Humean Skepticism and the Metaphysics of Impressions: Questions for Falkenstein

I engage with two themes from Lorne Falkenstein’s Consciousness, Time, and Skepticism in Hume's Thought. First, I consider two of Falkenstein's claims concerning Hume’s metaphysics of perceptual experience: that complex sensory impressions are “undivided wholes” and that the existence of such impressions is inconsistent with a principle central to the Treatise’s arguments against the infinite divisibility of extension. Second, I raise questions for Falkenstein’s reading of Humean skepticism, according to which Hume takes skepticism to serve a remedial function. For Falkenstein's Hume, the psychological effect of encounter with radical skeptical arguments is that one ceases to form beliefs that are at odds with the available evidence. I argue that this does not succeed in resolving the apparent tension between Hume’s skepticism and his project of constructing a science of human nature.