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John Shand, The Cambridge Companion to Hume's Treatise, The Philosophical Quarterly, Volume 66, Issue 265, October 2016, Pages 887–889, https://doi.org/10.1093/pq/pqv103
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Extract
It was good to be reminded what an exciting philosopher Hume is. When one starts doing philosophy, it is often Hume's ideas that really awaken one to the problems of philosophy and the search to solve them. Nearly all of the problems there are are here, clearly laid out in their undressed most intractable looking form. There may be other ways of starting to do philosophy, there may be those who think that Hume's starting place is fundamentally wrong-headed and creates philosophical problems which, if you started somewhere else, would not arise at all, would not be the subject of extended attempts to solve them; but if true it is far from obviously so and involves a lot of convoluted philosophical arabesques to be shown, which itself leaves the flavour of a trick being perpetrated. This is not to say that arguments that include the idea that embodiment and active engagement with the world are necessary for concept generation should not be taken seriously—they might even be right. However, it may still seem, when all the evasive manoeuvring is set aside, that how Hume lays things out is what you are up against. Not only does Hume show what the fundamental problems are, he gets you to see that there are problems, and that these are problems that cannot be swept aside by bluff jocular common sense. Reading Hume and about Hume has the sense of a philosophical coming home.
