The chapter-length Introduction establishes the historical and philosophical contexts for the Romantic reimagining of persuasion. A section on David Hume’s skeptical views on “perswasion” and the influential response to them by the Scottish rhetorician and minister George Campbell draws important terminological distinctions and delineates key features of the inquiries and reimaginings addressed in the chapters that follow. The main features of the concept of malleable persuasion are described and differentiated from adjacent concepts in works by Lord Byron, Edmund Burke, and Mary Shelley, among others. The book is situated in relation to major lines of scholarship on Romantic cultures of controversy, secular casuistry, and the histories of belief and skepticism. The chapter ends by addressing the distinctly literary dimensions of persuasion, including the role of reading in its representation and elicitation, and the formal resources involved across genres.

Isaiah Berlin’s essay explores and criticises a conception of human freedom that identifies it with knowledge and, especially, with self-understanding. Even on this conception, freedom seems to require a power to change or reform one’s self – some power of self-determination through choice or decision, through will or volition. But this involvement of self-determination through the will then raises the issue of determinism. Are our choices or decisions antecedently determined? Knowledge and freedom may both be goods, but they are importantly distinct goods, and they may be in tension. Berlin’s reflections on freedom and knowledge are part of a wider project of understanding conceptions such as freedom in terms of their intellectual history and of exploring plurality within goodness and tensions between its various forms. The discussion will explore the relation between two very different forms of freedom – freedom as a form of power, a capacity to produce or prevent outcomes, and freedom as liberation, a desirable condition of fulfilment. It is freedom conceived as a power that seems threatened by determinism.

Berlin sees the history of philosophy as a history not just of the struggle to find answers to certain questions, but (because of the distinctive nature of these questions) to find the right means of framing them in the first place, as well as of determining the answers’ viability. He concentrates on how Enlightenment philosophers, thrilled by the success of science, sought to apply scientific procedures to ‘all that related to the social life of men’, and he focusses on the variously implemented theory of ‘ideas’, in which ‘the mind was treated as if it were a box containing mental equivalents of the Newtonian particles’. This chapter will argue that the Enlightenment philosophers not only envisaged the mind as a container for ideas, but ideas themselves as containers of ‘ideas’ in the other sense. Hume especially seems to assume that we can use empirical observation (by means of ‘the inner eye’) to discover how the mind functions – that we introspect the idea-particles moved by a Newton-like force of attraction while simultaneously observing the sensory impressions and concepts that they represent.

I have argued in this book that different versions of the American ‘story’ are possible. Some writers will offer a generous and optimistic telling of the story that depicts the rise of the nation from humble beginnings to becoming the most powerful and fairest nation that has ever existed, a nation committed to the highest ideals of an often ill-defined Americanism. Other writers have considered the shortcomings of the American experiment, exposing its manifest flaws and blatant violations of liberal values and basic human rights throughout history. Other stories might be considered utopian in their visions of an inclusive and harmonious nation that will finally overcome invidious differences in ethnicities and cultures to achieve a ‘transnational’ America. The choices of what is written about and how various characters and their actions are described and evaluated will vary; in the end, it’s left to the thoughtful reader to distinguish fact from fiction and substantiated conclusions from mere opinion in order to properly evaluate the merits of the author’s argument. Ignorance or denial of history and passive acceptance of propaganda as fact must be challenged wherever they appear, whether in political discourse or in books written by academics and influential public figures.

This chapter offers an artificial comparison of the views of Kant and Hume on the foundations and implications of justice, artificial rather than historical in the sense that Hume’s theory of justice, most fully expounded in his Treatise of Human Nature, to which Kant did not have direct access during his formative years, was not a direct target for or influence on Kant, unlike, of course, other of Hume’s ideas. The two theories stand in complex relationships: on the one hand, Hume’s theory is empirically grounded on natural moral sentiments and their development in human social situations, and argues that justice is explained by the natural human desire for happiness, while Kant grounds his theory of justice as making freedom determinate and secure on an a priori argument that freedom is the end in itself for humans as rational beings; on the other hand, Hume’s actual politics and his accounts of the limits of pretensions of government are in some ways more radical than Kant’s.

