The dialogues I present to you are derived in a curious way from the famous work of David Hume, published posthumously as Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion.  This prologue is more extensive than Hume's because it also draws from the introduction by Henry D. Aiken in the edition first published by Hafner Publishing Company in 1948.  However, only Hume's work itself is required to appreciate the present dialogues.

It has been remarked by David Hume that, though the ancient philosophers conveyed most of their instruction in the form of dialogue, this method has been little practised in later ages, and has seldom succeeded in the hands of those who have attempted it.  Accurate and regular argument, indeed, such as is now expected of philosophic inquirers, naturally throws a person into the methodical and didactic manner, where one can immediately, without preparation, explain the point at which one aims; and thence proceed, without interruption, to deduce the proofs on which it is established.  The development of printing, and in more recent times the general increase in literacy, have assured the importance and accessibility of the written word in everyone's lives, and the accompanying decline in importance of oral traditions, has naturally rendered archaic the presentation of carefully reasoned arguments in lectures, let alone the working out of such arguments in genuinely free debates and conversations. Papers may be delivered at conferences, and the speaker questioned, but how much is really taken in until the script is read afterwards?

This dominance of the written word means that the writing of a philosophic dialogue seems much more artificial to us than it would to Plato, for whom the spoken word was still important, though arguably already being overtaken by the written word.  To sustain interest in the dialogue we must throw in a variety of topics and preserve a proper balance among the speakers, or use a number of techniques for infusing dramatic tension, or even turn it into a proper play, where non-verbal cues can do so much to help (provided they do not distract from the philosophic purpose).  Yet all these tricks, while helping us to overcome the feeling of artificiality, nevetheless are also marking it out more clearly to be an artifice.  Hence we enter deeper into the realm of fiction – how can we reach truth from it in the explicit way Philosophy requires?  (Shakespeare was not a philosopher, and anyone treating his plays as philosophic works will fail to appreciate their value to Philosophy.)

Yet there are some philosophic issues to which fiction, at least of the simple dialogue form, is perculiarly adapted, and where it is still preferable to the direct and simple method of exposition. (This is demonstrated well by some modern use of medieval disputation – pre-scripted debate – as contrasted with lecturing.)

Any point of doctrine which is so obvious that it scarcely admits of dispute, but at the same time so important that it cannot be too often inculcated, seems to require the use of fiction in handling it; where the novelty of the manner may compensate for the seeming triteness of the issue; where the drama and imagery of fiction may enforce the precept; and where the profusion of accessory details may appear neither tedious nor redundant nor distracting from the primary intent of the work.  (Like Aesop's fables for morality.)

Any question, on the other hand, which is so obscure and uncertain that it cannot be put into words directly in any satisfactory way, seems to lead us naturally into the realm of fiction, poetry, etc..  In a fictional dialogue opposing views may afford an agreeable amusement, even though they lead to no definite results.  Thus we may be moved to take an interest in the debate even though we have no confident opinions of our own.  (We may be at home with the images before being at home with the subject matter.)

All these circumstances are to be found in the problem of defining Philosophy.  What truth so obvious (at least to those already interested in Philosophy) as that Philosophy is a valid branch of knowledge, an academic discipline of the most ancient lineage, an enterprise which some of the greatest geniuses of all time have striven ambitiously to justify and further?  What secular enterprise could be more important than this which aims to provide the surest foundation for knowledge and for politics, and the only one which ought to be brought to bear on all other secular activity, and even religion?  On this reckoning it would seem that we can take it for granted that Philosophy is a valid and useful academic discipline.  But, in treating of this important enterprise, what obscure questions occur concerning the nature of it!  This has always been subject to the disputations of philosophers without reaching any definite conclusion.  The nature of a particular science is also always subject to disputation among practitioners without reaching any definite conclusion, but a science is not directly concerned with its own nature, and it does not have to arrive at definite (fully articulated) conclusions as to its precise nature so long as it can remain true to that nature, i.e. maintain itself as that science, that systematic inquiry into the particular subject matter (the subject matter indirectly defines it).  But for Philosophy there is no such pragmatic consideration justifying restraint of the inquiry into its nature, even though the lack of restraint would seem to lead into doubt, contradiction and absurdity.  The inquiry must go on!  The difficulty in explaining what Philosophy is makes any claim for its value ambiguous, hence making it doubtful that it should continue to be recognized as a discipline or enterprise.

