Christianity in Crisis: David Hume and the Genesis of Thomas Reid’s An Inquiry into the Human Mind, on the Principles of Common Sense
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract: In early modern Europe, atheism was thought to pose a pervasive threat to religious belief and social stability. This article explores how the amorphous phenomenon of atheism was understood by Scottish religious apologists in the period 1700–50. The delineation of unbelief by these apologists shaped the widespread perception that David Hume was an infidel, whose writings had precipitated an unprecedented crisis of religious belief in Scotland. Thomas Reid and his circle of moderate clergymen in the North-East shared this perception. Reid’s Inquiry is rooted in the Aberdonian response to Hume’s irreligion, and targets Hume’s blend of atheism and skepticism. Hume’s Epicurean atheism and Reid’s Calvinism are shown to issue in radically different conceptions of nature and natural belief, with Reid following Locke in accounting for the reliability of our mental faculties and our common sense beliefs in terms of God’s providential dispensation.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.006 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.066 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
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".