from Part I - Hume’s Dialogues
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 December 2025
Hume’s Dialogues contains one of the most efficient and rhetorically effective – and consequently influential statements of the problem (or problems) of evil in literature. In the last three parts of the Dialogues, we can see much of the shape of the contemporary debate on the problem, in its various aspects. But, familiar though the main lines of that debate might be, Hume’s presentation of the issues in dramatic form throws up some less familiar angles, as well as posing a question concerning his own views on religion. This chapter will follow the course of the discussion as it unfolds, taking points more or less in the order in which they arise, but organised around the various problems of evil. It ends with a brief consideration of the wider consequences of the discussion.
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