In the summer of 1776, as David Hume lay dying in his Edinburgh house, his physician noted something that unsettled the city's religious community far more than any argument he had ever published: he was cheerful. Not resigned, not secretly repentant, not seeking the last-minute consolation of faith that his critics had long predicted would come. He was reading Lucian, making jokes, and receiving visitors with the same good-humored equanimity he had brought to his philosophy for fifty years. James Boswell, unable to contain his morbid curiosity, came to ask him directly whether he harbored any fear of what lay beyond. Hume replied that the idea of continued existence after death was not merely unprovable but, on reflection, not particularly desirable. He said it pleasantly. Boswell left disturbed. Adam Smith, who witnessed the final weeks, wrote afterward that Hume had approached death with more genuine composure than any man he had ever known, approaching as nearly to the idea of a perfectly wise and virtuous man as perhaps the nature of human frailty will admit. The philosopher who had spent his career dismantling the foundations of religious belief had, in his dying, produced what his admirers considered his most persuasive argument.
That argument, and the philosophy behind it, remains as provocative today as it was in eighteenth-century Edinburgh. Born in 1711, David Hume became one of the most consequential and most unsettling figures in the history of Western thought, a philosopher, historian, and essayist whose radical skepticism about causation, personal identity, and the rational foundations of religious belief challenged assumptions so deeply held that many of his contemporaries found him not merely wrong but dangerous. His empiricism pushed the limits of what human reason could claim to know further than almost any predecessor had dared, and the questions he left open have never been fully closed. In an age of renewed debate about faith, evidence, and the grounds of belief, Hume feels less like a historical figure than a contemporary voice speaking with uncomfortable clarity from the eighteenth century.
To explore the full depth and the full provocation of that voice requires a guide of exceptional philosophical range. Paul Russell, Professor of Philosophy at the University of British Columbia and the University of Gothenburg, is among the foremost Hume scholars of his generation. The author of The Riddle of Hume's Treatise and The Limits of Free Will, and editor of The Oxford Handbook of Hume, Russell has devoted much of his career to the questions that Hume raised about skepticism, free will, moral responsibility, and the philosophy of religion, bringing to them both rigorous analytical precision and a genuine sense of why they matter beyond the academy.
In the conversation that follows, Russell guides us into Hume's philosophy and its irreligious heart, asking what it means to think seriously about the limits of belief, why Hume's arguments have proved so difficult to answer, and what the composure of a dying philosopher in Edinburgh in 1776 still has to teach us about the relationship between reason, faith, and the courage to follow an argument wherever it leads.
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