Building Religion through Dialogue: David Hume in Conversation with Twentieth-Century Philosophy of Dialogue

Abstract

The final part of David Hume’s Dialogues concerning Natural Religion has often left Hume’s readers perplexed. After a long and articulate debate between Philo, the skeptic, and Cleanthes, the theistic philosopher, the reader would expect the victory of Philo, whom many considered to be Hume’s spokesperson. Surprisingly, the book ends with the victory of Cleanthes. Keith Yandell suggested that none of these personages represented Hume, and that Philo’s change of mind was a “change of perspective”, epistemologically grounded in the concept of “propensities”, which Hume presented in The Natural History of Religion. In this article, I build on Yandell’s analysis and explore the dialogical dynamic of Hume’s work with the use of the twentieth-century philosophy of dialogue. I first focus on Michael Bakhtin’s analysis of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s books and show that, as in Bakhtin’s analysis, Hume does not orient the plurality of voices based on a pre-made understanding of reality. I then bring Hume into conversation with Martin Buber, especially regarding their epistemological standpoint. The aim of the article is to show the relevance of Hume’s thought for our contemporary philosophy of dialogue.