Abstract
Acombination of agnosticism and natural suppositions sustains a philosophy of common life. Agnostic on how mechanisms of understanding function or how nature works, we can suppose that we adequately judge or that nature works steadily and continue from there. The problem Hume confronts in his conception of history arises from a conflict between his desire to be agnostic on questions about how things in history work on one hand and our need to put forth propositions about how history moves. The last chapter covered the difficulties of establishing the “common sense” principles for a study of history since every account of history presumes something about the meaning of history and what moves history. That he conceives of history as determined by accident implies an answer to the question of how history works and what moves history. As troubling, Hume’s own account lends support to the view that history is animated by a spirit of progress behind accidents that are on the surface. How should or can philosophy of common life proceed if or when non-controversial natural suppositions are not available?
A correct Judgement … avoiding all distant and high enquiries, confines itself to common life, and to such subjects as fall under daily practice and experience; leaving more sublime topics to the embellishments of poets and orators, or to the arts of priests and politicians.
—Hume, EHU, p. 162.
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Notes
Fr. Copelston’s, A History of Philosophy: Hobbes to Hume, Volume V (Westminster: The Newman Press, 1964), p. 240, description is apt: “The characteristic feature of Berkeley’s argument for God’s existence is the use which he makes of his theory of ‘ideas.’ If sensible things are ideas, and if these ideas are not dependent simply on our minds, they must be referred to a mind other than our own. ‘It is evident to everyone, that those things which are called the works of Nature, that is, the far greater parts of the ideas or sensations perceived by us, are not produced by, or dependent on the wills of men. There is, therefore, some spirit that causes them, since it is repugnant that they should subsist by themselves’” (PHK 1.107).
Thomas Reid, An Inquiry into the Human Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), pp. 14–16 (Introduction; Section V).
See Michael Allen Gillepse, The Theological Origins of Modernity (The University Chicago Press, 2008), Chapters 1 and 6 for the importance of this idea of God in modern thought generally.
See Roger Scruton, A Short History of Modern Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1981), p. 104.
Keith Yandell, “Hume on Religious Belief,” in Hume: A Re-Evaluation (New York: Fordham University Press,1976), p. 114, notes “an interesting parallel between Hume’s treatment of belief in the external world and in causal connections, and his treatment of a minimally theistic belief.”
It is part of Hume’s project of establishing the autonomy of morals. See, for instance, Frederick G. Whelan, Order and Artifice in Hume’s Political Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), pp. 106–7, 308–9; J. C. A. Gaskin, “Hume on Religion,” in The Cambridge Companion to Hume, edited by David Fate Norton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 332–5; and David Fate Norton, “Hume, Atheism, and the Autonomy of Morals” in Hume’s Philosophy of Religion (Winston-Salem: Wake Forest University Press, 1986).
John P. Wright, “Hume’s Academic Scepticism,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 16, No. 3 (September 1986), p. 430, “On Hume’s view the discovery of such a hidden cause results from the supposition that there is an absolute necessity in nature, even where an established regularity fails to hold.”
Michael P. Levine, Hume and the Problem of Miracles: A Solution (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989), pp. 23–36; Leo Strauss, Philosophy and Law, translated by Eva Adler (Albany: SUNY, 1995), pp. 31–2; and C. S. Lewis, Miracles (New York: Macmillan, 1970), pp. 100–07.
See also Stephen P. Foster, “Hume at work in Gibbon’s Decline and Fall.” The Modern Schoolman 71 (March 1994), p. 234.
John Earman, Hume’s Abject Failure (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 44–7, discusses the permutations that this phraseology underwent in the successive editions of EHU.
Lewis, Miracles (New York: MacMillan, 1960), p. 103. See also Earman, Hume’s Abject Failure, pp. 3–4, who sees in Hume’s argument the “kind of overreaching that gives philosophy a bad name.” He continues: “Any epistemology that does not allow for the possibility that evidence, whether from eyewitness testimony or from some other source, can establish the credibility of a UFO landing, a walking on water, or a resurrection is inadequate.” See also pp. 22–4, 31–2 and Michael P. Levine, Hume and the Problem of Miracles: A Solution (New York: Springer, 1989), pp. 23–36.
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© 2016 Scott Yenor
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Yenor, S. (2016). Religious Belief and Hume’s Philosophy of Common Life. In: David Hume’s Humanity. Recovering Political Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137539595_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137539595_8
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