Workshop: Scepticism and Religion in al-Ghazālī, Maimonides, and HumeNovember 7–8, 2017

7 November 2017

In David Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Cleanthes challenges Demea: “Or how do you mystics, who maintain the absolute incomprehensibility of the Deity, differ from sceptics or atheists, who assert, that the first cause of All is unknown and unintelligible?” By the eighteenth century, we find questions of religion and scepticism tightly intertwined but this dialectic goes back already to the ancient sceptics’ critique of the gods and, when the three revealed monotheistic faiths encounter philosophy in the Middle Ages, it comes to embrace a rich variety of classical epistemological and metaphysical questions reconfigured in light of the medieval philosophical/theological context. Not only do thinkers grapple with issues of how knowledge can be acquired—by direct intuition, human reasoning, and/or divine revelation—but also with the classical question of the very possibility of knowledge, at least in the realms of metaphysics and theology. And if knowledge cannot be possessed, how should one act: by denying the claims as Academic sceptics are said to have argued, by embracing them despite, or because of, their lack of rational justification as fideists recommend, or by simply suspending judgment to free oneself from the conflict between religion and philosophy as Pyrrhonists would have reacted? In this workshop, we propose to explore parallels and discrepancies between three of the greatest philosophers in the three faiths to have canvassed this rich and inadequately studied territory between religion and scepticism leading to an even wider range of questions from atomism and causation to knowledge and the self: Abū Ḥāmid Muḥammad ibn Muḥammad al-Ghazālī (c. 1058-1111), Moses Maimonides (c. 1135–1204), and David Hume (1711–76). Although we make no claims of influence among these three thinkers, there are striking and sometimes uncanny moments of convergence and divergence in their arguments and strategies, whose mutual investigation can serve to illuminate the thought of each.

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