This chapter reconstructs the argument of two essays, Of Suicide’ and ‘Of the Immortality of the Soul’, which were published posthumously. In these essays Hume defends that in specific circumstances suicide is morally acceptable and shows himself critical about the doctrine of a ‘future state’. Comparing the two essays with Part 12 of the Dialogues, I elucidate how Hume left us posthumously a testimony of his ambition to counter the religious spirit of his age. In the Dialogues Philo’s challenges Cleanthes’ view that religion forms a necessary support of morality. In ‘Of Suicide’ and ‘Of the Immortality of the Soul’, Hume attacks in a more openly provocative way the Christian morality of his age. As I show in a second part of this chapter, Hume’s views were in the eighteenth century still controversial. It is no coincidence that one of the first editions of the two polemic essays contained a translation of two letters of Rousseau’s Héloïse which offered a more nuanced view on the moral acceptability of suicide and the sacredness of human life. Apparently, some contemporaries were convinced Hume could learn from Rousseau: whether today this view would still prevail, I leave to the reader to decide.

In section 11 of the Enquiry concerning Human Understanding [EHU], “Of a Particular Providence and of a Future State,” Hume attempts to sketch a method for natural theology, a method that establishes clear limits as to what natural theology can show. Unsurprisingly, he does so in the form of a dialogue. I argue that this dialogue is important because, in it, Hume offers a response to the reasoning Butler employs in the Analogy of Religion (1736) in order to establish the existence of a providential God, or what Butler calls a “moral governor” of the universe. Appreciating Hume’s strategy in this dialogue helps us better appreciate Hume’s more radical position in the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion and suggests a way of understanding the significance of Philo’s reversal in the final section. I claim that what appears to be a concession to religion actually turns out to have significant irreligious implications when considered as an extension of Hume’s response to Butler in EHU 11.

Much of Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion is spent debating the experimental design argument for the existence of God. A change of scene occurs in the ninth part of the Dialogues when the character of Demea presents an a priori cosmological argument that purports to demonstrate God’s necessary existence. The argument is then criticized by the characters of Cleanthes and Philo. The conversation in the ninth part of the dialogue has occasioned a mixed legacy. For some scholars, the objections raised by Cleanthes and Philo to the cosmological argument in Part 9 are persuasive and inspiring, whereas for others the objections are ineffective and overrated. This paper critically assesses the mixed legacy of Hume against the cosmological argument, in particular, one of Cleanthes’s famous objections to do with a collection of twenty particles of matter. This objection has had a lasting impact in the philosophy of religion literature in the form of the much disputed, ‘Hume-Edwards Principle’ (HEP). However, I claim that the HEP misrepresents the text on two counts, and that via the spokesperson of Cleanthes, Hume’s point against the cosmological argument has yet to be fully appreciated by critics.

This interpretive chapter attends to an often overlooked feature of the Dialogues: the tone of its repeated disputes. It asks what is the meaning of the tone and probes its value. To do so, it begins with a consideration of character in a dual-sense: the moral character of these disputes between literary characters. It argues that critical engagement with characterization via the lens of literary theory reveals that it is a category mistake to reduce the voice of a fictional character (e.g., Philo) to that of a real person (e.g., Hume). It further contends that if we think of each fictional character as merely a solitary component of a larger narrative flow we are more likely to focus on the basic action that is internal to the narrative, that is: disagreement, rather than who the character speaks for. Finally, it claims that the virtuous disagreement between interlocutors here rehearses an ethics of responsiveness that can be viewed as pointing towards a moral element. Hume’s dramatic sensibilities obscure the ethical temperament of the disagreements yet their posture reflects a gestural phenomenon of responsiveness (per Elise Springer) that might come close to expressing Hume’s ideal form of religion.

This paper examines the themes of history, psychology, and epistemology in Hume’s Natural History of Religion. In the first half, I argue that the origin of religion Hume seeks to uncover in this work is psychological rather than chronological: he is looking for religion’s origin in human nature rather than human history. In doing so, I reject the common view, going all the way back to Hume’s near contemporary Dugald Stewart, that the Natural History is a work of “conjectural history”. Examination of the work itself, and of the use of the term “history” at the time, corroborates the view that a “natural history” of religion, for Hume and his contemporaries, was an early form of what we would now call a theory of religious psychology.

In this chapter, I consider the Dialogues as a text that formulates and criticises a particular argument for design (‘the argument for design’). After presenting the relevant material from the Dialogues, I consider the strengths and weaknesses of the formulation of the argument that is the object of Hume’s criticisms, and set out what I take to be the full range of criticisms that Hume makes of it. I then assess the strength of these criticisms, paying particular attention to writers – for example Paley, Reid, Dawkins, and Hawthorne and Isaacs – who have claimed that Hume’s objections to ‘the argument for design’ are weak or ineffectual. Next, I consider the originality of Hume’s critique of ‘the argument for design’; I argue that, on the evidence that I have considered, Hume deserves most of the credit for the objections to ‘the argument for design’ in the Dialogues. I conclude with some brief remarks about the relative importance of the success of the criticisms of ‘the argument for design’ to the overall project of the Dialogues.