Strawson famously criticized Kant’s “imaginary subject of transcendental psychology.” Using the example of Hume, this chapter develops criteria for what a philosophical method based on the empirical psychology of human beings would be like, and argues that Kant’s method is not that of empirical psychology. However, Kant develops an analysis of conditions of the possibility of knowledge, for example, in his account of the “threefold synthesis” of apprehension, reproduction, and recognition, that would apply to any cognition of a manifold of data or inputs given over time, human or (anachronistically, to be sure) computer. It is not an empirical account, but it is not fanciful, either: it is an abstract account of the conditions of the possibility of knowledge, or of the abilities required for knowledge of a temporally extended manifold. In that regard it may be considered a transcendental psychology, but is not imaginary.

This chapter reconstructs the argument of two essays, Of Suicide’ and ‘Of the Immortality of the Soul’, which were published posthumously. In these essays Hume defends that in specific circumstances suicide is morally acceptable and shows himself critical about the doctrine of a ‘future state’. Comparing the two essays with Part 12 of the Dialogues, I elucidate how Hume left us posthumously a testimony of his ambition to counter the religious spirit of his age. In the Dialogues Philo’s challenges Cleanthes’ view that religion forms a necessary support of morality. In ‘Of Suicide’ and ‘Of the Immortality of the Soul’, Hume attacks in a more openly provocative way the Christian morality of his age. As I show in a second part of this chapter, Hume’s views were in the eighteenth century still controversial. It is no coincidence that one of the first editions of the two polemic essays contained a translation of two letters of Rousseau’s Héloïse which offered a more nuanced view on the moral acceptability of suicide and the sacredness of human life. Apparently, some contemporaries were convinced Hume could learn from Rousseau: whether today this view would still prevail, I leave to the reader to decide.

In section 11 of the Enquiry concerning Human Understanding [EHU], “Of a Particular Providence and of a Future State,” Hume attempts to sketch a method for natural theology, a method that establishes clear limits as to what natural theology can show. Unsurprisingly, he does so in the form of a dialogue. I argue that this dialogue is important because, in it, Hume offers a response to the reasoning Butler employs in the Analogy of Religion (1736) in order to establish the existence of a providential God, or what Butler calls a “moral governor” of the universe. Appreciating Hume’s strategy in this dialogue helps us better appreciate Hume’s more radical position in the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion and suggests a way of understanding the significance of Philo’s reversal in the final section. I claim that what appears to be a concession to religion actually turns out to have significant irreligious implications when considered as an extension of Hume’s response to Butler in EHU 11.

Much of Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion is spent debating the experimental design argument for the existence of God. A change of scene occurs in the ninth part of the Dialogues when the character of Demea presents an a priori cosmological argument that purports to demonstrate God’s necessary existence. The argument is then criticized by the characters of Cleanthes and Philo. The conversation in the ninth part of the dialogue has occasioned a mixed legacy. For some scholars, the objections raised by Cleanthes and Philo to the cosmological argument in Part 9 are persuasive and inspiring, whereas for others the objections are ineffective and overrated. This paper critically assesses the mixed legacy of Hume against the cosmological argument, in particular, one of Cleanthes’s famous objections to do with a collection of twenty particles of matter. This objection has had a lasting impact in the philosophy of religion literature in the form of the much disputed, ‘Hume-Edwards Principle’ (HEP). However, I claim that the HEP misrepresents the text on two counts, and that via the spokesperson of Cleanthes, Hume’s point against the cosmological argument has yet to be fully appreciated by critics.

This chapter traces a debate among British empiricists in the early modern period about our capacity to form abstract ideas. Locke holds that our ability to form abstract ideas explains our capacity for general thought and our linguistic understanding. However, Berkeley and Hume insist that abstract ideas are impossible and are left to try to explain these capacities in other ways. Roughly fifty years after Hume’s death, Mary Shepherd attempted to prove the existence of an external world in a way that revived this dispute, claiming that our ability to have abstract ideas is much more fundamental to our knowledge of the world and ourselves than even Locke recognized.

Abstract: In this chapter, Welchman examines John Dewey’s critique of traditional moral theories, particularly those grounded in nonempirical moral norms. She shows how Dewey challenges the idea that moral obligations derive from an intuitive grasp of absolute truths, arguing instead that norms emerge from human habits and social interactions. Tracing Dewey’s evolution from his early idealism to his later pragmatism, Welchman highlights his rejection of “intuitional ethics” and his shift toward a naturalistic account of moral reasoning. Dewey sees morality as a dynamic process, shaped by experience and subject to revision in light of its social consequences. Dewey maintains that moral principles should be empirically tested and continually refined. He argues that social institutions generate obligations, but these obligations must remain open to critical reflection. The chapter illuminates how this pragmatic approach positions morality not as an immutable ideal but as an evolving practice aimed at enhancing human welfare.

