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Adam Smith: Philosophy, Science, and Social Science

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 January 2010

D. D. Raphael
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Extract

What darkness was the ‘Enlightenment’ supposed to have removed? The answer is irrational forms of religion. Most of the ‘enlightened’ took the view that revealed religion was irrational and that natural religion could be rational; but some were sceptical about natural religion too. Hume was the most honest and the most penetrating thinker of the latter group. His biographer, Professor E. C. Mossner, is not alone in believing that the Dialogues concerning Natural Religion is ‘his philosophical testament’.

Type
Research Article
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 12 , March 1978 , pp. 77 - 93
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 1978

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References

REFERENCES AND NOTES

1 Mossner, Ernest C., ‘Hume and the Legacy of the Dialogues’, in David Hume, ed. by Morice, G. P. (Edinburgh, 1977), p. 3.Google Scholar
2 Raphael, D. D., ‘Adam Smith and “the infection of David Hume's society”’, Journal of the History of Ideas, xxx (1969); reprinted, with revision, as Appendix II of Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. by D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (Oxford, I976).Google Scholar