Impressions of Hume

the long version

Davide Panagia's Impressions of Hume: Cinematic Thinking and the Politics of Discontinuity is volume 15 of "Modernity and Political Thought," the Rowman & Littlefield series in contemporary political theory. Through close attention to David Humes's theorie's of sensation, Panagia conceptualizes the modern even more radically (though also more literally) than many of the previous authors in this series. In what at first seems to be an anachronistic as well as wildly curious claim about a philosopher of the eighteenth century, Panagia holds that Hume was a cinematic thinker. While devoting attention to how a historical thinker such as Hume is read and misread, used and abused, in the modern intellectual world, Panagia also focuses on developing a theory of Humean perception and by doing emphasizes the contemporaneity of Hume's thought.