Naturalism, realism, and Hume's philosophy of religion

Chris Michael Lorkowski, Purdue University

Abstract

This purpose of the present inquiry is to study the relationship between David Hume’s doxastic naturalism, causal realism, and philosophy of religion. Though Hume is standardly read as either a causal reductionist or a causal skeptic, I argue that a realist reading becomes possible if one accepts that Hume has three interpretive tools at his disposal and employs them in a certain way. The most important for my purposes is a non-rational doxastically appropriate belief-generation mechanism. I argue that Hume has such a mechanism at work in his corpus, and that it justifies our causal beliefs, making their grounding instinctual. However, after rejecting the standard account of this mechanism, I show that belief in the deity of attenuated deism is also instinctual, and once this is realized, an elegant reading of the Dialogues becomes manifest. After dismissing several other pieces of evidence often thought to count against reading Philo as Hume’s thoroughgoing spokesman, I turn to Philo’s Reversal. If Hume is a doxastic naturalist of the type I describe, then the Reversal is exactly what we would expect, as Philo is both a skeptical philosopher and a doxastic naturalist, and he represents Hume throughout the entire work. Once we realize that Philo’s words are Hume’s, then his philosophy of religion corpus becomes more clearly realist. I argue that the realist position explains passages pertaining to causation and the laws of nature found in “Of Suicide,” The Natural History, and the Dialogues much better than either the skeptic or the reductionist. After arguing for Hume’s realism in this way, I apply it to another area of his philosophy of religion, the Enquiry argument against miracles. Here, I show how Humean realism may overcome standard modality-based objections to the argument.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Draper, Purdue University.

Subject Area

Philosophy

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