In this new edition are a detailed bibliography, index, and textual supplements, making it the perfect text for scholars and advanced students of Hume, ...
Mossner's Life of David Hume remains the standard biography of this great thinker and writer. First published in 1954, and updated in 1980, it is now reissued in paperback in response to increased interest in Hume. E. C. Mossner was Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin. 'Mossner's work is a quite remarkable scholarly achievement; it will be an indispensable tool for Hume scholars and a treasure-trove of information for all students of the intellectual and literary (...) history of the eighteenth century' Richard H. Popkin in the Philological Quarterly. (shrink)
This volume, first published in 1954, is one of three presenting the correspondence of David Hume. It collects letters from 1737 to 1776 which do not appear in J. Y. T. Greig's two volumes of 1932, and offers a rich picture of the man and his age. The correspondents include such famous thinkers as Adam Smith, James Boswell, and Benjamin Franklin.
HUME’S PHILOSOPHICAL SUBVERSION OF RELIGION, NATURAL AND REVEALED, WAS LIFELONG: THE "RELIGIOUS HYPOTHESIS" IS EMPTY. SO I HAVE ARGUED IN A NEW READING OF THE "DIALOGUES". THE ONLY HOPE FOR HUMANITY LIES IN MAN HIMSELF. HUME DISTINGUISHES BETWEEN THE "VULGAR" AND THE "ENLIGHTENED." AT THE APEX OF THE "ENLIGHTENED" STAND THE "HEROES IN PHILOSOPHY," OF WHOM ONLY GALILEO AND NEWTON ARE SPECIFIED. THE "ENLIGHTENED" PROVIDE LEADERSHIP AND KNOWLEDGE, A DUTY WE MAY VIEW AS THE "RELIGION OF MAN." QUITE POSSIBLY HUME (...) CONSIDERED HIMSELF THE THIRD "HERO IN PHILOSOPHY." EVIDENCE IS PROVIDED BY HIS TRIUMPHAL RECEPTION IN PARIS, 1763-1765: "THEY CONSIDER ME AS ONE OF THE GREATEST GENIUSES IN THE WORLD." THUS THE "RELIGION OF MAN" IRONICALLY CONSTITUTES HUME’S PERSONAL RELIGION. (shrink)
Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion are still much with us. What appears to be the definitive edition was published by Professor Norman Kemp Smith in 1935 with a learned introduction which, among other things, assembled a mass of evidence pointing to the conclusion that Philo is to be identified with Hume himself, and that Hume in the Dialogues is deliberately trying to undermine the religious hypothesis. Though these conclusions have been widely accepted, Dr. B. M. Laing, in the April issue (...) of Philosophy , strenuously attacked them in an ingenious argument based in part on his already published thesis that Hume's fundamental philosophy is not really the scepticism so long assigned him. Dr. Laing takes the opportunity in passing to indicate his sympathy with the recent position of a distinguished British poet that Voltaire, also, has been traditionally abused in the assumption that on the question of religion he wrote with his tongue in his cheek. The present examination is not designed to inquire into this new mode of making the wicked pious; nor to push the question back from the Dialogues to Hume's basic philosophy; nor to press the writer's conviction [“The Enigma of Hume,” Mind , XLV pp. 334–349] that not only is Philo to be identified as Hume, but in addition, Cleanthes as Joseph Butler, and Demea as Samuel Clarke. The present purpose is solely to indicate certain unhistorical bases of Dr. Laing's attack on the more traditional view so ably championed by Professor Norman Kemp Smith. (shrink)
Mossner's Life of David Hume remains the standard biography of this great thinker and writer. First published in 1954, and updated in 1980, it is now reissued in paperback in response to increased interest in Hume. E. C. Mossner was Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin. 'Mossner's work is a quite remarkable scholarly achievement; it will be an indispensable tool for Hume scholars and a treasure-trove of information for all students of the intellectual and literary (...) history of the eighteenth century' Richard H. Popkin in the Philological Quarterly. (shrink)
