‘Galen's Muscles’: Wilkins, Hume, and the educational use of the argument from design

1993 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
pp. 577-597 ◽  
Author(s):  
Isabel Rivers
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Natural Religion ◽  
Religion And Ethics ◽  
Argument From Design

ABSTRACTWilkins's The principles and duties of natural religion, edited by Tillotson and published posthumously in 1675, designed to combat scepticism and infidelity, was reprinted nine times up to 1734 and was widely used as a textbook in the education of clergy and ministers. Hume's Dialogues concerning natural religion, substantially written in 1751 but withheld from publication on the advice of friends and only published posthumously in 1779, reversed Wilkins's procedure by scrutinising the tenets of natural religion from the perspective of scepticism. This essay explores the importance of Wilkins's text in the tripartite eighteenth-century scheme of natural religion, revealed religion, and ethics, and shows how Hume's parody of a well known passage from Wilkins – the ‘Galen's muscles’ of the title – was intended to contribute to the undermining of this scheme.

Nicolas Gueudeville's Enlightenment Utopia

Moreana ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 55 (Number 209) (1) ◽  
pp. 24-60
Author(s):  
Russ Leo
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
New World ◽  
Economic Life ◽  
Political Anthropology ◽  
French Translation ◽  
Natural Religion ◽  
Original Length ◽  
English Law

Nicolas Gueudeville's 1715 French translation of Utopia is often dismissed as a “belle infidèle,” an elegant but unfaithful work of translation. Gueudeville does indeed expand the text to nearly twice its original length. But he presents Utopia as a contribution to emergent debates on tolerance, natural religion, and political anthropology, directly addressing the concerns of many early advocates of the ideas we associate with Enlightenment. In this sense, it is not as much an “unfaithful” presentation of More's project as it is an attempt to introduce Utopia to eighteenth-century francophone audiences—readers for whom theses on political economy and natural religion were much more salient than More's own preoccupations with rhetoric and English law. This paper introduces Gueudeville and his oeuvre, paying particular attention to his revisions to Louis-Armand de Lom d'Arce, Baron de Lahontan's 1703 Nouveaux Voyages dans l'Amérique Septentrionale. Published in 1705, Gueudeville's “revised, corrected, & augmented” version of Lahontan's Voyages foregrounds the rational and natural religion of the Huron as well as their constitutive aversion to property, to concepts of “mine” and “yours.” Gueudeville's revised version of Lahontan's Voyages purports to be an anthropological investigation as well as a study of New World political economy; it looks forward, moreover, to his edition of Utopia, framing More's work as a comparable study of political economy and anthropology. Gueudeville, in other words, renders More's Utopia legible to Enlightenment audiences, depicting Utopia not in terms of impossibility and irony but rather as a study of natural religion and attendant forms of political, devotional, and economic life. Gueudeville's edition of Utopia even proved controversial due, in part, to his insistence on the rationality as well as the possibility of Utopia.

Part Eight

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert J. Fogelin
Keyword(s):  
Cloud Formation ◽  
Striking Similarity ◽  
Common Life ◽  
Natural Religion ◽  
Sextus Empiricus ◽  
Argument From Design

Philo expands on the nature of his objections to the natural religion of Cleanthes: far-fetched comparisons are dismissed in matters of common life, but are appropriate objections when we rise to the level of abstruse and remote reasoning. He offers a counterargument to the design-designer hypothesis, citing Epicurus. Constancy and change are discussed; cloud formation is one example. Philo’s critique of Cleanthes’ argument from design moves through stages, with striking similarity to Agrippa’s suspension of belief as presented by Sextus Empiricus.

The Taming of God: Revealed Religion and Natural Religion in the Eighteenth-Century Harvard Dudleian Lectures

2010 ◽  
Vol 83 (4) ◽  
pp. 641-673 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Jeehoon Lee
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Religious Leaders ◽  
Harvard College ◽  
Natural Religion

In the mid–1700s, America's religious leaders feared deism, but by the early 1800s, it had faded from view. The death of its leaders and the rise of pietistic Christianity have been charged with its downfall. At one of its purported hotbeds—Harvard College—another possibility emerges: deism disappeared because, at least in some crucial arenas, it had triumphed, and thus deists were appeased.

The ‘true religion’ of the sceptic: Penelhum reading Hume’s Dialogues

2012 ◽  
Vol 42 (S1) ◽  
pp. 183-197 ◽  
Author(s):  
Willem Lemmens
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Religious Culture ◽  
Natural Religion

According to Terence Penelhum, Philo's confession in the last part of Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion reveals on the side of the author a reconciliatory and pacifying attitude towards the liberal moderate clergy of his days. This article investigates whether another reading of this intriguing text is not more appropriate. It defends the idea that Philo's speeches and Cleanthes’ reactions to it in the last part of the Dialogues reveal on Hume's side an attitude of mild despair and isolation towards the religious culture of eighteenth-century Scotland, in both its orthodox and more moderate form.

