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They [some special kind of philosophers] think it a reproach to all literature, that philosophy should not yet have fixed, beyond controversy, the foundation of morals, reasoning, and criticism; and should for ever talk of truth and falsehood, vice and virtue, beauty and deformity, without being able to determine the source of these distinctions.

It's from Hume's "Enquiry concerning human understanding", so the it's a little bit old.

I have troubles with understanding this passage.

What does the construction "should not yet have" express? Let's insert this construction in some simple sentence: "John should not yet have cleaned his room". I have three suggestions about its meaning, please comment on their rightness:

  1. John was not yet obliged to clean his room.

  2. This is the same as "John has not yet cleaned this his room". But then the role of "should" is unclear.

  3. John had the obligation to clean his room but failed to fullfil that. In this case I'm gonna need you to explain me the syntax. Is then in this construction implied something like "but"? "Should [but] not yet have"?

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  • It's the negation of this usage
    – Stuart F
    Commented Nov 16 at 10:23
  • In the quoted excerpt, it's merely a more literary paraphrase of 'has not fixed', with a nod to possibility rather than certainty. // The usage in "John should not yet have cleaned his room" involves either deontic modality ('... the police told him to leave it while they searched for clues') or epistemic modality ('it is very probable that John will not have got round to cleaning his room yet').
    – Edwin Ashworth
    Commented Nov 16 at 15:02
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    If you have, at the very beginning of this book, found this to be problematic, chances are that you will be distracted by many more similar problems as you keep reading it. You may find it helpful to look at earlymoderntexts.com, which contains Jonathan Bennett's 'translations' of many classical texts from this era into the kind of English that sounds more natural to a present-day reader, and still fully preserve all the subtleties of their philosophical content.
    – jsw29
    Commented Nov 16 at 15:58

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"... that philosophy should not yet have fixed..." is a dependent clause. Additionally it is indirect speech: The word "should" signals that the indirect discourse contains not a fact but an assumption (as affirmed again at the end of the citation: "... without being able to determine the source of these distinctions...").

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