de Waal considers both Christian fundamentalism and pragmatism as competing responses to what Nietzsche called “the death of God”: the demise of the concept of God that was central to both science and philosophy in the modern era. de Waal provides an account of the relation among religion, science, and philosophy from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century that culminates in the demise of the idea of God as an omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent creator and in science inheriting the social prestige that was once religion’s. The fundamentalists responded by maintaining that the only good science is that which is consistent with Scripture – unlike, e.g., the theory of evolution. Pragmatists responded by embracing the new science and responded to it with a passel of new philosophical ideas, e.g., Peirce’s pragmatic maxim, conceived as a test of meaningfulness for our concepts; his critical common-sensism, which allows us to take a critical position with regard to our common-sense beliefs; James’s denial of a ready-made world and his doctrine that it is sometimes permissible to believe in the absence of evidence; and fallibilism, which denies the possibility of certainty.

This chapter focuses on two major axes of social identity in India: caste and tribe. It provides an overview of the two categories, in particular focusing on how the categories are identified and measured in national-level macro data. It summarizes key features of contemporary economic disparities along these two dimensions. The chapter discusses the overlap between caste/tribal status and religion and provides a summary overview of the racial theory of caste. Tribe as a category has specific dimensions that are distinct from the caste system. The chapter reviews these and moves on to a discussion of the intersection of caste/tribe category with sex. The evidence in the chapter suggests that caste and tribe continue to define socio-economic status in contemporary India. India’s affirmative-action policies addressing caste, tribe and gender disparities are necessary, but not sufficient, to lower the influence of the lottery of birth on individual outcomes.

Fanny Hensel inherited a tradition of powerful salonnières and redefined it for her time. She navigated gendered constraints on her music career via her Sonntagsmusiken, which were private yet highly curated performances that prioritized music just as much as conversation. Hensel’s social and religious concerns shaped many of her choices, initially confining her to informal settings and to a secondary role as her parents launched her brother’s career. However, her early exposure to Berlin’s elite musical circles allowed her to analyze areas for improvement in Berlin’s musical culture, and she embarked on a mission to raise the level of musical excellence and taste in her circle. This study examines key milestones in Hensel’s journey, highlighting shifts in the number of performers, performance formats, genres, and complexity. Hensel’s evolving approach to musical gatherings reflected broader nineteenth-century tensions between domesticity and professionalization, and shaped her eventual legacy far beyond her Berlin salon.

Building on the previous chapter, this one zooms in on the role of psychiatry in stimulating the discourse of homosexuality. Comparing developments in France to those in Belgium, it demonstrates how, in the former, a rising psychiatric profession latched onto sexual psychopathology to help establish medical control over the largely Catholic system of insane asylums in close alliance with an anticlerical state. The homosexual ‘invert’ thus served as an emblem of secularism. Belgium’s political culture, by contrast, was dominated by Catholics and laissez-faire liberals, neither of whom could support state expansion in the realm of mental health care, which the former dominated and the latter approached as a business. The country’s insane asylums would remain firmly in the hands of religious congregations and private entrepreneurs, stunting the development of an independent, confident, and militant psychiatry. Dominated by Catholics, the Belgian Society of Mental Medicine was hostile to new-fangled ideas about ‘sexual inversion.’ This is shown through the growing skepticism of its members to the work of the pioneering Austrian psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing, who increasingly came to see ‘contrary sexual feeling’ as an innate and morally innocent ‘condition.’

The Belgian historian Jos Van Ussel’s History of Sexual Repression inspired Michel Foucault to argue that the history of sexuality was not marked by silence but by a deafening discursive explosion. Following Foucault, many historians have sought to substantiate his influential claim by documenting the strong discursive preoccupation with same-sex eroticism in ‘Europe’ and ‘the West’ from the late nineteenth century onwards. The unstudied case of Belgium challenges both the geography and the chronology of this vestigial grand narrative. Unlike in larger neighboring countries (Britain, France, and Germany), which commonly get to tell the story of ‘Europe’ and ‘the West’ as a whole, Belgian intellectuals and policymakers barely broached the issue of homosexuality until the 1950s. Why this was the case, and how it complicates our understanding of queer history by breaking up the idea of a single and singular Europe from the inside out, is this book’s main subject. The Introduction also calls attention to the importance of silence and omission and to the role of religion in the history of (homo)sexualities.

