This volume brings together twelve of Louis Loeb's articles on modern epistemology. Loeb places Descartes and Hume with Sextus and Peirce in a tradition that adopts psychological properties of belief as the standard for epistemic assessment. Increasingly naturalistic investigation of the faculties lead Hume and Reid to reject, and even invert, Descartes' doctrine of reason's superiority to sense-perception.

For Descartes, reason's authority is based on its irresistibility. The Divine validation of the hierarchy of cognitive faculties presupposes a psychological asymmetry between reason and sense-perception. Loeb exploits these claims to solve the problem of the circle in terms of reason's capacity to secure unshakable belief for fully reflective inquirers. Hume's interest in explaining unreflective knowledge leads to a lower psychological threshold, stable belief. Custom infixes belief, and uneasy feelings of conflict unsettle belief, without aid of reflection.

In Hume's moral philosophy, the stable, or steady and general, point of view gives rise to a normative theory that assigns special weight to the interests of the agent himself and his circle. Loeb also argues that Kemp Smith's commitment to idealism and inattention to the role of corrections to sentiment and vivacity account for his emphasis on the nonrationality of moral and factual judgment. This comes at the expense of his insight that Hume seeks to ground distinctions between reasonable and unreasonable judgment in human nature.

Externalist readings of the Treatise, not just a stability interpretation, explain how-as in Reid-animals, children, and unreflective adults can possess inductive knowledge. In essays considering Hume's relationship to Locke and later British philosophy, Loeb contends that in the first Enquiry Hume moves even further down Reid's roster of commonsense beliefs unsupported by argument. An extensive introduction updates Loeb's views in light of five chapters that postdate his 2002 book on Hume.