Hume's Dialogues
Written by David Hume
Narrated by Ray Childs
4.5/5
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About this audiobook
What should we teach young people about religion? The characters Demea, Cleanthes, and Philo passionately present and defend three sharply different answers to that question. Demea opens the dialogue with a position derived from René Descartes and Father Malebranche - God's nature is a mystery, but God's existence can be proved logically. Cleanthes attacks that view, both because it leads to mysticism and because it attempts the impossible task of trying to establish existence on the basis of pure reason, without appeal to sense experience. As an alternative, he offers a proof both God's existence and God's nature based on the same kind of scientific reasoning established by Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton.
Taking a skeptical approach, Philo presents a series of arguments that question any attempt to use reason as a basis for religious faith. He suggests that human beings might be better off without religion. The dialogue ends without agreement among the characters, justifying Hume's choice of dialogue as the literary style for this topic.
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David Hume
David Hume was an eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher, historian, and essayist, and the author of A Treatise of Human Nature, considered by many to be one of the most important philosophical works ever published. Hume attended the University of Edinburgh at an early age and considered a career in law before deciding that the pursuit of knowledge was his true calling. Hume’s writings on rationalism and empiricism, free will, determinism, and the existence of God would be enormously influential on contemporaries such as Adam Smith, as well as the philosophers like Schopenhauer, John Stuart Mill, and Karl Popper, who succeeded him. Hume died in 1776.
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Reviews for Hume's Dialogues
3 ratings1 review
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I love how David Hume is not afraid to ask the hard questions about faith. The infinitely good and the question of evil. Where did evil come from? Is GOD bad or good? Why is there evil in the world? These are some question whiich even the faithful believe should be asked. To be a Christian is not to run away from these questions regardless of the fact that we do not know what the answers are because they are beyond us, but to rather glorify GOD in them. I love this book!
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