There are significant ambiguities in how “atheism” is to be understood or interpreted. Having considered these, we turn to Hume’s arguments and assess to what extent his views in the Dialogues should be interpreted in these terms. While it is evident that Hume opposed “superstition” and that he was, in this sense, plainly an irreligious thinker, this does not settle the question of his “atheism”. Although Hume has been read by some as an theist of a minimal kind, and by others as a sceptic or agnostic, both these accounts are rejected. Hume was, it is argued, a “hard sceptical atheist”, by which we understand him to take the view that we have probable (non-dogmatic) grounds for denying the theist hypothesis in all its forms. His “speculative atheism” is accompanied by a “practical atheism” which, while firmly opposed “superstition”, is willing to ally itself with both sceptics and those theists (or deists) who share Hume’s opposition to “superstition”.

I take this chapter as an opportunity to ask what Hume might think of rational religious belief given developments in philosophy of religion, epistemology and contemporary cognitive science of religion (which explores the natural roots of religion). To that end, I will consider some basic findings in the cognitive science of religion concerning the origins of religion in human nature. I will also reflect on some significant developments in twentieth-Century philosophy, including recent developments in religious epistemology, that I think Hume might have found insightful. I will argue that twenty-first-century Hume, perhaps ironically in line with the thought of Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff (who in turn align themselves with Thomas Reid), would defend rational belief in God.

Hume’s Dialogues contains one of the most efficient and rhetorically effective – and consequently influential statements of the problem (or problems) of evil in literature. In the last three parts of the Dialogues, we can see much of the shape of the contemporary debate on the problem, in its various aspects. But, familiar though the main lines of that debate might be, Hume’s presentation of the issues in dramatic form throws up some less familiar angles, as well as posing a question concerning his own views on religion. This chapter will follow the course of the discussion as it unfolds, taking points more or less in the order in which they arise, but organised around the various problems of evil. It ends with a brief consideration of the wider consequences of the discussion.

Darwin read the Dialogues while still formulating his theory of evolution by natural selection. And one might suspect that he would have found there much to please and put to use. But he had already encountered Humean critiques of the argument from design, together with quite effective responses in the work of William Paley. Moreover, in the wake of his reading of Dialogues, Darwin placed greater and greater weight on the on the very sort of analogy that Hume had targeted in Dialogues, that is, drawing similarities between the natural world and products of human design, in service of the inference that the natural world was also designed. Darwin came to reject the conclusion of the argument from design, but his alternative, evolution by natural selection, also relied, heavily, on an analogy between nature and human artifice, the breeder’s art. But an important passage in the conclusion to the Origin suggests an important influence of the Dialogues, especially when taken together with Darwin’s quite wide-ranging reading of Hume.

At points in the Dialogues Philo appears to favor the Stratonian theory that matter is endued with an inherent principle of self-organization—the hypothesis that order is endogenous to matter, and need not be imposed by any external organizing principle such as thought, design, cosmological pollination or insemination. Moreover, on two occasions Philo seems to say that it is “plausible” or even “probable” that the self-organization of matter proceeds by absolute necessity, such that if we could “penetrate into the intimate nature of bodies”, we would be able to see that it “was absolutely impossible, they could ever admit of any other disposition.” (DNR 6.12, 9.10) I first consider Philo’s purposes in advancing the Stratonian hypothesis, and in framing this theory in the language of absolute necessity. I show that Philo’s reasoning here is ad hominem, and proceeds upon a number of methodological assumptions that Philo himself does not share. I also consider Hume’s own purposes in having Philo feint in this way, and suggest that Hume intends to deliver a message about the pointlessness of hankering after ultimate explanations in natural theology and philosophy.

This essay examines the relationship between sceptical attitudes and religious belief in David Hume’s Dialogues concerning Natural Religion. Understanding Hume’s thoughts on scepticism is one of the most important – if not the most important – keys to unlocking his thoughts on the legitimacy of reasoning in mathematics, science and philosophy. Intense controversies swirl around his explicit arguments and analyses of sceptical themes in his A Treatise of Human Nature and Enquiry concerning Human Understanding along with various essays. While some argue that Hume’s approach to scepticism changes in these various works, especially between the Treatise and Enquiry, this essay shows how examining Hume’s discussion in his Dialogues sheds light on his overall stance toward scepticism. And this understanding of his approach in turn opens up new ways of looking at how the various characters in the Dialogues can be read as advocating or illustrating Hume’s epistemological stance. Exploring these issues will also allow us to see how Hume anticipates certain aspects of contemporary debates about reasoning about the nature of logic in general and counterpossible reasoning more specifically.

This Introduction offers a brief review of the central arguments and issues that arise in Hume’s Dialogues. It considers why Hume used the dialogue format to present his views and it also considers how the content of the Dialogues relates to Hume’s other philosophical works and his historical context. It concludes with a brief summary of the various contributions and an account of the way that the collection is structured and organized.

