M. Dewey 1939, pp. 17–8; Good 2006; Levine 2015). The same cannot be said of his turn to Hume or, indeed, of how Dewey’s reappraisal was founded upon a