‘John Banville, Art and Genre’ traces the work of one of Ireland’s most significant novelists since the early 1970s, John Banville. It reads backwards from the point at which Banville, a determinedly literary writer, began writing genre fiction under the pseudonym Benjamin Black in 2006, with his novel Christine Falls. However, Banville’s works, from early novels such as Nightspawn (1971), were from the beginning concerned with the exhaustion of literary form, and this can be traced through the science tetralogy, the art trilogy (beginning with the Book of Evidence, 1989), and the Cleave trilogy in the early 2000s. Hence, when Banville declared his 2022 novel, The Singularities, to be his last (even though it has since been followed by more genre fiction), it could be argued that this statement of finality is really only a continuation of a sense of fallibility and inevitable failure present in all his fiction.

Contemporary analytic philosophers of religion have tended to focus attention on epistemological questions about the grounds for religious belief, or on analysing the precise cognitive content of claims about God. But there is reason to suppose that the actual practice of religion depends less on intellectual inquiries of this sort and more on a lived tradition of observance, including participation in various kinds of ritual, and public and private acts of worship. This chapter, drawing on some attitudes manifest in the poetry of Horace, examines what may have been a prevalent approach to religion in the educated Roman world, involving conformity to religious praxis, combined with an ironic or sceptical attitude to the existence of supernatural forces, or the power or influence of the gods, in human affairs. Such an attitude certainly has its counterpart in our own contemporary culture, but it is argued that such a stance inevitably creates a certain psychological dissonance in the religious practitioner. Detached orthopraxy alone cannot satisfy our deepest human needs. The chapter concludes with reflections on the intimate relation between praxis and belief in matters of religion.

Vigorous debate about the advantages and disadvantages of using the term ‘belief’ regarding ancient states of mind and cognition has had a profound effect on the field of ancient history (and others, such as anthropology) in recent decades. This chapter considers which of these are still relevant and which are mutual misunderstandings, and which issues have, in effect, been resolved indirectly (such as injunctions to use different words for greater clarity). The opportunities offered by cognitive science of religion (and some limits) are set in a broader context of the study of religion. Behind many of these debates (and misunderstandings), it is argued, secular hegemony intrinsically seeks to ‘contain’ religion (taken pragmatically to be the assertion of the actual existence of divinities). This insoluble tension exerts an unceasing influence on our formulation of questions and answers in history. Recently, we have seen a fruitful greater sympathy for religion and ‘believers’ develop, while an appropriate secular distance from empathy is still maintained, notwithstanding the fact that empathy may contribute to an openness to greater sympathy and understanding: the tension does, and will, persist.

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”.

This essay examines the relationship between sceptical attitudes and religious belief in David Hume’s Dialogues concerning Natural Religion. Understanding Hume’s thoughts on scepticism is one of the most important – if not the most important – keys to unlocking his thoughts on the legitimacy of reasoning in mathematics, science and philosophy. Intense controversies swirl around his explicit arguments and analyses of sceptical themes in his A Treatise of Human Nature and Enquiry concerning Human Understanding along with various essays. While some argue that Hume’s approach to scepticism changes in these various works, especially between the Treatise and Enquiry, this essay shows how examining Hume’s discussion in his Dialogues sheds light on his overall stance toward scepticism. And this understanding of his approach in turn opens up new ways of looking at how the various characters in the Dialogues can be read as advocating or illustrating Hume’s epistemological stance. Exploring these issues will also allow us to see how Hume anticipates certain aspects of contemporary debates about reasoning about the nature of logic in general and counterpossible reasoning more specifically.

The Tusculan Disputations can be read as a complex of four projects: (1) a set of formal exercises in the schola genre; (2) a therapeutic operation directed against the emotions, and fear in particular, with an agonistic relation to Epicurean predecessors; (3) a project of edification, aiming to reinforce the reader’s commitment to virtue; and (4) an exhibition or advertisement of the powers of philosophy and its advantages to Rome. Together, these dimensions of the Tusculans explain the peculiarities of its argumentation and literary approach. It is plausibly the aspiration to advertise philosophy to Rome (4) which is most fundamental: therapy (2) and edification (3) are projects in which philosophy can usefully display its powers, and the schola form (1) is convenient for doing so. These projects are to be distinguished from that of philosophical inquiry; the Tusculans is informed more by Cicero’s patriotic pragmatism than by his scepticism.

Chapter 6 presents a discussion of how one might go about changing the minds of others (and even one’s own). This broad discussion reiterates messages from Chapter 4 in the context of engaging misinformation and reconstructing knowledge. The topic of ‘debunking’ is introduced and how using it to change people’s minds is perhaps more difficult than simply advising others of their ‘mistakes’ (e.g. with respect to the backfire effect), depending on the nature of the belief and the individual’s attachment to it. Persuasion techniques are also discussed, as is how people can ‘change their own minds’ and how we often rationalise poor thinking.

Shelley was an adherent to the basic tenet of empiricism, that ‘the senses are the only inlets of knowledge’. Yet he also affirmed that there are things we only ‘feel’ to be true. Rooted in Hume’s distinction between ‘impressions’ and ‘ideas’ – between sensory perceptions and the pictures in our minds, distinguishable only by the relative strength of their appearances – Shelley developed the notion of an ‘inward sense’ that guides us in our feelings or intuitions and discerns between real and ideal things. Above and beyond the philosophy of the British empiricists and the scepticism of Hume, yet rooted in their works, Shelley also developed in his verse a notion of what it would mean for an ‘idea’ to outstrip an ‘impression’ – for the world of the imagination to surpass the real thing, and for poetry to offer up ideas of greater force than empirical reality.

Is there philosophy in Hume’s Essays? In this contribution, I argue that the form of the Essays implies an ongoing philosophical project with a significant sceptical difference from the systemic form of Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature. There is evidence in the Essays that Hume thought of himself thinking philosophically in these works, even if philosophy is narrowly conceived as the search for general principles associated with the ‘abstruse philosophy’ of the Treatise and Enquiries. The distinction between the forms of the Essays and the form of the Treatise indicates, however, that the Essays are not merely continuing the Treatise’s project. The pedagogy of the Essays, revealed in their form, teaches that philosophy is an ongoing project, a sceptical search that is sceptical even about its limits, rather than the system that the young Hume was confident could be completed within the boundaries of a treatise. There is not philosophy in the Essays. The Essays are philosophy.

Hume’s ‘four essays on happiness’ are distinctive in Hume’s oeuvre, and not merely in the 1741 volume of Essays, Moral and Political in which they appeared. They are written in the style of philosophical monologues, with Hume ‘personating’ a representative of each of the main, late Hellenistic philosophical sects in turn. Each such representative, however, engages critically with the philosophical positions staked out by his rivals and antagonists. The ultimate question each of the philosophical sects seeks to answer is: what is the true end (summum bonum) of human life, and where is true contentment to be found? Scholars have tended to be preoccupied with the question of which sect best articulates Hume’s own underlying philosophical commitments. This chapter argues that such an approach is mistaken, because Hume dismissed the quest for the summum bonum altogether. Hume presented all the late Hellenistic philosophical sects as capturing something important about human life, and about the purpose of philosophical activity. Yet ancient moral philosophers had ultimately failed to develop the ‘science of man’ that Hume took to be the greatest achievement of modern philosophy. The four essays, then, reveal Hume’s keen – and lifelong – interest in the history of moral philosophy, and his attentiveness to the distinctive (and superior) character of modern approaches to the discipline.