The Drama of Reason: Hume's Dialogue Concerning Natural Religion and the Antinomies of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Scholars have puzzled over the relation between philosophical argument and literary form in Hume"s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion for decades.The dialogue presents the reader with three principle speakers.Each figure offers exposition and critique of natural theology.The plurality of voices afforded by the dialogue genre, however, makes it difficult for the reader to determine Hume"s stance concerning the epistemic status of the natural theology in this late composed work.According to the received view, sometimes called the "camouflage" interpretation, Hume chooses the dialogue form in order to lead readers to conclude "that the design argument is a failure and that there are no other rational arguments for religious belief that are not failures."1 This assessment has been contested in recent years by scholars such as Prince, who, more optimistically, maintains that the purpose of Hume"s choice of genre is to enable readers to "see their own conflicting opinions, their own uncertainties, played out before their eyes" such that "in the resolution of the dialogue they find a resolution for themselves." 2 Dancy, more reasonably, advocates a "balance" interpretation, according to which Hume critiques but, nevertheless, recognizes the natural tendency "to infer" a supreme being from natural theological argument.3 Although Hume is highly critical of speculative arguments for the existence of God, he recognizes that speculative proofs do possess a certain degree of natural persuasiveness.If Dancy is correct, Hume"s final assessment of the epistemic import of natural theology would bear close likeness to that of Kant.Indeed, it is unlikely that the similarity is an accident.Manfred Kuehn, more than any recent scholar, has succeeded in shining light on the influence Scottish Enlightenment figures such as David Hume
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.009 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.063 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.009 | 0.011 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".