At the start of Hume’s Dialogues Philo feigns to agree with Demea that he believes that God exists, and both Philo and Demea claim that we cannot come to have knowledge of the nature of God. In §1, however, I turn to Cleanthes’ ‘Newtonian Theism’ in which science is seen as serving theology, with a central role played by the argument from design. We can infer ‘that the Author of nature is somewhat similar to the mind of man’ (D 2.5). §2 turns to the various critiques of this argument put forward by Philo and we find that his alliance with Demea is a ruse. Philo rejects the theism of both Cleanthes and Demea. §3 focuses on part 12 of the Dialogues where Philo appears to take a more conciliatory line towards belief in God. Various interpreters take Philo to be committed to a thin form of deism or theism. I reject such interpretations and argue that part 12 does not diverge from the atheistic message of the Dialogues.

This chapter takes forward the exploration of marriage as difference through an examination of what are locally perceived as ‘mixed’ marriages in Penang. Difference can be calibrated in many registers – including age, wealth, class, familial background, religion, language, ‘race’ and ethnicity. The cultural and ethnic diversity of Penang offers unusual scope for marrying outside familiar boundaries. But which sorts of difference are most salient, and which boundaries are more permeable and more easy to bridge? ‘Malayness’ and Islam have a historically privileged legal status in Malaysia, and marrying a Muslim legally requires a non-Muslim spouse to convert. The bodily, culinary, religious and legal concomitants of this conversion are likely to impact close family members of a non-Muslim partner. At the extreme end of a range of possibilities, ‘mixed’ couples encountering or expecting opposition from their families sometimes elope to marry. But, after marriage, a long process of accommodation and absorption is likely to occur. Experiences of ‘mixed’ marriage and the negotiation of difference, which is part of marriage everywhere, offer a perspective on other changes in Malaysia over several decades. But more broadly, it provides a way to understand how intimate worlds may generate wider social transformation.

This chapter reflects on a case involving a pediatric patient with a rare neurogenerative disease whose medical team requested an ethics consultation when his parents disagreed with the medical recommendation to remove his breathing tube, knowing that this could lead to his death. The ethics consultation explored what at first appeared to be conflicting beliefs about the facts of this patient’s condition and quality of life: his medical team believed he had an irreversible, neurodegenerative condition that would become progressively more debilitating and uncomfortable; his parents believed that he may still recover from his disease and survive. Yet on deeper analysis, we came to see that this was not a case of a medical team holding true beliefs and a family holding false beliefs about the clinical facts of the matter, but rather a difference between ways of being in and seeing the world, particularly as it relates to reasoning from a position of faith in what might be. This case shows the importance of differentiating between claims about facts and assertions of values, and how biomedical expectations of evidence can influence perceptions of relevant information during a clinical ethics consultation.

In a series of articles and essays, the literary critic Baruch Kurzweil (1907–1972) portrayed the history of modern Hebrew literature as a history of crisis: of the breakdown of the old traditional world of religion and faith and the emergence of a new secular world. Kurzweil saw this history as a tragedy. Though the figure of crisis became associated with Kurzweil, he was by no means the first critic to employ it. In fact, it has played a central role in modern Hebrew literary criticism since its inception. Indeed, crisis emerged as a privileged figure for portraying the relationship between evolving literary forms, themes, figurations, and vocabulary to rapidly changing demographic, social, cultural, economic, and political contexts. In this chapter, I attempt to contextualize Kurzweil’s ideas within the framework of crisis and tragedy in Hebrew literary criticism, and then briefly suggest their potential implications for the present moment.

The first Linear B tablets were found by Evans in Knossos, many more by Blegen in Pylos in 1939 and progressively in all Mycenaean centres. Crete had three writing types Hieroglyphic, Linear A being more widespread, still undeciphered, and Linear B which descends from Linear A and appeared in mainland Greece around 1400 BC. After many endeavours, it has been deciphered in 1952 revealing a syllabic script for an early stage of Greek language. The debate of concordance between the Knossos and the Pylos tablets followed and is still alive. The inscribed clay tablets, simply dried, were baked by the fires that destroyed the palaces and thus preserved. They are administrative documents mostly inventory or tax statements teaching us a lot about Mycenaean life, palatial system, social hierarchy but no literature or history.

The past few decades have witnessed a significant religious revival in China, coinciding with a sharp increase in economic inequality. This chapter investigates the impact of religion on the Chinese public’s perceptions of income disparity and political trust. The findings reveal a notable difference in the perceived fairness of personal income distribution between religious and nonreligious individuals. Religious beliefs are positively correlated with a heightened sense of fairness regarding both personal and national income distribution. These perceptions of fairness, in turn, contribute to fostering people’s trust in political institutions and government officials. However, religious beliefs mitigate the positive effect of perceived fairness in income distribution on institutional trust. Consequently, when income distribution is perceived as unfair, institutional trust declines more sharply among religious believers compared to their nonreligious counterparts.

In the ‘Coda’ to Part III, I reflect on the relationship between late medieval religious and economic practices, brought together through the theme of alchemy.