Why not go back to Bishop Berkley?
While both Berkeley and Hume are today wrongly classified at empericists (they were in fact idealists), Hume’s “philosophy” is much more rich in the bad ideas that would effect the future of philosophy. The positivists, for example, were strongly influenced by Hume, but mostly dismissed Berkeley, I think.
Regi
I came across this old article last night. You are the only active Freeper on this thread who still around. I wish I had read this back in 2007. It explains why the Republican Party is so divided. The GOP are Post Modernist Statists.
Heck, it explains the antipathy toward religion, the use of Gobal Warming as an organizing technique ( it doesn’t have to be true), and use of special interest groups to undermine what we thought of as set belief systems.
As far as I can understand in my brief reading on Post Modernism, it is an aggressive form of nihilism.
People my age never read about Post Modernism in college. I guess it was rejected as too fatalistic. We followed the line of Niebuhr, Bonhoeffer and Tillich. They never even mentioned Post Modernism.