Books by Richard Whately

Doutes historiques relatifs à Napoléon Bonaparte, par M. Whately, ... Traduit de l'anglais sur la 4e éditionDate de l'édition originale: 1833Le présent ouvrage s'inscrit dans une politique de conservation patrimoniale des ouvrages de la littérature Française mise en place avec la BNF.HACHETTE LIVRE et la BNF proposent ainsi un catalogue de titres indisponibles, la BNF ayant numérisé ces oeuvres et HACHETTE LIVRE les imprimant à la demande.Certains de ces ouvrages reflètent des courants de pensée caractéristiques de leur époque, mais qui seraient aujourd'hui jugés condamnables.Ils n'en appartiennent pas moins à l'histoire des idées en France et sont susceptibles de présenter un intérêt scientifique ou historique.Le sens de notre démarche éditoriale consiste ainsi à permettre l'accès à ces oeuvres sans pour autant que nous en cautionnions en aucune façon le contenu.Pour plus d'informations, rendez-vous sur www.hachettebnf.fr

The atheist philosopher David Hume unleashed an assault on Christianity in the 1700s that reverberates to this day. By undermining arguments based on or included references to miracles- or documents that contained them- many a person embraced his strict empiricism. Famously rising to the challenge, the Rev. Richard Whately showed that employing the same kind of 'empirical' scrutiny to other historical claims would result in absurdities. Namely, we could know little, if anything, about the famous Napoleon Bonaparte (Buonaparte). Indeed, one might even conclude he hadn't existed at all! There was only one problem: Napoleon had carried out his great feats within the lifetime of Whately's readers and his existence, and those feats, were common knowledge! Something had to give, either Hume's strict empiricism or knowledge itself (ie, epistemology). Whately is convinced that his playful analysis of Hume's reasoning would have been seen by Hume himself to show the great joke his reasoning was. Unfortunately, Hume died in 1776, and it is up to modern readers to decide for themselves if Whately was correct.