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Michael Berkowitz's avatar

Perhaps you're basing your opinion on a much larger corpus than the snippet you quoted (one would think so), but the snippet itself offers no basis for your discussion of it. No sentence that begins with β€œI am apt to suspect..." can be attacked for having insufficient supporting evidence.

It's been forty-five years, but from what I remember of Hume from my high-school Philosophy class he was among the most sensitive to the difference between what he suspected and what he 𝘬𝘯𝘦𝘸.

He may have had racist opinions by our standards, or even by the standards of his own time, but frankly a) you have nothing here to suggest that* and b) why would anyone care?

* Yes, if you consider the acceptance of the idea of race-related traits to be racism, then even his tentative opinion would define him as a racist. That's a plausible definition, too, except that let's be honest -- nobody who throws accusations of racism around nowadays thinks of it that way. They think in terms of oppression.

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