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BY-NC-ND 3.0 license Open Access Published by De Gruyter Open Access January 27, 2015

Hume and Kantian Teleology

  • Ronald Mercer
From the journal Open Theology

Abstract

This paper argues that Hume’s claim to have some belief in God is accurate because his own philosophy is held together by a teleological underpinning that leads to the idea of God. Previous work that has favorably connected Hume’s philosophy to Kant’s provides a framework to argue that Hume inadvertently admits a teleological a priori in understanding nature in the same way that Kant understands teleology as the “lawfulness of the contingent.” Having connected Hume and Kant through teleological aesthetics, this paper moves to show how this teleology underwrites several positive statements about God that Hume makes in the Dialogues.



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Received: 2014-8-19
Accepted: 2014-12-1
Published Online: 2015-1-27

©2015 Ronald Mercer

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License.

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