All this you will have occasion to observe as you imagine the conversations which take place on a summer weekend at the country cottage of Professor Cleanthes, between Philo and Demea and their host, of which Hume has already given us a fictional account in Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion.  Hume's account has provoked me into a transformation of it which displays a variety of ideas on the nature of Philosophy.  The characters have been given the same names, but their opinions are strangely altered, and to enter into the spirit of the dialogue you must not imagine them as being the same characters as they were in Hume's Dialogues.  To make clear their attitudes I give a sketch of each.

(Hume's Dialogues was inspired in its turn by Cicero's De Natura Deorum, but he changed the names of the participants, and did not replace Cicero as participant with himself.  But the present Dialogues have not been much influenced directly by Cicero's work, despite some comments in this Prologue.)

Pamphilus, the narrator in Hume's version (and Cicero himself in his version), has disappeared.  He has not been killed, so much as ceased to be an observer physically present in the dialogues in becoming identified with the writer and reader of the dialogues (removing the fictional element as participator even in Cicero's version).  Thus the present Dialogues are presented to our imagination more directly, so that while they remain fictitious, they nevertheless point us more earnestly to the truth.  (The truth appears more readily on the surface of what is supposedly said.)

It is not easy to formulate Philo's ultimate attitude to the many-sided and complex works usually lumped together under the rubric of 'Philosophy'.  He certainly holds that these works are not amenable to a single, inclusive definition, and his attitudes to particular works are accordingly varied and, on occasion, ambiguous. It would be a great injustice to Philo, whatever his limitations, to regard him simply as castigating everything classed as philosophic.  The manifold aspects of thought classed as philosophic, and the effects of these upon our ultimate well-being, are a lifelong interest for Philo.  He is not only as well-informed as anyone in the history of ideas, but also one of the closest critics of Philosophy.

Thus, despite his views, Philo is fully at home in philosophic debate, and is not insensitive to the ideals of Western Philosophy.  But he is also concerned with the 'man in the street', with the whole person, and with politics, and such strictures as he passes upon Philosophy in its academic manifestations or its making a boast of triviality are grounded in a passionate concern for sincerity and truth.

Philo does not regard all philosophic speculation as worthless although he does beliee that all public funding of purely philosophic research and teaching should be stopped.  There is nothing in his works to support the view that he espouses scientism, the belief that Science (some amalgam of particular sciences) is all self-sufficient to lead us into all truth.  Philo is distrustful of speculative metaphysics of all sorts, however it disguises itself (including Hume's); indeed it is of the essence of his philosophic position, in so far as he may be said to have one, to deny that any view of the ultimate nature of things in general can be put coherently into words.

The following quotation from his long essay The Sociology of I Know Not What may help to explain the nature of this distrust:

'Every philosophy is sustained by the promise of further refinement in its explanations and arguments.  Mere reason is insufficient to convince us of the truth of a philosophic theory; and whoever is moved to go along with a philosophy is conscious of a continued development and opening up of ideas as its theory is put into that person's own words, a process of development which continues to subvert all the principles of understanding the person has, and to lead the person to be ready to believe at any moment the contrary to what was believed only a moment before.'

Philo sees this as reason for abandoning Philosophy, but for others, like Cleanthes, this see-saw in debate is the main attraction of Philosophy.

