He strives for a synthesis of the skeptical interpretation of Plato, defended by the Academic skeptics Arcesilaus, Carneades and Philo, with that of Antiochus' dogmatic interpretation, according to which Plato held doctrines of his own.
A more skeptical interpretation, prevalent among some veteran Western security analysts, is that the Iranian regime simply did the bare minimum to buy time.
Recent interpretations of B34 reject the skeptical interpretation in favor of other less extreme readings.
(See, for instance, Hampton 1995; Millgram 1995; Korsgaard 1997. For objections to this skeptical interpretation of Hume, see Setiya 2004).
Furthermore, the passage in The History of England, lends support for a skeptical interpretation of Hume's philosophy.
Numenius' reaction against a skeptical interpretation of Plato may have been triggered by attempts chronologically close to him, such as those by Anonymus in Theaetetum (1st c. CE?), Plutarch, and Favorinus (1st-2nd c. CE), to revive a form of academic skepticism (see Opsomer 1998).
The statistical modeling of individual difference is still an art form in its early stages of development and first results will require extremely cautious and skeptical interpretation.
(For further discussion, and criticism, of this "vehicle view" see De Pierris (2001 200202).) Recent non-skeptical interpretations like Garrett (1997), and, following him, David Owen (1999), take naturalism one step further and deny that there is even a preliminary skeptical stage.
We believe, contrary to non-skeptical interpretations like Garrett's (note 5 above), that Hume's appeal to circularity here is normative or justificatory: Hume is saying that a circular argument for the principle of the uniformity of nature is simply begging the question and, as such, it is a fallacious argument not simply one that happens to be causally inefficacious.
The leading contemporary representative of the non-skeptical interpretation of this argument, Don Garrett (1997), maintains, on the contrary, that Hume, in these sections of the Treatise and the Enquiry, is only making the purely descriptive claim that "reasoning" cannot be the cause of our inductive inferences.
"Despite the seductiveness of the conclusions, I'm skeptical about the interpretations," he says.