The specter of demographic decline haunted many European nations as they faced mutual competition, growing geopolitical tensions, and dwindling birth rates from the late nineteenth onwards. Amid these developments, the homosexual emerged as a loathsome incarnation of decadence, effeminacy, and infertility, but it did so in some countries more than others. This chapter compares the discourse of demographic decline in France and Belgium. It shows how alarmist declinism was much more pronounced in the former following defeat in the Franco-Prussian War. Belgium, by contrast, was not a major geopolitical power and far less concerned with military and demographic prowess. Moreover, when the birth rate began tapering off there too, the Catholic Church rather than nationalist voices formulated the country’s response. It did so in a vocabulary specifically calibrated to avoid naming sexuality’s supposed ‘aberrations,’ including homosexuality, so as not to let the genie out of the bottle. The latter, these Catholics argued, had been the fatal mistake of countries where a scientific discourse of ‘perversion’ had been allowed to circulate freely, and where ‘perverts’ and ‘inverts’ had now begun using that very scientific vocabulary in their own defense.

Much of Pascal’s philosophy, though applicable to a variety of problems and issues we face today, is couched in religious terms that, even for religious believers today, may not resonate. This chapter explores some possibilities of developing some key Pascalian ideas – the limits of reason and experience, the ambiguity of the world, the heart, our sometimes-misplaced desires, and the wager – in secular terms. One possibility that emerges as particularly fruitful is to replace Pascal’s “God” with William James’s “religious belief” that the good will ultimately triumph, and that it is important and beneficial for us to believe it.

Wollstonecraft, like most philosophers of the enlightenment period, had a deep trust in the power of reason to change the course of human history, and thought that religion, provided it was not dogmatic and allowed for dissent, was a crucial element of what it meant to be a good human being. Yet she was also an applied philosopher who engaged with revolutionaries proposing social and political reforms. In this chapter, I look at how her work was shaped by the political acts that took place around her, and how it in turns attempted to help shape the new social and political frameworks that were developing at the time – the French Revolution, which she commented on in her Moral and Historical View of the French Revolution.

Having established the basics of a Pascalian, “cordate” epistemology, this chapter explores the implications for how the world works and applications to some pressing problems today. The way the world looks, and so the reasons your experience gives you, depends on the state of your heart. But the fact that the world can be seen in these ways, according to the different states of heart, is a significant fact about it. Pascal infers much from this built-in ambiguity in the world when it comes to religion. That the world can be seen as both a Godless mechanism and mediating a loving relationship with God confirms one theology (the Augustinian Fall), and disconfirms the rest. A similar situation arises for us today, where the facts about the world can seem equally obvious to both sides of our polarized society, even though they are looking at the same world, albeit from their own “echo chambers.” This chapter explores the relevance of Pascal’s views on ambiguity to the deep disagreements we encounter in society today, applying insights about how the heart influences the way things appear as well as how to communicate with those who profoundly disagree with us.

This chapter opens the doors to kitchens and closets to recover how patients treated themselves at home. The chapter introduces a Lincolnshire man who moved to Jamaica in the 1700s to work as an overseer of a sugar plantation and relates how he came to rely on his own homemade treatments for treating his persistent pox. Because so few patients shared such intimate details in writing, the bulk of the chapter pieces together how patients produced and consumed home cures for the disease using 193 handwritten medical recipes, many penned by women. Recipes reveal the tedious and often costly labor of sourcing ingredients and making antivenereals at home. Marginal notes show that patients tried and tested these household cures, and a careful look at language and ingredients shows the moral assumptions embedded in the logic of how they were presumed to work. Long before the establishment of reforming institutions in the nineteenth century, recipes reveal how moral recuperation was a key ingredient of the disease’s cure.

