British Empiricism (David Hume) 4of4

As the last of the three British Empiricist, David Hume was born in 1711 in Berwickshire, Scotland. His family was fairly wealthy and of the Calvinist religious view. He was educated by his mother until leaving for the University of Edinburgh at only 11 years old. Even though he left school around the age of fifteen to study on his own, he still had ambitious goals. Man encouraged him to pursue law, but he chose the route of philosophy. He spent much of his time studying religion.

 Hume, like Berkeley, valued Locke’s look at knowledge. He wanted to take Locke’s cautious view of empiricism and put the scientific method behind it. Hume is a skeptic, so even someone who he admires doesn’t have the whole answer. Hume wanted to know how humans live and function in the world. Hume’s view of the beliefs of people have to do with the contents of our minds. Philosophy pages says about Hume’s beliefs, “Impressions are the direct, vivid, and forceful products of immediate experience. Ideas are merely feeble copies of these original impressions.” He gets this from Hume’s book Enquiry II. The example used in the article is that the color of the screen I am looking at is an impression. I am looking at it directly, while the memory of my mother’s hair color is only an idea. Because of this logic, every idea comes from an impression, thus, all knowledge comes from experience.

 

Once again, our man with the 3 minute philosophy is back. Let him explain Hume in a simple way!

http://www.philosophypages.com/hy/4t.htm

http://www.iep.utm.edu/hume/