Loud and petulant skepticism isn't clever. At least he inspired Kant, and that is clever.

A must-read.

David Hume wrote perceptively on a wide range of topics: logic, ethics, epistemology, psychology, aesthetics, politics, history and economics. His work is mostly in the form of essays, not multiple-volume tomes; but Hume could say more of substance in a 10-page essay than most philosophers could in 1000-page book. Following Hume's death, many 'philosophical' topics became specialized fields of study; and philosophy's scope (now confined primarily to logic, epistemology and metaphysics) shrank rapidly from the catch-all discipline of the 17th and 18th Century. With a handful of exceptions, philosphy, post-Hume, has been characterized by the arid mysticism and scholastic hairsplitting of the Middle Ages; he was the last of the giants.

One of the greatest and most relevant philosophers even to this day. His scepticism is necessary and useful, and his claim that you can't logically draw a normative conclusion from empirical observations is far too often forgotten in moral and political debates. Also his discussion of the nature of moral as some sort of feeling or emotion also strikes me as excellent, and is far better than all sorts of metaphysical explanations.