This chapter reconstructs the argument of two essays, Of Suicide’ and ‘Of the Immortality of the Soul’, which were published posthumously. In these essays Hume defends that in specific circumstances suicide is morally acceptable and shows himself critical about the doctrine of a ‘future state’. Comparing the two essays with Part 12 of the Dialogues, I elucidate how Hume left us posthumously a testimony of his ambition to counter the religious spirit of his age. In the Dialogues Philo’s challenges Cleanthes’ view that religion forms a necessary support of morality. In ‘Of Suicide’ and ‘Of the Immortality of the Soul’, Hume attacks in a more openly provocative way the Christian morality of his age. As I show in a second part of this chapter, Hume’s views were in the eighteenth century still controversial. It is no coincidence that one of the first editions of the two polemic essays contained a translation of two letters of Rousseau’s Héloïse which offered a more nuanced view on the moral acceptability of suicide and the sacredness of human life. Apparently, some contemporaries were convinced Hume could learn from Rousseau: whether today this view would still prevail, I leave to the reader to decide.

How did colonialism affect the content and practice of Buddhist monastic law? This chapter answers this question from the perspective of colonial legal sources, considering the ‘practices of legal pluralism’ employed by British officials starting in the early 1800s. Drawing on colonial correspondence, court decisions, draft laws, government transcripts, and newspaper reports, I explain how and why the British concretised legal concepts, such as ‘ecclesiastical succession’, ‘Buddhist temporalities’ and ‘temple lands’, while also generating new bodies of law: a body of civil-court case law governing monks called Buddhist Ecclesiastical Law; and an influential ordinance regulating the use and administration of ‘Buddhist properties’, called the Buddhist Temporalities Ordinance. I show how colonial jurists mapped Buddhism onto particular spaces, issues and communities, such that Buddhism acquired, in law, English-style qualities of jurisdiction across three dimensions: territorial jurisdiction, subject-matter jurisdiction, and personal jurisdiction.

In section 11 of the Enquiry concerning Human Understanding [EHU], “Of a Particular Providence and of a Future State,” Hume attempts to sketch a method for natural theology, a method that establishes clear limits as to what natural theology can show. Unsurprisingly, he does so in the form of a dialogue. I argue that this dialogue is important because, in it, Hume offers a response to the reasoning Butler employs in the Analogy of Religion (1736) in order to establish the existence of a providential God, or what Butler calls a “moral governor” of the universe. Appreciating Hume’s strategy in this dialogue helps us better appreciate Hume’s more radical position in the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion and suggests a way of understanding the significance of Philo’s reversal in the final section. I claim that what appears to be a concession to religion actually turns out to have significant irreligious implications when considered as an extension of Hume’s response to Butler in EHU 11.

Much of Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion is spent debating the experimental design argument for the existence of God. A change of scene occurs in the ninth part of the Dialogues when the character of Demea presents an a priori cosmological argument that purports to demonstrate God’s necessary existence. The argument is then criticized by the characters of Cleanthes and Philo. The conversation in the ninth part of the dialogue has occasioned a mixed legacy. For some scholars, the objections raised by Cleanthes and Philo to the cosmological argument in Part 9 are persuasive and inspiring, whereas for others the objections are ineffective and overrated. This paper critically assesses the mixed legacy of Hume against the cosmological argument, in particular, one of Cleanthes’s famous objections to do with a collection of twenty particles of matter. This objection has had a lasting impact in the philosophy of religion literature in the form of the much disputed, ‘Hume-Edwards Principle’ (HEP). However, I claim that the HEP misrepresents the text on two counts, and that via the spokesperson of Cleanthes, Hume’s point against the cosmological argument has yet to be fully appreciated by critics.

