ABSTRACT
David Hume was a principal figure in what has been labeled the Scottish Enlightenment, a period of extraordinary intellectual innovation in the eighteenth century. Hume’s writings address many topics directly and indirectly related to death and dying—including anguish at leaving this life, fears concerning an afterlife, immortality more generally—but an examination of these philosophical arguments should be placed in context of the astonishingly untroubled and happy days leading up to his death. Some of Hume’s writings on religion have an explicitly political purpose: to use philosophical analysis to moderate the sectarian conflicts that had roiled British politics from the Reformation onward. Religions based on faith, which Hume calls “popular,” are those not based either on experience or abstract reason. The Natural History of Religion is Hume’s fullest exploration of popular religions. Hume seems to realize that his merely skeptical analysis will not overcome the disturbing thought of death as simple annihilation.
