Enquiry concerning the principles of morals / Hume, David, 1711-1776.

This vital study offers a new interpretation of Hume's famous "Of Miracles," which notoriously argues against the possibility of miracles. By situating Hume's popular argument in the context of the eighteenth-century debate on miracles, Earman shows Hume's argument to be largely unoriginal and chiefly without merit where it is original. Yet Earman constructively conceives how progress can be made on the issues that Hume's essay so provocatively posed about the ability of eyewitness testimony to establish the credibility of marvelous and miraculous events.

David Johnson seeks to overthrow one of the widely accepted tenets of Anglo-American philosophy—that of the success of the Humean case against the rational credibility of reports of miracles. In a manner unattempted in any other single work, he meticulously examines all the main variants of Humean reasoning on the topic of miracles: Hume's own argument and its reconstructions by John Stuart Mill, J. L. Mackie, Antony Flew, Jordan Howard Sobel, and others.Hume's view, set forth in his essay "Of Miracles," has been widely thought to be correct. Johnson reviews Hume's thesis with clarity and elegance and considers the arguments of some of the most prominent defenders of Hume's case against miracles. According to Johnson, the Humean argument on this topic is entirely without merit, its purported cogency being simply a philosophical myth.

List of members in v. 4-5, 7-10.

Reading Hume on Human Understanding is a companion to the study of one of the great works of Western philosophy. The aims of the volume are: to provide a general overview of Hume's Enquiry on Human Understanding, in the context of Hume's philosophical work as a whole; to elucidate, analyse, and assess the philosophy of the Enquiry; and to discuss recent developments in Hume scholarship. The eminent contributors cover a broad range of topics which remain at the centre of philosophical debate today: meaning, induction, scepticism, belief, personal identity, causation, freedom, miracles, probability, and religious belief.

James F. Sennett and Douglas Groothuis have assembled a distinguished array of scholars to examine the Humean legacy with care and make the case for a more robust, if chastened, natural theology after Hume.