This interpretive chapter attends to an often overlooked feature of the Dialogues: the tone of its repeated disputes. It asks what is the meaning of the tone and probes its value. To do so, it begins with a consideration of character in a dual-sense: the moral character of these disputes between literary characters. It argues that critical engagement with characterization via the lens of literary theory reveals that it is a category mistake to reduce the voice of a fictional character (e.g., Philo) to that of a real person (e.g., Hume). It further contends that if we think of each fictional character as merely a solitary component of a larger narrative flow we are more likely to focus on the basic action that is internal to the narrative, that is: disagreement, rather than who the character speaks for. Finally, it claims that the virtuous disagreement between interlocutors here rehearses an ethics of responsiveness that can be viewed as pointing towards a moral element. Hume’s dramatic sensibilities obscure the ethical temperament of the disagreements yet their posture reflects a gestural phenomenon of responsiveness (per Elise Springer) that might come close to expressing Hume’s ideal form of religion.

This paper examines the themes of history, psychology, and epistemology in Hume’s Natural History of Religion. In the first half, I argue that the origin of religion Hume seeks to uncover in this work is psychological rather than chronological: he is looking for religion’s origin in human nature rather than human history. In doing so, I reject the common view, going all the way back to Hume’s near contemporary Dugald Stewart, that the Natural History is a work of “conjectural history”. Examination of the work itself, and of the use of the term “history” at the time, corroborates the view that a “natural history” of religion, for Hume and his contemporaries, was an early form of what we would now call a theory of religious psychology.

In this chapter, I consider the Dialogues as a text that formulates and criticises a particular argument for design (‘the argument for design’). After presenting the relevant material from the Dialogues, I consider the strengths and weaknesses of the formulation of the argument that is the object of Hume’s criticisms, and set out what I take to be the full range of criticisms that Hume makes of it. I then assess the strength of these criticisms, paying particular attention to writers – for example Paley, Reid, Dawkins, and Hawthorne and Isaacs – who have claimed that Hume’s objections to ‘the argument for design’ are weak or ineffectual. Next, I consider the originality of Hume’s critique of ‘the argument for design’; I argue that, on the evidence that I have considered, Hume deserves most of the credit for the objections to ‘the argument for design’ in the Dialogues. I conclude with some brief remarks about the relative importance of the success of the criticisms of ‘the argument for design’ to the overall project of the Dialogues.

This chapter outlines distinctions between national and nationalist uses of folk music as a frame for discussing its slipperiness as a concept and the political and identitarian implications of its performance, its collection and publication, its use in education and in religion, and its adoption into works of art music. Consideration of folk practices in Britain, France, Spain, and the USA from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries is combined with special attention to expressions of Celtic otherness within nation states. The chapter also addresses the manner in which sub-national musical nationalisms (or ethnic nationalisms), operate as positive symbols of subaltern resistance and celebration when folk or folk-like material is imported into the art music of late nineteenth-century concert halls. At the same time, the chapter addresses the ‘primitivism’ of folk music and the connections nineteenth-century thinkers made between national folk musics and the precepts of social Darwinism.

There are significant ambiguities in how “atheism” is to be understood or interpreted. Having considered these, we turn to Hume’s arguments and assess to what extent his views in the Dialogues should be interpreted in these terms. While it is evident that Hume opposed “superstition” and that he was, in this sense, plainly an irreligious thinker, this does not settle the question of his “atheism”. Although Hume has been read by some as an theist of a minimal kind, and by others as a sceptic or agnostic, both these accounts are rejected. Hume was, it is argued, a “hard sceptical atheist”, by which we understand him to take the view that we have probable (non-dogmatic) grounds for denying the theist hypothesis in all its forms. His “speculative atheism” is accompanied by a “practical atheism” which, while firmly opposed “superstition”, is willing to ally itself with both sceptics and those theists (or deists) who share Hume’s opposition to “superstition”.