Philosophy and Theology in the Mid-Eighteenth Century

2019 ◽  
pp. 56-68
Author(s):  
Thomas Ahnert
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Religious Belief ◽  
David Hume ◽  
Divine Revelation ◽  
Philosophy And Religion ◽  
Human Understanding ◽  
Solid Foundation ◽  
Theological Argument

Near the end of his Enquiry concerning Human Understanding David Hume declared that the ‘best and most solid foundation’ of divinity and theology was ‘faith and divine revelation’. Many other passages can be found where Hume uses similar fideist arguments to criticize the application of philosophical reason to religious questions. The question addressed in this chapter is how Hume’s criticism of the use of philosophy in religious and theological argument compares to the beliefs of his contemporaries on the same subject. In particular, it examines his intellectual relationship with the two main groups within the mid-eighteenth-century Presbyterian Kirk, the ‘Orthodox’ and the ‘Moderates’. Claiming that the fideist language used by Hume was not as similar to the position of orthodox Presbyterians as has sometimes been suggested, the chapter also argues that Hume’s sceptical, fideist arguments about philosophy and religion were closer to the beliefs of these Moderates, including Hutcheson, Leechman, Robertson, and Blair, than has often been realized. Nevertheless, they and Hume differed significantly in their explanations for the emergence of religious belief in human societies.

The Hamann–Hume Connection

1987 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 95-107 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. Redmond
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Religious Belief ◽  
David Hume ◽  
Soren Kierkegaard ◽  
Religious Faith ◽  
Isaiah Berlin

It is well known that the eighteenth century Scottish philosopher and sceptic David Hume was a severe critic of religious belief, but what may not be so familiar, and has been brought to our attention in recent years by Isaiah Berlin, is that some religious believers have found in Hume's sceptical arguments a source of nurture for their religious faith. In particular, Berlin singles out the example of Hume's contemporary, Johann Georg Hamann (17388), a devout but unconventional believer as well as one of the leaders of the German Counter-Enlightenment. Hamann's primary claim to fame, however, rests upon his influence upon the Danish theologian, Soren Kierkegaard. Although Kierkegaard never met Hamann, he was familiar with his writings, and calls Hamann ‘his only teacher.’ Kierkegaard's vast influence on modern Christianity, especially Protestantism, is, of course, a commonplace. What, though, is often overlooked, and Berlin calls our attention to, is that this man who influenced Kierkegaard was himself deeply influenced by Hume. The student of religion, as well as the philosopher, cannot help but be struck by this historical connection between Hume and believers such as Johann Hamann and thus, ultimately, between David Hume and modern Protestantism.

Moral canals: trust and social capital in the work of Hume, Smith and Genovesi

2000 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-45 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luigino Bruni ◽  
Robert Sugden
Keyword(s):  
Social Capital ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Market Economy ◽  
David Hume ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Social Institution ◽  
Economic Life ◽  
Economic Agents ◽  
Trading Partners ◽  
History Of

It is a truism that a market economy cannot function without trust. We must be able to rely on other people to respect our property rights, and on our trading partners to keep their promises. The theory of economics is incomplete unless it can explain why economic agents often trust one another, and why that trust is often repaid. There is a long history of work in economics and philosophy which tries to explain the kinds of reasoning that people use when they engage in practices of trust: this work develops theories of trust. A related tradition in economics, sociology and political science investigates the kinds of social institution that reproduce whatever habits, dispositions or modes of reasoning are involved in acts of trust: this work develops theories of social capital. A recurring question in these literatures is whether a society which organizes its economic life through markets is capable of reproducing the trust on which those markets depend. In this paper, we look at these themes in relation to the writings of three eighteenth-century philosopher-economists: David Hume, Adam Smith, and Antonio Genovesi.

scholarly journals Emotions vocabulary and the reconceptualisation of emotions in Ann Radcliffe’s “The Italian, or the Confessional of the Black Penitents”

