Word: hume
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Struggles with Hume...
Raphael Demos, Alford Professor of Natural Religion, Moral Philosophy and Civil Polity, introduces freshmen and upperclassmen to the various doctrines of philosophy in Philosophy 1. For the freshman, especially one who comes from a relatively sheltered religious background, the introduction to such thinkers as Spinoza and Hume may prove novel and disquieting. Demos admits some students may be shaken by an introduction to skepticism...
...Frederick Morehouse '59-3 performed with considerable skill. Jan de Hartog's The Four-poster, a series of lovely vignettes of married life, came off moderately well in the hands of Tad Danielewski and Sylvia Daneel; but the play really cries out for polished husband-and-wife teams like Hume Cronyn-Jessica Tandy and Rex Harrison-Lili Palmer...
Thus among the countless traumas a freshman may fall heir to, an agonizing struggle in Hum 5 or Phil 1 with Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion is evidently one of the most severe; many a small town has lost its most promising Baptist in those ordeals, and many a fashionable parish the scion of its most prominent Episcopalian. Freud's Moses and Monotheism or The Future of an Illusion must provoke nearly equal distress; one atheist passes up all alternatives listed on the questionnaire and writes, "God is man's interpretation of what dissatisfies him.... A rejection...
Like a good liberal nineteenth-century freethinker, the typical Harvard non-believer doodles with arguments about an entity named God as if this merely happened to be a nondescript question that struck his fancy. Instead of being made more complacent by Hume and Freud, he needs to be jarred by Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, Pascal and Dostoyevski, into the realization that the religious question is the question of questions, that the problem of God is not whether an entity exists or does not exist--about which a cautious skepticism might make sense--but whether the spiritual dynamo of an entire civilization...