I’ve been reading Critique of Pure Reason and An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding in the evenings. It should be no surprise that the former is a more tedious read than the latter, David Hume being the better stylist than Immanuel Kant. In faireness, one presumes that translation from the German might add some overhead in terms of obscurity (though I’ve heard that the German isn’t the model of clarity either). Nevertheless, I’m struck by the fact that Kant’s prose reminds me a great deal of Stephen Jay Gould. I think this is interesting because Gould drew so much inspiration from out of favor Germanic conceptions of biological processes and paradigms, in particular the importance of bauplan. An analog to Hume might be Richard Dawkins’, who if excessively simple in his formulation nevertheless gains in economy as a result.
P.S.: I haven’t read Hume since college, and I have to say I’m a lot less impressed than I once was. Dude was wrong a lot!
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