Religion and Faction in Hume's Moral Philosophy

by Jennifer A. Herdt

• ISBN13: 9780521554428
• ISBN10: 052155442X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1997-11-13
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

This book explores Hume’s concern with the destructiveness of religious factions and his efforts to develop, in his moral philosophy, a solution to factional conflict. Sympathy and the related capacity to enter into foreign points of view are crucial to the neutralization of religious zeal and the naturalization of ethics. Jennifer Herdt suggests that Hume’s preoccupation with religious faction is the key which reveals the unity of his varied philosophical, aesthetic, political, and historical works.

Table of Contents

Preface	xi	(4)
Abbreviations	xv
Introduction	1	(16)
1. Setting sympathy's stage	17	(22)
Modern natural law and the problem of conflict	17	(7)
Interestedness and intelligibility	24	(5)
The solution of sympathy	29	(6)
Sympathy and the "experimental method"	35	(4)
2. Displacing Providence	39	(43)
Species of sympathy	39	(10)
The Hutcheson connection	49	(11)
Accounting for approbation	60	(5)
The problem of contradiction	65	(6)
Sympathy and the Enquiry	71	(11)
3. "Poetical systems" and the pleasures of tragedy	82	(35)
Spectators and sympathy	82	(5)
The Douglas controversy	87	(11)
"Of tragedy"	98	(7)
Fiction, reality, and belief	105	(8)
Religion and poetry: the dangers of detachment	113	(4)
4. Sympathetic understanding and the threat of difference	117	(51)
In search of a standard of taste	117	(16)
The problem of "vicious manners"	133	(10)
Divergent sympathies	143	(14)
Beyond poetry - history, speculation, and religion	157	(11)
5. Religion and irrationality in history	168	(51)
Varieties of religious belief	171	(10)
The charge of self-deception: Hume vs. Pascal	181	(7)
Irony and sentimentality in the History of England	188	(9)
Zeal and faction	197	(9)
The limits of sympathetic understanding	206	(13)
Conclusion	219	(15)
Notes	234	(49)
Select bibliography	283	(10)
Index	293