Popular religions are practical; they are used as guides to living. But philosophical religion has no implications for how we should live. Hume thought that philosophical theism and popular monotheism cannot be coherently united. Yet incoherent unification is precisely what has happened in our own culture.
In this paper we argue that a dominant view of Humean naturalism involves a fundamental misconception of Hume's naturalist project. We shall show that the naturalist project as Hume conceives it is philosophically much more interesting than the form of naturalism commonly attributed to him. We shall also argue, however, that Hume's commitment to principles of empiricist epistemology prevented him from bringing his naturalist project to a satisfactory conclusion. Finally, we shall suggest that Wittgenstein shares Hume's conception of a philosophically (...) satisfactory form of naturalism, and that, unencumbered by empiricist doctrines, Wittgenstein was able to provide the sort of undogmatic unravelling of the sceptical problem that eluded Hume. (shrink)
Full-text of this article is not available in this e-prints service. This article was originally published [following peer-review] in Hume Studies, published by and copyright Hume Society.
Popular religions are practical; they are used as guides to living. But philosophical religion has no implications for how we should live. Hume thought that philosophical theism and popular monotheism cannot be coherently united. Yet incoherent unification is precisely what has happened in our own culture.
