David Hume has traditionally been assumed to be a soft determinist or compatibilist,1 at least in the “reconciling project” that he presents in Section 8 of the first Enquiry, entitled “Of liberty and necessity”.2 Indeed in encyclopedias and textbooks of Philosophy he is standardly taken to be one of the paradigm compatibilists, rivalled in significance only by Hobbes within the tradition passed down through Locke, Mill, Schlick and Ayer to recent writers such as Dennett and Frankfurt.3 Many Hume scholars also concur in viewing him as a determinist, for example (in date order) Norman Kemp Smith, Barry Stroud, A. J. Ayer, Paul Russell, Don Garrett, Terence Penelhum, George Botterill, John Bricke, and John Wright.