'David Hume and The Natural History of the Ignorant Multitude', Led by Daniel Hayward
When:
—
Venue:
Birkbeck 43 Gordon Square
No booking required
Daniel Hayward, a Phd Candidate at Birkbeck College. He is currently preparing a thesis on ‘The Natural History of Attention’
Hume’s Natural History of Religion was most likely written between 1749 and 1752 and was published In Edinburgh in 1757. The book professes to offer, over a very short compass, an account of the “origin” of religion in “human nature.” The following presentation will begin with an explanation of why it was that Hume believed that such an account ought to take the form of a “natural history.” I will briefly distinguish the meaning of Hume’s “natural history” from civil, ecclesiastical, universal, and “popular” histories, as well as from other kinds of “natural” history and from the genre (invented later by Dugald Stewart but with reference to Hume’s book) of “conjectural history”. Out of a compressed overview of the arguments in the Natural History I will develop the following questions. Who is the principal subject of Hume’s Natural History? Who is the book about? Is there a sense in which the Natural History is a popular history after all, that is, a new kind of history of the people? If this is the case, what significance should be attributed to the fact that Hume chooses to draw on the generic language of contemporary natural philosophy? In conclusion I will make the case that Hume is interested not so much in the method of the natural philosopher as he is his assumed psychology. Central to the account in the Natural History of the religious beliefs of the “ignorant multitude” is a seemingly programmatic overvaluation of the powers of attention possessed by a particular type of person – the natural philosopher. Rather than deride that overvaluation as a mistake, I will finish by asking, what are its intellectual consequences for later thinking about the “nature” of “common life”? What are its results?
Set Text:
David Hume, Dialogues and Natural History of Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998) - the discussion concentrated on the first ten pages of the book (pp. 134 – 144).
Contact name:
Ann Lewis