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Between Relativism and Design: The Limits of Hume's Secularity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 March 2020

Roger Maioli
Roger Maioli*
Affiliation:
Department of English, University of Florida
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

Challenging the common image of Hume as a thoroughly secular philosopher, I argue that Hume occasionally relied on the design argument to defend the objectivity of values. Hume acknowledged that rejecting design might open the door to aesthetic, ethical, and epistemic relativism. To avoid this prospect, he allowed himself to repurpose the language of providential naturalists like Hutcheson and claim that “nature,” rather than God, has attuned our faculties to objective standards of morals, beauty, and truth. Historians of philosophy have treated such passages as merely figurative, as they conflict with fundamental principles in Hume's philosophy. I argue instead, from an intellectual historical perspective, that Hume nonetheless expects the passages to be read literally, since only the literal reading helps his case against relativism. Rather than recasting Hume as a defender of design, however, I argue that his appeals to design were less an integral part of his philosophy than a provisional compromise, a response to intractable tensions in the history of secularism.

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Articles
Information
Modern Intellectual History , Volume 18 , Issue 4 , December 2021 , pp. 1081 - 1105
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Copyright © The Author(s) 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

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97 Superstition arises “from the unhappy situation of private or public affairs, from ill health, from a gloomy and melancholy disposition, or from the concurrence of all these circumstances” (Hume, E, 73–4).

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99 Ibid., 5.21, 40.

100 Ibid.

101 Ibid., 5.22, 40.

102 Ibid., 5.2, 31.

103 Examples not mentioned in this paper include Hume, T, 1.4.1.7, 1.4.2.1, 2.1.5.6, 2.1.5.10, 2.2.6.6; EHU, 8.35; EPM, 1.9; and E, 131, 132, 162.

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