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Articles
From Hume to Tillich: Teaching Faith & Benevolence
Nancy Bunge was taught philosophy by two of the 20th century’s greatest thinkers, Willard Quine and Paul Tillich. She remembers the profound effect of Tillich’s ideas.
Forty years ago when I was a philosophy major at Harvard-Radcliffe, I took classes from two philosophers who could be seen as philosophic descendants of David Hume. In the case of Willard Quine, the link to Hume seems obvious and indeed, in his autobiography The Time of My Life, Quine reports that when forced to choose between teaching Leibniz and Hume early in his career, he easily chose the latter: “The critical knowledge of Hume that I would need for my course would mesh with my own philosophical thinking, providing enrichment and perspective.” The tie between Paul Tillich and David Hume seems far less obvious. Tillich himself sees the contribution of Hume and other skeptics to his theology as limited and blames Hume for philosophical positivism and its impact on the history of philosophy: “It is the tragedy of this positivism that it either transforms itself into a conservative absolutism or into a cynical type of relativism.”
Yet the first book on the reading list for Tillich’s course on the Philosophy of Religion was David Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion and, indeed, Tillich’s position on arguments for the existence of God closely resembles that of Philo in Hume’s Dialogues.
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