In The Sociology of I Know Not What Philo attacks two widespread beliefs which he thinks are wholly without sociological fourndation.  One of these is the supposition that Philosophy is already a coherent enterprise which people are engaged in.  Philo argues against this, suggesting that Philosophy is simply an aggregate of particular explanations which have been bundled together for the convenience of academics and librarians.  It is not the unity of method or form of debate which first impresses us about Philosophy, but rather a multitude of approaches, styles, interests and goals somewhat arbitrarily related to one another.  Even when a particular view of how to go about philosophising has been dominant, this agreement tends to be attained at the expense of becoming irrelevant to people's lives.  The other object of Philo's attack is the supposition that Philosophy, whatever the truth of its insights, has been socially beneficial.  For Philo, not only do they result in giving undue weight to the most preposterous notions because of some subtle turn of argument, but also in a brain-drain, with brilliant minds wasting their time chasing will o' the wisps.  Cleanthes alleges that it is a noble privilege of philosophers to infer from the variety of pleasures of philosophic debate so sublime an enterprise as Philosophy, but when we consider the products of this enterprise you will scarcely be persuaded philosophies are anything but sick people's dreams.

For Philo, the worst effect of academic philosophy is its subversion of sincerity and self-knowledge.  No one can particpate in Philosophy merely by following an academic course of study, like having water on tap by getting the tap connected to the water supply system.  The most one can do is train oneself to write in a manner that will satisfy academic expectations, and risk neglecting to consider whether one is really concerned with the questions one purports to deal with.  (All that hard work may lead one to expect to be able to participate in Philosophy, while in fact one may be rendered less able to do so than before.)  What might be appropriate in the sciences (including scholarly disciplines) which take the subject matter as given, may in Philosophy become a form of make-believe (asserting something, yet not really meaning to assert it) which, treated as a way of earning a living, is like ancient sophism.

Philo is unalterably opposed, on moral grounds, to all the varieties of traditional Philosophy, and on intellectual grounds willing to concede no more than the simple, though somewhat ambiguous (or at least undefined proposition), that philosophic explanations bear some remote resemblance to how things are.

Cleanthes

Hume, in his Dialogues, throught the mouth of Pamphilus, describes Cleanthes as having an accurate philosophic turn.  (Cleanthes was a famous Stoic, so I presume Hume's Cleanthes is Cicero's Balbus transformed.)  This description may be allowed to stand in the present dialogues. Cleanthes is Professor of Philosophy at a British red brick university, and a prolific writer of philosophic books and articles which show great breadth of interest, but much influenced by British Empiricism and Linguistic Philosophy.  In so far as he can be said to have a favourite philosopher, that philosopher is Hume.  With regard to ethics he may be described as reluctant utilitarian, reluctant because he is not unaware of the inadequacies of utilitarianism.  He argues for a concept of Philosophy from the existence of academic departments denoted 'Philosophy'.

The present time may not appear to be one of the great flowering times of Philosophy.  There may be some truth in saying, 'It has a facile interest in Philosophy, its problems and doubts are cliches, and its insights trivial.'  (Quotation from Philo's The Sociology of I Know Not What.)  Philosophers often tend to be blinkered and narrow in their outlook, even when they have read widely – not that I morally condemn them for this, for the problem of assimilation may appear intractable.  But I can condemn them for their false modesty, i.e. setting great value on mediocrity.  Cleanthes is in part guilty of these things too.  But he could at least claim the merits of his defects.  If his philosophic opinions express complacency, i.e. little sense of their own incompleteness, a sense which Demea holds as essential to any valid conception of Philosophy, his contempt for philosophic hero worship and his detached yet incisive intellect make him an excellent mediator in debate.  If he does not fully appreciate the positions of Philo and Demea, neither is he totally insensitive toe the ideals which motivate them.  His criticisms of very particular philosophy are grounded in a spirit of friendship and free enquiry.

Philo is suspicious of every particular piece of speculation, but Cleanthes is confident that, since there can be no conclusive verbal argument about anything, one's philosophic position must always be a matter of taste, agreement, or academic politics.  Hence any philosophic argument which claims to be conclusive must inevitably disappoint in the end.  Such disappointment is to be mitigated by not committing oneself too seriously to any particular philosophy.

