Hume in se
My most popular post by a huge margin is on Hume and Popper , although I'm not sure if it gets so many hits because it is insightful or because philosophy professors keep sending their students to it as an example of how not to analyze philosophy. I finally got around to reading Hume's famous work "An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding" and I was curious whether it would cause me to rethink my other post. In a word, no, because that post was mostly (I realize now) about Popper. But I'm still glad I read it. After slogging through Spinoza and Leibniz, I can't say what a pleasure it was to read a book in the Anglophone tradition, where the author's primary effort is to be understood. That, and Hume's empiricist outlook, make this book a pleasure to read even where I disagree with it, and that does not include his generally sceptical approach. Hume tries to show that we can only ever assume causality, never know it directly, which is unobjec