It is interesting how the Roman Catholics can accurately analyze philosophers whom they reject as wholes and absorb parts of them for their own use. Most of the time their results seem silly and the rest trivial. However, I speak from the ignorence of distaste.

I ran across Sokolowski's article on Hume purely by accident. I was intrgued by the fact that he (and another Catholic scholar Hurley) prefered Hume's TREATISE ON HUMAN NATURE as the most important of all of his works. With Sokolowski as well as Karol Wojtyla, they emphasize phenomenology, but SEEM to just take the parts that appeal to them. Edmund Husserl and Max Scheler (JPII's favorite) are poor subjects to rely on.

They, like the Catholics, have a purely positive roal for philosophy (Scheler was a Catholic for a while, starting out half-jewish. His weak minded son was a storm trooper in the SA and died in the street fighting in Berlin before Hitler came to power.) which distorts their results because they all have pre-ordained and morally approved goals to achieve.

Heidegger picked and chose what he wanted from both, butr he did that to absolutely everybody. He could combine it into a more coherent fashion because the goal of his philosophy was not at all positive but black, vicious, wild anarchistic nihilism. Thereby the worst in human being was always grist for his mill. Though he never mentions Hume, his thorough grasp of the Humean aspects in Kant and Hegel means he had to have read at least the TREATISE -- and very thoroughly. He understood very well Hume was right, but also understood in the ways of "everyday understanding" one had to operate by and that "belief" and "passion" are the only ground of abstract knowledge derived from sense impression, he had the excuse for a savage latitude of behaviour.

Hume as well as Heidegger believed one's individual character was their destiny. Hume says you can change it but it is very difficult. Luckily he was the ideal of British decency and reasonableness.

Heidegger reflected all the worst aspects of traditional German character as it had developed in the German Empire under Wilhelm II. Hume deliberately set up a fiction of "moderate skepticism" to operate a dialectic between the two unreconcilable opposites of Pyrronistic Skepticism and "vulgar understanding" so each could correct the deficiencies of the other. Also, he never wanted to "convince" but to "converse politely."