ZusammenfassungHumes Enquiry concerning Human Understanding entfaltet eine Konzeption von Freiheit und Verantwortlichkeit, der zufolge beides mit der These der »Notwendigkeit« vereinbar ist. Hume wirft dabei die Frage auf, ob ein Mensch oder Gott für moralisch böses Handeln dieses Menschen verantwortlich ist, wenn Gott existiert und als Schöpfer der Welt auch das Handeln von Menschen bestimmt. Der Aufsatz untersucht, welche Antwort Hume auf diese Frage gibt und welche Folgen sich aus seiner Antwort für eine angemessene Konzeption von menschlicher Freiheit und Verantwortlichkeit (...) ergeben. Wie deutlich wird, legt Hume sich darauf fest, dass in dem Fall, den er beschreibt, sowohl der Mensch als auch Gott frei und verantwortlich Handelnde sind. Wenn das zutrifft, müssen die Kriterien für Freiheit und Verantwortlichkeit grundsätzlich anders aufzufassen sein, als es der Forderung nach einem »ersten« oder »absoluten« Anfang oder einer »letzten« oder »wahren« Verantwortlichkeit entspricht. Humes Diskussion verdeutlicht, dass wir diese Forderung in Frage stellen sollten. (shrink)

Many think that the aim of Hume’s Dialogues is simply to discredit the design argument for the existence of an intelligent designer. We think instead that the Dialogues provides a model of true religion. We argue that, for Hume, the truly religious person: believes that an intelligent designer created and imposed order on the universe; grounds this belief in an irregular argument rooted in a certain kind of experience, for example, in the experience of anatomizing complex natural systems such as (...) the eye; and retains this belief, on the basis of these reasons, even after careful scrutiny. We argue that two of the Dialogues’s characters, Philo and Cleanthes, exhibit true religion. A third character, Demea, exhibits false religion and a persistent impiety. Taken as a whole, we see the Dialogues as an educational performance for the benefit of Pamphilus, Cleanthes’s ward, as well as for the benefit of readers of the Dialogues. Specifically, we think, given that its lessons concern theology and the principles of religion, the dynamics of the Dialogues’s discussion and the interplay between its characters can be seen as a demonstration of a method for becoming truly religious. (shrink)

I argue that acknowledging Hume as a doxastic naturalist about belief in a deity allows an elegant, holistic reading of his Dialogues. It supports a reading in which Hume's spokesperson is Philo throughout, and enlightens many of the interpretive difficulties of the work. In arguing this, I perform a comprehensive survey of evidence for and against Philo as Hume's voice, bringing new evidence to bear against the interpretation of Hume as Cleanthes and against the amalgamation view while correcting several standard (...) mistakes. I ultimately isolate the interpretation of Philo's Reversal at the end of the Dialogues as of paramount importance, and show how my naturalistic interpretation makes this, and other notoriously difficult passages, unproblematic. (shrink)

Historically, many Christians have understood God’s transcendence to imply God’s properties categorically differ from any created properties. For multiple historical figures, a problem arose for religious language: how can one talk of God at all if none of our predicates apply to God? What are we to make of creeds and Biblical passages that seem to predicate creaturely properties, such as goodness and wisdom, of God? Thomas Aquinas offered a solution: God is to be spoken of only through analogy (the (...) doctrine of analogy). Gavin Hyman argues Aquinas’s doctrine of analogy was neglected prior to the early-modern period and the neglect of analogy produced the conception of a god vulnerable to atheistic arguments. Contra Hyman, in this paper, I show early-modern atheism arose in a theological context in which there was an active debate concerning analogy. Peter Browne (1665–1735) and William King (1650–1729) offered two competing conceptions of analogical predication that were debated through the 19th century, with interlocutors such as the freethinker Anthony Collins (1676–1729), theologian/philosopher George Berkeley (1685–1753), and skeptic David Hume (1711–1776). Lastly, I discuss the 18th century debate over theological analogy as part of the background relevant to understanding Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. (shrink)

Nearly four decades after David Raynor attributed to David Hume an allegorical Scots militia pamphlet from the early 1760s popularly known as Sister Peg, there is still no scholarly consensus about whether the author was in fact Hume or his friend Adam Ferguson. Using new evidence that has emerged since the appearance of Raynor’s edition in 1982 – including information about Sister Peg’s publication history, Ferguson’s handwritten corrections and revisions in the Abbotsford copy of the work, a 1767 newspaper article (...) by James Boswell and a copy of a 1775 letter by Sir John Dalrymple that both named Ferguson as the author, two volumes of Ferguson’s correspondence published in 1995, and a recently discovered letter by Ferguson from 1809 – this article seeks to resolve this controversy by establishing that Sister Peg was written by Ferguson, as his fellow militia agitator Alexander Carlyle asserted in his memoirs. In the process, the article refutes Raynor’s arguments about Ferguson’s supposed incapacity for writing a satirical pamphlet like Sister Peg and clarifies the nature of Hume’s views and actions in regard to the Scots militia cause during the Seven Years’ War. The article also throws light on several related issues affecting Hume and Ferguson’s circle. (shrink)

This paper critically examines David Berman's theological lying interpretation of Hume and identifies two types of theological lying: the denial of atheism strategy and the pious Christian strategy. It is argued that neither reading successfully establishes an atheist interpretation of Hume. Moreover, circumstantial evidence shows that Hume's position was different from that of the atheists of his time. Attributions theological lying to Hume, therefore, are unwarranted and should be rejected, even if we grant that this literary technique was used in (...) the early-modern era. Analysing other non-theistic readings of Hume is beyond the scope of this paper. However, given that Berman presents one of most elaborated atheist reinterpretations of Hume's affirmative theistic passages, the failure of Berman's analysis shows that rejecting these passages should not be the default interpretive approach, and it is reasonable to attribute to Hume a weak, indeterminate theism. (shrink)

Turing made strong statements about the future of machines in society. This article asks how they can be interpreted to advance our understanding of Turing’s philosophy. His irony has been largely caricatured or minimized by historians, philosophers, scientists, and others. Turing is often portrayed as an irresponsible scientist, or associated with childlike manners and polite humor. While these representations of Turing have been widely disseminated, another image suggested by one of his contemporaries, that of a nonconformist, utopian, and radically progressive (...) thinker reminiscent of the English Romantic poet Percy B. Shelley, has remained largely underexplored. Following this image, I will reconstruct the argument underlying what Turing called (but denied being guilty of) his “Promethean irreverence” (1947–1951) as a utopian satire directed against chauvinists of all kinds, especially intellectuals who might sacrifice independent thought to maintain their power. These, Turing hoped, would eventually be rivaled and surpassed by intelligent machines and transformed into ordinary people, as work once considered “intellectual” would be transformed into non-intellectual, “mechanical” work. I study Turing’s irony in its historical context and follow the internal logic of his arguments to their limit. I suggest that Turing genuinely believed that the possibilities of the machines he envisioned were not utopian dreams, and yet he conceived them from a utopian frame of mind, aspiring to a different society. His ever-learning child machines, whose intelligence would grow out of their own individual experiences, would help distribute power. (shrink)

This study advances the claim that Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, which drew its inspiration and guidelines from Cicero's De Natura Deorum, fulfills four basic elements of Michel Meyer's theory of problematology. In doing so, it is argued, the Dialogues contribute importantly to our understanding of the question-answer pair, and to the notion of rhetoric as a way of knowing.