The taming of religion : Hume's sceptical theism and his criticism of vulgar religion in context
This dissertation aims to give a novel interpretation of Hume's criticism of religion, his position on theism, and his conception of true religion. Hume's philosophy of religion and his general epistemological views, as well as his theory of belief, are investigated in their historical context and contrasted with the main alternative views in the philosophy of religion in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. My interpretation broadly follows the scholars (including Gaskin, 1988; Livingston, 1998; Yoder, 2008; and Willis, 2015) who take Hume's affirmative theistic passages as sincere expressions of his views and consequently read Hume as a non-Christian, irreligious philosophical theist. However, this dissertation will defend a different and more nuanced perspective on Hume's theism and religion than those put forward by these scholars. This dissertation reconstructs Hume's position as developed in a clear direction from minimal theism to an agnostic, indeterminate view on God. Concerning his position on theism, two different periods in Hume's intellectual life are distinguished: the first, his minimal theist period, stretches from his A Letter from a Gentleman (1745) to around 1776; the second, Hume's
Hartl, Peter Zoltan
Religion ; Theism ; Agnosticism
The taming of religion : Hume's sceptical theism and his criticism of vulgar religion in context. This dissertation aims to give a novel interpretation of Hume's criticism of religion, his position on theism, and his conception of true religion. Hume's philosophy of religion and his general epistemological views, as well as his theory of belief, are investigated in their historical context and contrasted with the main alternative views in the philosophy of religion in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. My interpretation broadly follows the scholars (including Gaskin, 1988; Livingston, 1998; Yoder, 2008; and Willis, 2015) who take Hume's affirmative theistic passages as sincere expressions of his views and consequently read Hume as a non-Christian, irreligious philosophical theist. However, this dissertation will defend a different and more nuanced perspective on Hume's theism and religion than those put forward by these scholars. This dissertation reconstructs Hume's position as developed in a clear direction from minimal theism to an agnostic, indeterminate view on God. Concerning his position on theism, two different periods in Hume's intellectual life are distinguished: the first, his minimal theist period, stretches from his A Letter from a Gentleman (1745) to around 1776; the second, Hume's
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