Hume's Syndrome: Irrational Resistance to the Paranormal

Journal for the History of Rhetoric, 2024

This article shows how David Hume's notable essay "Of Miracles" responds to the exigency of scientific Christianity by articulating a rationale for divorcing the concerns of English empiricism and Protestantism while also attempting to liberate secular inquiry from religious interference. What it calls skeptical Baconianism denotes how Hume altered Francis Bacon's cultural grammar to reveal the epistemological incommensurability between science and religion and appeal to the strong anti-Catholic and proscientific sentiments of British culture by way of equivocation. In so doing, it shows how Hume attacks the epistemological foundations of scientific Christianity while also exploiting the theological prejudices of English Protestants in the eighteenth century.

Oxford Scholarship Online

No one believes every miracle report they hear. At least, no one I know. For religious and non-religious alike, it is common to disbelieve testimony to the miraculous; it is also common to dismiss such testimony outright. This chapter investigates the rationality of failing to believe miracle reports. Hume famously argued that it is irrational to believe that a miracle has occurred on the basis of testimony alone. While certain aspects of Hume’s argument have received extensive discussion, other features of his argument have been largely overlooked. After offering a reconstruction of Hume’s argument, I will argue that epistemic defeat plays a central role in the argument and explore the aptness of as well as some limitations to Hume’s reasoning.

A paper written for a seminar on Early Modern Philosophy for the MA in Philosophy from Biola University. David Hume’s essay “On Miracles” continues to garner competing interpretations as to what Hume was arguing. The Traditional Interpretation argues that in Part I of the essay Hume is providing an a priori, “in-principle” argument against the possibility of ever justifying a miracle claim on the basis of human testimony. A Revisionary Interpretation championed by Antony Flew and others calls this Traditional Interpretation into question. This paper examines the case for and against the Traditional Interpretation and finds that the Revisionary Interpretation lacks sufficient evidential basis to overthrow the Traditional Interpretation.

2019

The late-Victorian period was characterised by rapid social, cultural, and intellectual changes, with all domains open to challenge from numerous and diverse directions. This thesis focusses on a short period in ‘the Age of Enlightenment’, from the mid-nineteenth century to 1914, during which many groups and individuals wanted to try to answer the ultimate questions about the nature of the universe and humanity’s place within it. For them, the well-established fields of science, religion, and philosophy each proved to be inadequate individual tools with which to attempt to answer these questions. Consequently, many members of the cultural and intellectual elite turned to the paranormal domain, within which they saw the potential to answer some of their fundamental questions. Psychical research was a nascent intellectual field that investigated strange phenomena which existed at the borders of orthodox thinking, sitting precariously between the acceptable and the unacceptable. This t...

2016

an eighteenth century empiricist, skeptic, and a widely acclaimed philosopher of the Enlightenment, formulated one of the greatest modern critique, against the reliability and plausibility of religion in general and Christianity in particular in the modern era of philosophy. During his time, religion depended mainly on the testimonies of miracles and it was probably taken for granted that miracles, an ancient religious tradition, was never considered to be an ideology whose truthfulness could be doubted or denied. But Hume, being a skeptic, argued against not just the possibility of miracles but also the truthfulness of the various testimonies and miraculous claims in history. While Hume continues to argue against the possibility of miracles, Christian and theistic philosophers who believe in the historicity and possibility of miracles have also made effort to respond to some of the philosophical questions aimed at denying the possibility of miracles and the plausibility of religious beliefs in general.

Hume Studies, 1985

Hume and the Enlightenment, Craig Taylor and Stephen Buckle (eds.) Pickering and Chatto, 2011; 105-116, 2011

Despite the fact that many Hume scholars now think that Hume is a kind of naturalist and agree that he thinks that his philosophy is continuous with the sciences of the mind, they ignore much of the evidence that bears on his claims. I discuss Hume’s argument in the section of the Treatise titled ‘Of Scepticism with Regard to Reason’. I take him to be arguing there against aspects of Cartesianism, in particular the claim that one can be certain that one is right about some very simple mathematical or logical beliefs. I argue that his view is vindicated to a surprising degree by some recent research on the family of cognitive deficits called ‘acalculia’. Acalculics can have false beliefs about even very simple arithmetical propositions. At the same time, they can be convinced that their claims are obviously true. They are not insane. Their case constitutes a modern malignant demon. My paper follows up arguments I put in an earlier paper on Hume: ‘Is Induction Epistemologically Prior to Deduction?’ (Ratio, 17, 2004: 28-44).

Journal of the history of the behavioral sciences, 2014

In so far as researchers viewed psychical, occult, and religious phenomena as both objectively verifiable and resistant to extant scientific explanations, their study posed thorny issues for experimental psychologists. Controversies over the study of psychical and occult phenomena at the Fourth Congress of International Psychology (Paris, 1900) and religious phenomena at the Sixth (Geneva, 1909) raise the question of why the latter was accepted as a legitimate object of study, whereas the former was not. Comparison of the Congresses suggests that those interested in the study of religion were willing to forego the quest for objective evidence and focus on experience, whereas those most invested in psychical research were not. The shift in focus did not overcome many of the methodological difficulties. Sub-specialization formalized distinctions between psychical, religious, and pathological phenomena; obscured similarities; and undercut the nascent comparative study of unusual experi...