ABSTRACT
In the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Hume's character, Philo, puts forward and conditionally defends a naturalistic necessitarianism that eighteenth-century readers possessing an adequate knowledge of the relevant intellectual context should have immediately associated, thanks primarily to Cudworth, Bayle, and Leibniz with the name of Strato of Lampsacus and, thereby, with Spinoza. In particular, Philo proffers versions of necessitarianism and “hylozoism”, supports the rejection of ontological realism about final causes, and speaks in favor of the “ergodicity” of the universe, the superiority of something quite like the “Intellectual Love of God” over vulgar religious superstition, and a semantic expansion and softening of the term ‘God’, according to which anthropomorphism is to be evacuated from our conceptions of God's attributes, both moral and non-moral.
