Hume is one of my favorite philosophers not least for his reluctance to admit into his schema unnecessary “explanatory” elements. That said, one can’t help but wish such an acute mind could have been born later and so have had access to (i) set theory, which cuts through so many apparent problems that are in fact confined to language alone, and (ii) modern understanding of how the brain works (e.g. a loose pattern-recognition engine doomed forever to fall prey to false positives).

Without these two pieces of knowledge, Hume’s brilliance was doomed to wander among the cul-de-sacs inherent in language, a mechanism of imprecision, itself.

Perhaps Feynman was reasonably accurate when he opined that (to paraphrase him) philosophy was what people did before we had science.