Abstract

This thesis is about the philosophy, or philosophies, of agnosticism. As such it takes the form of a critical exposition of the work of five philosophers--Hume, Kant, Hamilton, Mansel and Spencer. Hume and Kant have been given considerable space because they provided much of the theoretical groundwork for the 19th century agnostics. The sceptical and critical elements in their thought created substantial doubt about the possibility of knowledge of God, or of the world as an independent reality, or the mind as a real entity. ;Their work, either explicitly or by implication, revealed incoherences in a widely held assumption about knowledge. Stated generally, this assumption was that knowledge is constituted by privately entertained sensations, images, ideas or propositions, which somehow correspond to a reality external to the mind. Stated differently, this problem of knowledge was expressed in the separation of reality into three fictional entities which were assumed to be real--the mind, the world, and God. The possibility of knowing, or not knowing, was as a consequence defined by the possible relations between these entities. ;The 19th century agnostics Hamilton, Mansel and Spencer, inherited this tripartite picture of reality along with the concept of knowledge which it embodied; but they also inherited the scepticism and criticism of Hume and Kant. There is consequently an uneasy mixture in their thought between, on the one hand, some form of realism which asserts a self-evident duality between the individual mind and the material world; and, on the other hand, a critical awareness of the limits and conditions of human knowledge. Sometimes they take the problems of knowledge of God as a separate issue from knowledge of the self and the world; sometimes these issues are seen to be inseparable. ;Consideration of these issues leads me to the thesis that, only if the 19th century agnostics had been able to free themselves from these ontological assumptions would they have been able to develop a consistent and critical agnosticism; furthermore, that such an agnosticism provides a possible solution to conceptual problems in both religion and science