Scepticism and Belief in Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, and: Hume, Newton, and the Design Argument, and: Dialogues sur la religion naturelle, and: Hume's Philosophy of Religion (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 481 Stanley Tweyman. Scepticism and Belief in Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. International Archives of the History of Ideas, Vol. 1o6. Dordrecht and Boston: Martinus Nijhoff, 1986. Pp. xv + 167. $45.oo. Robert H. Hurlbutt III. Hume, Newton, and the Design Argument. Revised edition. Lincoln , NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1985. Pp. xvi + 255. $24-95. David Hume. Dialogues sur la religion naturelle. Introduction, traduction et notes par Michel Malherbe. Paris: J. Vrin, a987. Pp. 16o. Paper, 42F. J. C. A. Gaskin. Hume's Philosophy of Religion. 2d edition. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1988. Pp. xiii + 25o. Cloth, $39.95. Paper, $15.oo. Stanley Tweyman steps off on the wrong foot. He contends that the Design Argument proceeds from a resemblance between human artefacts and the design of the world to the conclusion that the purposive cause of the one has its analogue in the purposive cause of the other. The only textual authority which is offered for this limping argument seems to be a quotation of his own devising (78). His authentic citations from Hume relate not to the design but to the order of the world, and to the question whether that order is evidence of design and, if it is, whether analogy is adequate to identify the attributes (not attitudes: xii) of the designer. Conceptual conflation on this scale cannot be rectified just by substituting the correct term 'order' for the incorrect term 'design', for it implies that the author has been in a fog about Hume's true references to design throughout the Dialogues. The Introduction sets out the problems of the Dialogues as they may strike the philosophic literalist. Chapter 1 sketches the epistemological framework for Hume's argument. Potentially the most promising section is one that traces the forms and stages of scepticism presented in the first Enquiry, which Tweyman sees re-enacted at strategic points in the Dialogues. One suggestion here is that there is a progress from dogmatism to mitigated scepticism just as there is from Pyrrhonism to mitigated scepticism. But the former cannot be the strong tendency of human nature that the latter is: the dogmatist under Pyrrhonian attack moderates his truculence, but there is little evidence he moderates his beliefs; while the mitigated sceptic of the Enquiry stays with matters of common life and avoids judgments about the origin of worlds. No other significant background, of either history or philosophy, penetrates the remaining chapters, which are devoted seriatim to the preamble, Parts 1-8, and Part 12, of the Dialogues. If it had, Parts 9-11 might not have been dropped as a diversion. Once he embarks on the text in chapter 2, the author has a bit of a struggle with Augustan English. He thinks the first five paragraphs of the preamble do not convey the sentiments of Pamphilus (21), seems to misunderstand Hume's idiomatic use of 'careless' (not "a technical term": 23), and is too inventive over "the accurate philosophical turn of Cleanthes." He will not have the incipient Pyrrhonism of Philo at D. 131 to be Pyrrhonism, but insists that it is simultaneously moderate antecedent scepticism (24) and mitigated scepticism (25). Even if it could be squared with Hume's prescriptions for one, it cannot be both. Chapter 3 forces the reader to reconsider whether "The world is nothing but one great machine" is strictly a premise for Cleanthes in Part 2. Tweyman argues it is not, 482 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY ~7:3 JULY 1989 but I think we need to know the associations of the term 'machine', which in traditional cosmology (e.g., Lucretius) referred simply to a system or structure. There seems to be nothing in Cleanthes' formulation to match Tweyman's conclusion that the cause should be "external to the design" (36-38), whatever this means. It is introduced to facilitate a comparison with Philo's later reformulation of the argument, a formulation which, after quoting the original verbatim, Tweyman recasts in a "more rigorous form" (4o). It looks to me more like free improvisation, and much of it is logically redundant: Philo argues generically about mind where Cleanthes sought to quantify an analogy from the...