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 40-58
Author(s):  
Elena D. Andonova-Kalapsazova
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
David Hume ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Emotional Experience ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Emotional Experiences ◽  
Critical Studies ◽  
Francis Hutcheson ◽  
History Of

The article undertakes the analysis of Ann Radcliffe’s novel The Italian, or the Confessional of the Black Penitents (1797) from a history of literary emotions perspective which, I argue, yields insights into the attitudes towards emotions embedded in Radcliffe’s works. A reading of the novel from such a perspective also complements the critical studies of the artist’s engaging with the eighteenth-century cult of sensibility. The novel is read as a text that registered but also participated in the dissemination of an epistemology of emotional experience articulated in the idiom of eighteenth-century moral philosophers – Francis Hutcheson, David Hume and Adam Smith - at the same time as it retained some of the older, theology-based conceptions of passions and affections. The dynamic in which the two frameworks for understanding the emotions exist in the novel is explored through a close reading of the vocabulary in which Radcliffe rendered the emotional experiences of her fictional characters. In this reading it is the passions which are found to have been invested with a variety of meanings and attributed a range of moral valences that most noticeably foreground the movement from a generally negative towards a more complex appreciation of powerful emotions.

John Wesley

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas S. Koskela
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Divine Revelation ◽  
John Wesley ◽  
Knowledge Of God ◽  
Community Of Faith ◽  
Important Evidence ◽  
Genuine Knowledge

This chapter explores the epistemological vision of the eighteenth-century Anglican evangelist John Wesley, particularly as it relates to knowledge of God. The primary thesis of the chapter is that Wesley’s epistemology of theology centred on the interplay between testimony and perception of the divine. He understood scripture to provide the primary content of what is known about God and salvation. In this respect, scripture functioned for Wesley as divine testimony to divine salvific work, though this testimony was mediated in various modes through the community of faith. Wesley also considered immediate perception of the divine to provide the strongest and most important evidence that those claims are true. He thus understood the agency of God to be essential to the formation of genuine knowledge of God, a factor which makes divine revelation an inescapable category when coming to terms with Wesley’s epistemology.

Philosophy

Unfelt ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 24-68
Author(s):  
James Noggle
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
David Hume ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Eliza Haywood ◽  
Robert Boyle ◽  
David Hartley ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Mental Contents

This chapter examines how the late seventeenth-century British philosophy of sensation, feeling, and selfhood responded to the challenges of mechanism with the idiom of the insensible. It shows how this idiom carries forward from John Locke and Robert Boyle to philosophers of the mid-eighteenth century, the age of sensibility, who use it to address a variety of problems. The consistent, Lockean element in these usages by David Hartley, Étienne Bonnet de Condillac and David Hume, Eliza Haywood and Adam Smith, is that they do not refer to mental contents. One does not hear of “insensible perceptions.” There are no “unconscious thoughts” or “unfelt sensations” in the British tradition surveyed here. Writers in this tradition rather describe insensible powers that affect the mind without themselves being mental. They are nonconscious, not unconscious. This is an implication carried by the idiom into articulations of quite a wide variety of other ideas. All of them indicate the persistent usefulness in philosophies of feeling of a stylistic gesture toward something beyond the reach of both feeling and philosophy.

History of Religion as Critique of Religion?

2021 ◽  
pp. 10-30
Author(s):  
Hans Joas
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Natural History ◽  
David Hume ◽  
Religious Texts ◽  
History Of Religion ◽  
Universal History ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Literary Character ◽  
History Of

The Scottish eighteenth-century philosopher and historian David Hume can be considered a pioneer of the “natural history of religion” in the sense of a universal history of religion that is not based on theological presuppositions. This chapter offers a characterization of his methodological achievements and a reevaluation of his empirical claims concerning monotheism, polytheism, religion and tolerance. It also interprets the German reception of Hume in Herder and other eighteenth-century thinkers as a serious critical continuation that is free from Hume’s anti-Christian motives. This continuation opens the perspective of a serious study of the literary character of religious texts, in this case of the Bible. All simple contrasts between Enlightenment and religion are overcome as soon as we take this interaction of thinkers into account.

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