I have found Hume's TREATISE ON HUMAN NATURE to be a MAJOR key to understanding both Hegel and Heidegger. The only real difference seems to be the effort of the Germans to make their terminology technically strict and seemingly ontologically enduring. Whereas Hume's approach is absolutely necessary to understanding Heidegger's approach to skepticism, solipsism, everyday experience, history, making promises, the fictions of the law, the nature of transcendence and the world and the necessary idea of God to establish those two concepts (also, the severe delimiting of the scope and importance of the concept "God" to the point of triviality where a person can do without it altogether -- EXCEPT in the establishing of transcendence which is necessary for establishing the context of the world, the near- ontological security of cause-and-effect, and the only justifiable ground for the 'reality' of abstractions). God belongs a tool of reason.
The same can be seen happening in Kant and Hegel. Kant knew large portions of the TREATISE from a German translation of a near hysterical attack on Hume by Beattie translated before 1760. Roman Catholic theologians emphatically refer to discuss the TREATISE as Hume's major work because, as the prominent Father Robert Sokolowski clearly demonstrated, Hume's "moderate skepticism" was a fictional reality that stood between A) radical or Pyrronistic Skepticism which necessarily limited reality only to sense impression WITH NO ABSTRACTIONS WHATSOEVER thus destroying the very basis of action but is also the only legit accomplishment of strictly rational philosophy (this is also reflected in Hegel and Heidegger) & B) "vulgar understanding," tradition, custom, common sense and morality which one must have to simply be able to act and live. It is obvious in the viewpoint of modern philosophy this seems to be leading up to an "existential decision".
But Hume rejects that for his compromise fiction of "moderate skepticism" which he describes quite openly. And John Henry Cardinal Newman also rejected, very emphatically before his 1845 conversion to Catholicism (see Frank M. Turner's great study of the crises of scepticism in Newman that developed in Newman's TRACTARIAN movement. "Tract 85" is a drastic statement of the skeptical approach WITHIN religion. You can find much of this at the site "John Henry Newman: The Father of the Second Vatican Council," http://ic.net/~erasmus/RAZ22.HTM.
Everything in Hume's strict philosophy is based on sense impression, "passion," and "belief," i. e., faith cause and effect will universally make sense. Hume is also closely related to Ludwig Wittgenstein (see David Pears), and Newman's GRAMMAR OF ASSENT closely follows what Wittgenstein says on certainty ("Certainty is a feeling" both Hume, Newman, and Wittgenstein say.) and religious belief ("to understand religion, observe the behaviour of a group of religious people."). There is a great essay on the internet by a graduate of Trinity College, Dublin, a great school, @ NEWMAN AND WITTGENSTEIN AFTER FOUNDATIONALISM, by Angelo Bottone (needs adobe reader I think).
Gary C. Moore
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