An examination of David Hume's work, revising our understanding of the period in which he lived and wrote.

Recent work at the intersection of moral philosophy and the philosophy of psychology has dealt mostly with Aristotelian virtue ethics. The dearth of scholarship that engages with Hume’s moral philosophy, however, is both noticeable and peculiar. Hume's Moral Philosophy and Contemporary Psychology demonstrates how Hume’s moral philosophy comports with recent work from the empirical sciences and moral psychology. It shows how contemporary work in virtue ethics has much stronger similarities to the metaphysically thin conception of human nature that Hume developed, rather than the metaphysically thick conception of human nature that Aristotle espoused. It also reveals how contemporary work in moral motivation and moral epistemology has strong affinities with themes in Hume’s sympathetic sentimentalism.

Inspired by Machiavelli, modern philosophers held that the tension between the goals of biblical piety and the goals of political life needed to be resolved in favor of the political, and they attempted to recast and delimit traditional Christian teaching to serve and stabilize political life accordingly. This volume examines the arguments of those thinkers who worked to remake Christianity into a civil religion in the early modern and modern periods. Beginning with Machiavelli and continuing through to Alexis de Tocqueville, the essays in this collection explain in detail the ways in which these philosophers used religious and secular writing to build a civil religion in the West. Early chapters examine topics such as Machiavelli’s comparisons of Christianity with Roman religion, Francis Bacon’s cherry-picking of Christian doctrines in the service of scientific innovation, and Spinoza’s attempt to replace long-held superstitions with newer, “progressive” ones. Other essays probe the scripture-based, anti-Christian argument that religion must be subordinate to politics espoused by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and David Hume, both of whom championed reason over divine authority. Crucially, the book also includes a study of civil religion in America, with chapters on John Locke, Montesquieu, and the American Founders illuminating the relationships among religious and civil history, acts, and authority. The last chapter is an examination of Tocqueville’s account of civil religion and the American regime. Detailed, thought-provoking, and based on the careful study of original texts, this survey of religion and politics in the West will appeal to scholars in the history of political philosophy, political theory, and American political thought.

This ebook is a selective guide designed to help scholars and students of social work find reliable sources of information by directing them to the best available scholarly materials in whatever form or format they appear from books, chapters, and journal articles to online archives, electronic data sets, and blogs. Written by a leading international authority on the subject, the ebook provides bibliographic information supported by direct recommendations about which sources to consult and editorial commentary to make it clear how the cited sources are interrelated related. This ebook is a static version of an article from Oxford Bibliographies Online: Philosophy, a dynamic, continuously updated, online resource designed to provide authoritative guidance through scholarship and other materials relevant to the study Philosophy. Oxford Bibliographies Online covers most subject disciplines within the social science and humanities, for more information visit www.oxfordbibligraphies.com.

This volume provides a new and nuanced appreciation of David Hume as a historian. Gone for good are the days when one can offhandedly assert, as R. G. Collingwood once did, that Hume “deserted philosophical studies in favour of historical” ones. History and philosophy are commensurate in Hume’s thought and works from the beginning to the end. Only by recognizing this can we begin to make sense of Hume’s canon as a whole and see clearly his many contributions to fields we now recognize as the distinct disciplines of history, philosophy, political science, economics, literature, religious studies, and much else besides. Casting their individual beams of light on various nooks and crannies of Hume’s historical thought and writing, the book’s contributors illuminate the whole in a way that would not be possible from the perspective of a single-authored study. Aside from the editor, the contributors are David Allan, M. A. Box, Timothy M. Costelloe, Roger L. Emerson, Jennifer Herdt, Philip Hicks, Douglas Long, Claudia M. Schmidt, Michael Silverthorne, Jeffrey M. Suderman, Mark R. M. Towsey, and F. L. van Holthoon.

In today’s developed world, much of what people believe about religious toleration has evolved from crucial innovations in toleration theory developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Thinkers from that period have been rightly celebrated for creating influential, liberating concepts and ideas that have enabled many of us to live in peace. However, their work was certainly not perfect. In this enlightening volume, John Christian Laursen and María José Villaverde have gathered contributors to focus on the paradoxes, blindspots, unexpected flaws, or ambiguities in early modern toleration theories and practices. Each chapter explores the complexities, complications, and inconsistencies that came up in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as people grappled with the idea of toleration. In understanding the weaknesses, contradictions, and ambivalences in other theories, they hope to provoke thought about the defects in ways of thinking about toleration in order to help in overcoming similar problems in contemporary toleration theories.