Hume Holism And Miracles

David Johnson seeks to overthrow one of the widely accepted tenets of Anglo-American philosophy—that of the success of the Humean case against the rational credibility of reports of miracles. In a manner unattempted in any other single work, he meticulously examines all the main variants of Humean reasoning on the topic of miracles: Hume's own argument and its reconstructions by John Stuart Mill, J. L. Mackie, Antony Flew, Jordan Howard Sobel, and others.Hume's view, set forth in his essay "Of Miracles," has been widely thought to be correct. Johnson reviews Hume's thesis with clarity and elegance and considers the arguments of some of the most prominent defenders of Hume's case against miracles. According to Johnson, the Humean argument on this topic is entirely without merit, its purported cogency being simply a philosophical myth.

In this book the author offers a critical analysis of David Hume's argument against miracles from his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, "Of Miracles" is one of the most influential works written in defense of the position that belief in supernatural occurrences is not reasonable. Using Hume's work as a point of departure, the author addresses the two most important epistemological questions asked about miracles: Is it ever reasonable to ascribe a divine source to an anomalous event in order to identify it as miraculous? and What theoretically entails sufficient evidence that a miracle has actually taken place? Contemporary rehabilitations of Hume's argument, as put forth by Antony Flew, Alastair McKinnon, and Patrick Nowell-Smith, are evaluated. Contents: Defining the Miraculous; Hume's Argument, Part 1;Hume's Argument, Part 2;The Rationality of Belief and the Existence of God; Contemporary Rehabilitations of Hume's Argument; and Miracles and Evidence.

Alexander George’s lucid interpretation of Hume’s “Of Miracles” provides fresh insights into this provocative text, explaining the concepts and claims involved. He also shows why Hume’s argument fails to engage with committed religious thought and why philosophical argumentation so often proves ineffective in shaking people’s deeply held beliefs.

Since its publication in the mid-eighteenth century, Hume's discussion of miracles has been the target of severe and often ill-tempered attacks. In this book, one of our leading historians of philosophy offers a systematic response to these attacks. Arguing that these criticisms have--from the very start--rested on misreadings, Robert Fogelin begins by providing a narrative of the way Hume's argument actually unfolds. What Hume's critics (and even some of his defenders) have failed to see is that Hume's primary argument depends on fixing the appropriate standards of evaluating testimony presented on behalf of a miracle. Given the definition of a miracle, Hume quite reasonably argues that the standards for evaluating such testimony must be extremely high. Hume then argues that, as a matter of fact, no testimony on behalf of a religious miracle has even come close to meeting the appropriate standards for acceptance. Fogelin illustrates that Hume's critics have consistently misunderstood the structure of this argument--and have saddled Hume with perfectly awful arguments not found in the text. He responds first to some early critics of Hume's argument and then to two recent critics, David Johnson and John Earman. Fogelin's goal, however, is not to "bash the bashers," but rather to show that Hume's treatment of miracles has a coherence, depth, and power that makes it still the best work on the subject.

This vital study offers a new interpretation of Hume's famous "Of Miracles," which notoriously argues against the possibility of miracles. By situating Hume's popular argument in the context of the eighteenth-century debate on miracles, Earman shows Hume's argument to be largely unoriginal and chiefly without merit where it is original. Yet Earman constructively conceives how progress can be made on the issues that Hume's essay so provocatively posed about the ability of eyewitness testimony to establish the credibility of marvelous and miraculous events.

This book developed from sections of my doctoral dissertation, "The Possibility of Religious Knowledge: Causation, Coherentism and Foundationalism," Brown University, 1982. However, it actually had its beginnings much earlier when, as an undergraduate at the University of Virginia, I first read Hume's "Of Miracles" and became interested in it. (Fascinated would be too strong. ) My teacher put the following marginal comment in a paper I wrote about it: "Suppose someone told you that they had been impregnated by an angel whispering into their ear. Wouldn't you think they had gone dotty?" She had spent time in England. I thought about it. I agreed that I would not have believed such testimony, but did not think this had much to do with Hume's argument against belief in miracles. What surprised me even more was the secondary literature. I became convinced that Hume's argument was misunderstood. My main thesis is established in Part I. This explains Hume's argument against justified belief in miracles and shows how it follows from, and is intrinsically connected with, his more general metaphysics. Part II Part I. It should give the reader a more complete understanding builds on of both the structure of Hume's argument and of his crucial and questionable premises. Chapters 5 and 11 are perhaps the most technical in the book, but they are also the least necessary. They can be skipped by the reader who is only interested in Hume on miracles.

Hume says we never have grounds to believe in miracles. He's right, but many commentators misunderstand his theory of probability and therefore his argument. This book shows that Humean probability descends from Roman law, and once properly contextualized historically and philosophically, Hume's argument survives the criticisms leveled against it.