A quarter century ago, John Richetti published the most sustained literary analysis to date of Locke, Berkeley and Hume's major works, arguing that ‘Philosophical writing in this period is self-conscious about the difficult relationship between thought and the expository necessity whereby thought acquires style and becomes persuasive by extralogical or rhetorical means’. He distinguished Hume as ‘a rather more interesting writer than Berkeley or Locke’, one who ‘always conceived of his philosophy in literary terms and saw his problems as essentially rhetorical’. Thus, Richetti rendered Hume exemplary of a set of eighteenth-century thinkers whose work must be approached as philosophical writing rather than as philosophy tout court. Characterizing Hume's writing as ‘a distinct rhetorical enactment and a crucial supplement to his thought’, Richetti paid particular attention to the ways in which his ‘tightly controlled style’, with its ‘terse understatement, irony, mock concession, and … austerity of ornament’, often served as a counterweight to the enormity of his claims and the ‘extreme implications of his findings’, especially in the Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40)

Like Richetti, I am interested in the ‘larger, cumulative effects’ of Hume's prose and in its ‘operation and sequence’, particularly in the ways that complicated manipulations of serial order generate its curious accretive power.