Abstract
A consideration of historical context helps to bring Hume’s writings on superstition into focus. ‘Supersitition’ was a category used by many philosophers and theologians in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to describe and explain religious beliefs and practices which they, the authors, rejected. There was of course no novelty in this. Christian theologians and philosophers always explained that pagan religions, especially polytheisms, were superstitions. So the contrast made in this as in earlier periods is standardly between superstitions on the one hand, and whatever is taken to be the ‘true religion’ on the other.1
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Notes
Walter Rex, Essays on Pierre Bayle and Religious Controversy The Hague, 1965.
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© 1999 Claremont Graduate University
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Bell, M. (1999). Hume on Superstition. In: Phillips, D.Z., Tessin, T. (eds) Religion and Hume’s Legacy. Claremont Studies in the Philosophy of Religion. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-27735-3_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-27735-3_11
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