Hume on Superstition

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 These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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