Joseph Hall and Neo-Stoicism

PMLA ◽  
1950 ◽  
Vol 65 (6) ◽  
pp. 1130-1145 ◽  
Author(s):  
Audrey Chew
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Natural Religion ◽  
Ethical Point ◽  
Rule Of Life ◽  
Right Reason ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Thomas Browne ◽  
The Universe

During his own lifetime Bishop Joseph Hall was nicknamed “our spiritual Seneca” by Henry Wotton and later called “our English Seneca” by Thomas Fuller; as a result it has recently become fashionable to associate him with seventeenth-century English Neo-Stoicism. A seventeenth-century Neo-Stoic is of interest presumably because he points in the direction of eighteenth-century Neo-Stoicism, away from a revealed religion toward a natural religion, away from faith toward reason. In a recent article Philip A. Smith calls Hall “the leading Neo-Stoic of the seventeenth century” and says that he enthusiastically preached the “Neo-Stoic brand of theology” to which Sir Thomas Browne objected. This theology maintained that “to follow ‘right reason’ was to follow nature, which was the same thing as following God.” Smith goes on to say that “what most attracted seventeenth-century Christian humanists like Bishop Hall was the fact that Stoicism attempted to frame a theory of the universe and of the individual man which would approximate a rule of life in conformity with an ‘immanent cosmic reason‘”—though in the same paragraph he also mentions the point “that Neo-Stoic divines of the seventeenth century were interested in Stoicism almost exclusively from the ethical point of view.” He cites Lipsius to show how a Christian might reach an approximation between the Stoic Fate and Christian Providence, leaving the reader to assume that Hall might also have made this approximation. He says that “the natural light of reason, as expounded by the Stoic philosophers, became, for seventeenth-century Neo-Stoics, the accepted guide to conduct” and that “religious and moral writers endeavored to trace a relationship between moral and natural law which in effect resulted in the practical code of ethical behavior commonly associated with Neo-Stoicism.”

Paley, William (1743–1805)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charlotte R. Brown
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Scientific Understanding ◽  
Christian Faith ◽  
Orthodox Christianity ◽  
Moral Philosopher ◽  
Natural Religion ◽  
God's Will ◽  
William Paley

William Paley, theologian and moral philosopher, expressed and codified the views and arguments of orthodox Christianity and the conservative moral and political thought of eighteenth-century England. Paley says that his works form a unified system based on natural religion. Like others during this period, Paley thought that reason alone, unaided by revelation, would establish many Christian theses. He is confident that a scientific understanding of nature will support the claim that God is the author of nature. Paley belongs to the anti-deist tradition that holds that revelation supplements natural religion. The most important revelation is God’s assurance of an afterlife in which the virtuous are rewarded and the vicious are punished. Natural and revealed religion, in turn, provide the foundation for morality. God’s will determines what is right and his power to reward and punish us in the afterlife provide the moral sanctions. On the whole, Paley is concerned with sustaining Christian faith, and ensuring that people known what their duties are and do them.

Butler, Joseph (1692–1752)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
R.G. Frey
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Thomas Hobbes ◽  
Moral Motivation ◽  
Moral Philosopher ◽  
Natural Religion ◽  
The Third ◽  
Long Line ◽  
Joseph Butler ◽  
The One

Joseph Butler the moral philosopher is in that long line of eighteenth-century thinkers who sought to answer Thomas Hobbes on human nature and moral motivation. Following the Third Earl of Shaftesbury, he rejects any purely egoistic conception of these. Instead, he analyses human nature into parts, of which he notices in detail appetites, affections, and passions on the one hand and the principles of self-love, benevolence and conscience on the other. His ethics consists in the main in showing the relation of these parts to each other. They form a hierarchy, ordered in terms of their natural authority, and while such authority can be usurped, as when the particular passions overwhelm self-love and conscience, the system that they constitute, or human nature, is rightly proportioned when each part occupies its rightful place in the ordered hierarchy. Virtue consists in acting in accordance with that ordered, rightly proportioned nature. As a philosopher of religion, Butler addresses himself critically to the eighteenth-century flowering of deism in Britain. On the whole, the deists allowed that God the Creator existed but rejected the doctrines of natural and, especially, revealed religion. Butler’s central tactic against them is to argue, first, that the central theses associated with natural religion, such as a future life, are probable; and second, that the central theses associated with revealed religion, such as miracles, are as probable as those of natural religion. Much turns, therefore, on the success of Butler’s case in appealing to what is present in this world as evidence for a future life.

From Cudworth to Hume: Cambridge Platonism and the Scottish Enlightenment

2012 ◽  
Vol 42 (S1) ◽  
pp. 8-26 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Hutton
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
Ethical Thought ◽  
Natural Religion ◽  
Moral Sentimentalism ◽  
Human Understanding ◽  
History Of ◽  
Cambridge Platonism ◽  
Cambridge Platonists

This paper argues that the Cambridge Platonists had stronger philosophical links to Scottish moral philosophy than the received history allows. Building on the work of Michael Gill who has demonstrated links between ethical thought of More, Cudworth and Smith and moral sentimentalism, I outline some links between the Cambridge Platonists and Scottish thinkers in both the seventeenth century (e.g., James Nairn, Henry Scougal) and the eighteenth century (e.g., Smith, Blair, Stewart). I then discuss Hume's knowledge of Cudworth, in Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals, Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, The Natural History of Religion and Dialogues concerning Natural Religion.

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