David Hume

Background

David Hume (1711–1776) was a Scottish Enlightenment philosopher, historian, and essayist — the most important philosophical naturalist of the modern period and the figure whose critiques of natural theology set the agenda for subsequent skeptical philosophy of religion. Educated at the University of Edinburgh, Hume produced the Treatise of Human Nature (1739) in his twenties; its philosophical radicalism kept him from academic appointments, but the later Enquiry and the posthumously published Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779) are among the most widely-read works in the modern philosophical canon.

Hume's philosophical style is dialogic and genial — the Dialogues stage an extended conversation among Demea (an a priori theist), Cleanthes (a watchmaker-argument theist), and Philo (a skeptical voice widely taken to represent Hume's own view). The three characters allow Hume to state the strongest form of each position before advancing his critique; this is an ancestor of the steelman methodology this wiki enforces.

Positions held in this wiki

• The Kalam Cosmological Argument — the Part-9 Dialogues critique of a priori cosmological reasoning. Hume's three key moves: (i) no being's non-existence implies a contradiction; (ii) "necessary existence" has no coherent content; (iii) the demand for a cause of "the whole" commits a fallacy of composition (Hume, Dialogues Part 9).
• The Fine-Tuning Argument — the Part-2 Dialogues disanalogy critique. "The dissimilitude is so striking, that the utmost you can here pretend to is a guess, a conjecture, a presumption concerning a similar cause" (Hume, Dialogues Part 2).
• Origin of the Universe — the Part-8 Epicurean cosmogony in which Hume sketches a past-eternal self-organizing-matter alternative to theistic cosmology.

Key works in our corpus

• Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779) — in corpus. Body text in 12 parts. Key passages:
• Part 2 — design-argument disanalogy critique.
• Part 8 — Epicurean cosmogony: "matter is, and always has been, in continual agitation… matter can acquire motion, without any voluntary agent or first mover."
• Part 9 — cosmological-argument critique: "there is no being, therefore, whose non-existence implies a contradiction. Consequently there is no being, whose existence is demonstrable."

Corpus gap: Hume's Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748) — and particularly §X "Of Miracles" — is not yet ingested. See meta/ingestion-queue.md.

Principal critics

• William Lane Craig — has engaged Hume directly on the kalām critique; argues that the kalām premise does not depend on the parts-to-whole inference Hume attacks.
• Thomas Aquinas — the pre-Humean Christian philosopher whose per se causal reasoning is, Thomists argue, immune to Hume's primarily-temporal objections.
• Alvin Plantinga — modal-logic replies to the conceivability principle (not in corpus).
• Richard Swinburne — Bayesian-cumulative-case replies to Hume's probabilistic deflation of natural theology (not in corpus).

See also

• J. L. Mackie — Hume's twentieth-century philosophical heir; The Miracle of Theism (1982) makes Hume's objections rigorous (not in corpus).
• Graham Oppy — contemporary Humean-descended critic of cosmological arguments (not in corpus).