ABSTRACT
Hume’s philosophy has been more highly valued during this century than ever before. That is not necessarily because the real interest and importance of his views have come to be correctly understood and appreciated, but perhaps partly because recent philosophers have claimed to find in Hume the clearest origins of important contemporary ideas. In any case, his virtual canonization by the generally positivistic philosophy of the twentieth century was certainly not the result of his having repudiated or reduced to absurdity the assumptions of his empiricist forbears. That conception of his achievement was congenial to Hume’s idealist critics in the nineteenth century, but other aspects of his thought have attracted more recent and more sympathetic interpreters.