Cleanthes prefers a candid and open avowal of the inconclusiveness of philosophic argument and the avoidance of all grandiose claims, particularly the claim that some theory is a theory of everything.  He is concerned, for instance, to expose the false pretensions of logicians and rigorists in order to restore explanation and understanding to its proper role in Philosophy.  And this example shows clearly his concern to preserve free and open debate against attempts to silence opponents through aggressive, seemingly watertight, argument, as we find, for instance, in Bishop Berkeley's Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous.

However, Cleanthes cannot assent to any particular philosophy, and his view of the nature of Philosophy, including a view of the nature of philosophic debate, must therefore remain nebulous and inexpressible.  And when we take into account his denial that any words can communicate something new, and hence that any philosophic work can truthfully make a special claim for itself, his disbelief that any opinions can be sustained, and his opposition to any philosophic basis of morality (for he maintains, as a utilitarian, that the basis of morality is provided by the actual interests people have, and not a philosophic blueprint of what their interests should be), his position has much in common with Philo, for whom the word 'Philosophy' remains a "riddle, an enigma, an inexplicable mystery" whose nature is forever beyond the power of words to penetrate.

Let me briefly sketch the opinions about Philosophy expressed in his more important works.  In his first book, A Treatise on Language Games, there are many casual remarks about the nature of Philosophy; and he attacked both the idea of a philosophic work being unique and the idea of any rigorous verbal argument not being a tautology.

In his famous essay, On Originality, Cleanthes' avowed purpose, as he wrote, was 'to silence ... arrogance and fanciful speculation, and free us from their impertinent solicitations.'  He argues that the weakness and divergence of philosophic expositions, taken together with the general stability and convergence in the English language (thus we can read Hume with little difficulty), is sufficient to establish it as a maxim that no philosophic work can have sufficient force to show something radically new, or, which is perhaps more important for the present purpose, to make it a sufficient foundation for a philosophic system. Any philosophy which claims to be the philosophy can only justify its claim to say something new by inspiring faith in what it promises.  It cannot first be found to say something new and then base its claim on that.

In his main work, A History of Philosophy, Cleanthes attacks two claims of philosophic monists which he considers false.  One of these is the supposition that monism is a necessary goal for all explanation.  For Cleanthes, this is so far from being true that he argues the converse, that pluralism is the more natural goal for philosophic explanation.  It is not the order and unity of nature which explanations bring home to us, but rather the variety of phenomena and the need for different ways of explaining that balance one another.  Even when a particular philosophic system has been dominant, popular speculation has always remained more or less pluralistic.  The other object of Cleanthes' attack is the supposition that the grand unitary philosophic systems (such as those of Aquinas and Hegel) have been beneficial in the history of Philosophy.  For Cleanthes, not only does such a system result in fanaticism, which cannot tolerate the confusions which the plurality of ramifications of the system brings, but also it results in loyalties which weaken people's attachment to principles of fair debate and free enquiry – whether they are for or against the system.  For him, the protagonists almost invariably fail to appreciate properly the arguments of their system, and for this reason alone tolerant pluralism is superior to the narrow spirit of Aristotelianism, the destructive principles of Cartesianism, and the grotesque intolerance of Marxists (of which group even Marx dd not consider himself to be a member).  Every attempt to reconcile all philosophies into one grand theory must result in the production of one more alongside all the others.

Cleanthes is reluctant to give open offence to received opinion, and notoriety is extremely distasteful to one so gregarious and so intensely desirous of preserving his good name.

Demea

Demea has undergone a sex change, and instead of being a rationalist she is a disciple of Hume, though Hume may have trouble recognising his views in her works.  She has written a widely acclaimed book on Hume, Impressions from Reading Hume: Making Hume's Ideas More Forceful and Lively .