i am gearing up to teach david hume's enquiry concerning human understanding in my modern phil class. in my opinion, hume is, first off, the best philosophical prose stylist ever to write in english. it's not strunk-and-white stripped-down plain-speaking, exactly, but through all its complexities it is at great pains to achieve clarity.
coming to it after teaching descartes, locke, pascal, spinoza, i am struck by the modernity of hume's voice: really maybe the whole culture made a turn to something more comprehensible to us in the intervening decades. but also hume's voice - personal and intimate and yet amusing and entertaining - is perhaps a bit more like the style of his novelist contemporaries than it is like locke or malebranche. obviously, he had benefitted greatly from swift and addison, as well as his own people like samuel johnson and adam smith and gibbon. it is not surprising that hume's great style could be turned to a variety of authorial purposes, and it sparkles still in his essays on various topics and in his histories.
and then he really is both a charming and a killer intellectual: swashbuckling, bold as hell, but more precise in his way than any of his predecessors and also more humble. he is disarming, genial, but devatsting. he will rip your concepts to shreds. here's a good example: the classic section IV, part II of the enquiry.
