Author Description

Presenting significant new research particularly on the moral and religious philosophy of David Hume, this volume illustrates the importance of intellectual context in understanding the work and career of one of the most important thinkers of the eighteenth century. Distinctive in its reappraisal of the influence of John Locke, Francis Hutcheson, and others, it examines how Hume reacted to, and in turn affected, other thinkers whose views, like his own, were bound up with specific philosophical, theological, and scientific traditions and commitments. The essays fall into three broad groups. The first looks at Hume's work as a moral philosopher, re-evaluating his place in the sceptical, utilitarian, and natural-law traditions. The second reassesses his work in moral psychology and the science of the mind in the light of new research on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century sources. A final group, which examines Hume's critique of religion in its literary, historical, and philosophical aspects, includes an edited transcription of a significant new manuscript on the problem of evil.