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Time: 16 hours
Level: Intermediate
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 Introduction Resource- This unit examines David Hume's reasons for being complacent in the face of death, as these are laid out in his suppressed essay of 1755, ‘Of the immortality of the soul’. More generally, they examine...
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- 1 Prelude: Hume's death Resource
- In mid-August 1776 crowds formed outside the family home of David Hume. Hume was a pivotal figure in the Scottish Enlightenment, and his imminent death was widely anticipated. The crowds were anxious to...
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| | 2 From enlightenment to romanticism
- 2.1 Working through the section Resource
- This section examines Hume's reasons for being complacent in the face of death, as these are laid out in his suppressed essay of 1755, ‘Of the immortality of the soul’. More generally, they examine some...
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| | 3 The intellectual background
- 3.1 Introduction Resource
- Hume often assumes familiarity with views that were popular at the time of writing. To have done otherwise would have been tedious for the original readership. Many of these views are no longer so widespread,...
- 3.2 Empiricism Resource
- The Enlightenment is also known as the Age of Reason, but it was a very specific conception of reason that held sway. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe had seen a boom in knowledge brought about...
- 3.3 Deism Resource
- In the readings you will often come across allusions to the contrast between revealed religion and natural religion (or deism). The distinction turns on what the nature of the evidence is for a particular...
- 3.4 Proving God's existence Resource
- Deists had at their disposal three traditional ways of arguing for the existence of God.
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| | 4 Hume on life after death
- 4.1 Why was our immortality an issue? Resource
- When reading about Hume's death you may have been puzzled as to why people became so worked up about Hume's attitude. The question of what, if anything, happens after death is something most of us are...
- 4.2 Moral grounds for thinking we are immortal Resource
- The moral reason (as Hume calls it) for thinking that there is an afterlife has already been touched on. God, being just, would surely see to it that we are punished or rewarded for our aberrant or commendable...
- 4.3 Physical grounds for thinking we are immortal Resource
- In section III Hume discusses what he calls physical reasons for thinking there is an afterlife. A sensible guess as to what he means by a physical reason is that it is one based on observation and experience...
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- 5.1 The reception of Hume's views Resource
- ‘Of suicide’ was received with the same degree of public hostility as his essay on immortality. Here is what an anonymous reviewer of the 1777 posthumous edition of both essays had to say in the Monthly...
- 5.2 Philosophy, religion and everyday life Resource
- Perhaps because he is aware he will be stirring up trouble by publishing his views on this topic, Hume warms to his theme by talking in paragraphs 1–4 about how he conceives of the relation between philosophy,...
- 5.3 Do we have a duty to God not to commit suicide? Resource
- Why, you may be wondering, would anyone think that we have a duty to God not to take our own lives? Because it would have been so familiar to his original readership, Hume barely bothers to state the position...
- 5.4 Assessing Hume's views Resource
- The main value of Hume's essay lies in its discussion of our duties to God. Here Hume's arguments initially seem quite convincing. But arguments almost always seem convincing when they are first heard...
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| | References and Acknowledgements | |
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