David Hume 1711-76 was a Scottish Enlightenment philosopher,
historian, economist, and essayist, who is best known today for his highly
influential system of philosophical empiricism, skepticism, and naturalism.
Beginning with his A Treatise of Human Nature (1739), Hume strove to create a
total naturalistic science of man that examined the psychological basis of
human nature. Against philosophical rationalists, Hume held that passion rather
than reason governs human behaviour. Hume argued against the existence of
innate ideas, positing that all human knowledge is founded solely in
experience; Hume thus held that genuine knowledge must either be directly
traceable to objects perceived in experience, or result from abstract reasoning
about relations between ideas which are derived from experience, calling the
rest "nothing but sophistry and illusion
Origin of ideas
Next, Hume discusses
the distinction between impressions and ideas. By "impressions", he
means sensations, while by "ideas", he means memories and imaginings.
According to Hume, the difference between the two is that ideas are less
vivacious than impressions. For example, the idea of the taste of an orange is
far inferior to the impression (or sensation) of actually eating one. Writing
within the tradition of empiricism, he argues that impressions are the source
of all ideas.
Hume accepts that ideas may be either the product of mere
sensation, or of the imagination working in conjunction with sensation. According
to Hume, the creative faculty makes use of (at least) four mental operations
which produce imaginings out of sense-impressions. These operations are
compounding (or the addition of one idea onto another, such as a horn on a
horse to create a unicorn).
However, Hume admits
that there is one objection to his account: the problem of "The Missing
Shade of Blue". In this thought-experiment, he asks us to imagine a man
who has experienced every shade of blue except for one (see Fig. 1). He predicts
that this man will be able to divine the color of this particular shade of
blue, despite the fact that he has never experienced it. This seems to pose a
serious problem for the empirical account, though Hume brushes it aside as an
exceptional case
Association of ideas
In what is sometimes referred to as Hume's problem of
induction, he argued that inductive reasoning and belief in causality cannot be
justified rationally; instead, our trust in causality and induction result from
custom and mental habit, and are attributable only to the experience of
"constant conjunction" of events. This is because we can never
actually perceive that one event causes another, but only that the two are
always conjoined. Accordingly, to draw any causal inferences from past
experience it is necessary to presuppose that the future will resemble the
past, a presupposition which cannot itself be grounded in prior experience
The cornerstone of Hume's epistemology is the problem of
induction. This may be the area of Hume's thought where his scepticism about
human powers of reason is most pronounced. “experience cannot establish a
necessary connection between cause and effect, because we can imagine without
contradiction a case where the cause does not produce its usual effect…the reason
why we mistakenly infer that there is something in the cause that necessarily
produces its effect is because our past experiences have habituated us to think
in this way– all other sciences are reduced to probability." He uses this
skepticism to reject metaphysics and many theological views on the basis that
they are not grounded in fact and observations, and are therefore beyond the
reach of human understanding
Hume's opposition to the teleological argument for God's
existence, the argument from design, is generally regarded as the most
intellectually significant attempt to rebut the argument prior to Darwinism.” A very small part of this great system, during
a very short time, is very imperfectly discovered to us; and do we thence
pronounce decisively concerning the origin of the whole?” It mean we cannot
trace back to God on the basis of cause and effect relationship because cause
and effect have complex relationship and so is universe.
Hume's argument is that we cannot rationally justify the
claim that nature will continue to be uniform, as justification comes in only
two varieties—demonstrative reasoning and probable reasoning—and both of these
are inadequate. With regard to demonstrative reasoning, Hume argues that the
uniformity principle cannot be demonstrated, as it is "consistent and
conceivable" that nature might stop being regular. Turning to probable
reasoning, Hume argues that we cannot hold that nature will continue to be
uniform because it has been in the past. As this is using the very sort of
reasoning (induction) that is under question, it would be circular
reasoning.[78] Thus, no form of justification will rationally warrant our
inductive inferences
Empiricist philosophers, such as Hume and Berkeley, favoured
the bundle theory of personal identity. In this theory, "the mind itself,
far from being an independent power, is simply 'a bundle of perceptions'
without unity or cohesive quality".[95] The self is nothing but a bundle
of experiences linked by the relations of causation and resemblance; or, more
accurately, that the empirically warranted idea of the self is just the idea of
such a bundle (3 Minutes Philosophy)
Compatibilism is
the belief that free will and determinism are mutually compatible and that it
is possible to believe in both without being logically inconsistent.
Compatibilists believe freedom can be present or absent in situations for
reasons that have nothing to do with metaphysics. For example, courts of law make
judgments, without bringing in metaphysics, about whether an individual was
acting of their own free will in specific circumstances. It is assumed in a
court of law that someone could have acted otherwise than in reality.
Otherwise, no crime would have been committed. Similarly, political liberty is
a non-metaphysical concept.
Hume defines the concept of necessity as "the
uniformity, observable in the operations of nature; where similar objects are constantly
conjoined together”, and liberty as "a power of acting or not acting,
according to the determinations of the will”. He then argues that, according to
these definitions, not only are the two compatible, but liberty requires
necessity. For if our actions were not necessitated in the above sense, they
would "have so little in connexion with motives, inclinations and
circumstances, which one does not follow with a certain degree of uniformity
from the other"
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