This interpretive chapter attends to an often overlooked feature of the Dialogues: the tone of its repeated disputes. It asks what is the meaning of the tone and probes its value. To do so, it begins with a consideration of character in a dual-sense: the moral character of these disputes between literary characters. It argues that critical engagement with characterization via the lens of literary theory reveals that it is a category mistake to reduce the voice of a fictional character (e.g., Philo) to that of a real person (e.g., Hume). It further contends that if we think of each fictional character as merely a solitary component of a larger narrative flow we are more likely to focus on the basic action that is internal to the narrative, that is: disagreement, rather than who the character speaks for. Finally, it claims that the virtuous disagreement between interlocutors here rehearses an ethics of responsiveness that can be viewed as pointing towards a moral element. Hume’s dramatic sensibilities obscure the ethical temperament of the disagreements yet their posture reflects a gestural phenomenon of responsiveness (per Elise Springer) that might come close to expressing Hume’s ideal form of religion.

This paper examines the themes of history, psychology, and epistemology in Hume’s Natural History of Religion. In the first half, I argue that the origin of religion Hume seeks to uncover in this work is psychological rather than chronological: he is looking for religion’s origin in human nature rather than human history. In doing so, I reject the common view, going all the way back to Hume’s near contemporary Dugald Stewart, that the Natural History is a work of “conjectural history”. Examination of the work itself, and of the use of the term “history” at the time, corroborates the view that a “natural history” of religion, for Hume and his contemporaries, was an early form of what we would now call a theory of religious psychology.

In this chapter, I consider the Dialogues as a text that formulates and criticises a particular argument for design (‘the argument for design’). After presenting the relevant material from the Dialogues, I consider the strengths and weaknesses of the formulation of the argument that is the object of Hume’s criticisms, and set out what I take to be the full range of criticisms that Hume makes of it. I then assess the strength of these criticisms, paying particular attention to writers – for example Paley, Reid, Dawkins, and Hawthorne and Isaacs – who have claimed that Hume’s objections to ‘the argument for design’ are weak or ineffectual. Next, I consider the originality of Hume’s critique of ‘the argument for design’; I argue that, on the evidence that I have considered, Hume deserves most of the credit for the objections to ‘the argument for design’ in the Dialogues. I conclude with some brief remarks about the relative importance of the success of the criticisms of ‘the argument for design’ to the overall project of the Dialogues.

There are significant ambiguities in how “atheism” is to be understood or interpreted. Having considered these, we turn to Hume’s arguments and assess to what extent his views in the Dialogues should be interpreted in these terms. While it is evident that Hume opposed “superstition” and that he was, in this sense, plainly an irreligious thinker, this does not settle the question of his “atheism”. Although Hume has been read by some as an theist of a minimal kind, and by others as a sceptic or agnostic, both these accounts are rejected. Hume was, it is argued, a “hard sceptical atheist”, by which we understand him to take the view that we have probable (non-dogmatic) grounds for denying the theist hypothesis in all its forms. His “speculative atheism” is accompanied by a “practical atheism” which, while firmly opposed “superstition”, is willing to ally itself with both sceptics and those theists (or deists) who share Hume’s opposition to “superstition”.

I take this chapter as an opportunity to ask what Hume might think of rational religious belief given developments in philosophy of religion, epistemology and contemporary cognitive science of religion (which explores the natural roots of religion). To that end, I will consider some basic findings in the cognitive science of religion concerning the origins of religion in human nature. I will also reflect on some significant developments in twentieth-Century philosophy, including recent developments in religious epistemology, that I think Hume might have found insightful. I will argue that twenty-first-century Hume, perhaps ironically in line with the thought of Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff (who in turn align themselves with Thomas Reid), would defend rational belief in God.

Hume’s Dialogues contains one of the most efficient and rhetorically effective – and consequently influential statements of the problem (or problems) of evil in literature. In the last three parts of the Dialogues, we can see much of the shape of the contemporary debate on the problem, in its various aspects. But, familiar though the main lines of that debate might be, Hume’s presentation of the issues in dramatic form throws up some less familiar angles, as well as posing a question concerning his own views on religion. This chapter will follow the course of the discussion as it unfolds, taking points more or less in the order in which they arise, but organised around the various problems of evil. It ends with a brief consideration of the wider consequences of the discussion.