History and Power in Hume’s ‘Of Miracles’: A Pragmaticist-Historicist Account

Abstract

This reconsideration of Hume’s classic essay “Of Miracles” via the lens of American pragmatist ways of thinking about history and power shifts our attention from Hume’s epistemic concerns about the legitimacy of witnesses and testimony to his distaste for sacred history, his critical stance regarding the social force of revelation, and his disdain for religious authority. To view Hume’s essay both as an articulation of a critical philosophy of history and as an exercise in moral dynamism (social power or, authority, is a result of epistemic transactions), is to intervene in both Hume studies and Contemporary Pragmatism.