When I first saw this on social media, I thought it was a joke.  It's not.  If members of the Edinburgh philosophy department don't raise hell about this (some members are, alas, confirmed knuckleheads), then let's cancel them too!  Indeed, let's cancel the University of Edinburgh!  

What's bizarre about the mass delusion now gripping the Anglophone world, even outside the U.S., is that no one yet knows whether George Floyd was killed because he was Black, rather than poor, marginalized, and non-cooperative (which cops hate!), the factors that actually explain most police killings. 

And what's even worse is that none of this has anything to do with Hume.  

Hume was a man of his time in some ways, but we don't read him to figure out whether we should invest in the slave trade.  We read him because he transcended his time, because he touched the fundamental questions about what it is to be a human being in the world:  what do we know, what should we value, what is there really?   In that regard, he is like Plato, the enemy of democracy, and Aristotle, the defender of slavery, as well as Hobbes, Kant, Marx and Nietzsche:   he speaks to all human beings, despite his parochial prejudices. 

That these analysts of human being should be erased from the landscape, because of their local prejudices, is a symptom of our times, not simply of the narcissistic stupidity of "identity politics" and the craven spinelessness of academic administrators, but, more importantly, of the reactionary forces of the moment which  will love nothing better than the erasure of the cosmopolitan ideals we have inherited:  the forces of reaction, after all, are committed to vindicating the local traditions and prejudices and customs.  They can happily join forces with the identity narcissists in eradicating those thinkers concerned with the human.

ADDENDUM:  Leave it to the Edinburgh knucklehead Aidan McGlynn to try to rationalize this.  Of course it's not strictly a "cancellation" (that's actually why I put it in quotes), since it didn't involve a living person losing their job, but it shares with that phenomenon the effort to demote someone's status in response to meritless mob outrage.  Nobody thought putting Hume's name on the building was an insult, obviously taking it off is meant to signal disapproval and demotion, even if it is, as McGlynn says irrelevantly, a "tall brown, tower block" .  (I wonder what the knucklehead's colleagues interested in Hume think about this?  Will the mob soon come for their seminars?)  Enzo Rossi (Amsterdam) points out the additional irony that the former "Hume Tower" will now be known simply as its address "40 George Square," after King George who opposed the abolition of slavery.  (ADDENDUM:   Enzo tells me now that, unlike the George Square in Glasgow, the one in Edinburgh is not named after the King.  That's fortunate considering Hume's new name!)