Reading Hume's Dialogues: A Veneration for True Religion

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Indiana University Press, 13/09/2002 - 296 páginas

"... establishes the literary and philosophical greatness of the Dialogues in ways that even its warmest admirers have been unable to do before."
-- Terence Penelhum

In this lively reading of David Hume's Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, William Lad Sessions reveals a complex internal hermeneutic that gives new form, structure, and meaning to the work. Linking situations, character, style, and action to the philosophical concepts presented, Sessions finds meaning contained in the work itself and calls attention to the internal connections between plot, character, rhetoric, and philosophy. The result avoids the main preoccupation of previous commentaries, namely, the attempt to establish which of the main characters speaks for Hume. Concentrating on previously unexplored questions of piety and theology, Sessions asks important questions in the philosophy of religion today -- what is the nature of true religion, what is the relationship between theology and piety, and how should we actively engage with God?

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Páginas seleccionadas

Índice

SceneSetting
11
Pamphilus to Hermippus
30
75
108
87
147
Part 11
164
Part 12
182
Conclusion
207
LIST OF SOURCES
261
Direitos de autor

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Passagens conhecidas

Página 54 - Finite, weak, and blind creatures, we ought to humble ourselves in his august presence, and, conscious of our frailties, adore in silence his infinite perfections, which eye hath not seen, ear hath not heard, neither hath it entered into the heart of man to conceive them.
Página 141 - Nothing is demonstrable, unless the contrary implies a contradiction. Nothing, that is distinctly conceivable, implies a contradiction. Whatever we conceive as existent, we can also conceive as non-existent. There is no being, therefore, whose non-existence implies a contradiction.
Página 80 - The declared profession of every reasonable sceptic is only to reject abstruse, remote and refined arguments; to adhere to common sense and the plain instincts of nature; and to assent, wherever any reasons strike him with so full a force, that he cannot, without the greatest violence, prevent it.
Página 53 - Look round the world : contemplate the whole and every part of it : You will find it to be nothing but one great machine, subdivided into an infinite number of lesser machines, which again admit of subdivisions to a degree beyond what human senses and faculties can trace and explain. All these various machines, and even their most minute parts, are adjusted to each other with an accuracy which ravishes into admiration all men who have ever contemplated them.
Página 92 - If the material world rests upon a similar ideal world, this ideal world must rest upon some other, and so on without end. It were better, therefore, never to look beyond the present material world. By supposing it to contain the principle of its order within itself, we really assert it to be God; and the sooner we arrive at that Divine Being, so much the better.
Página 65 - But the ideas in a human mind, we see, by an unknown, inexplicable economy, arrange themselves so as to form the plan of a watch or house. Experience, therefore, proves, that there is an original principle of order in mind, not in matter. From similar effects we infer similar causes. The adjustment of means to ends is alike in the universe, as in a machine of human contrivance. The causes, therefore, must be resembling.
Página 89 - A mind, whose acts and sentiments and ideas are not distinct and successive ; one, that is wholly simple, and totally immutable, is a mind which has no thought, no reason, no will, no sentiment, no love, no hatred ; or, in a word, is no mind at all.

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Acerca do autor (2002)

William Lad Sessions is Ballengee 250th Anniversary Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Philosophy Department at Washington and Lee University. He is author of The Concept of Faith.

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