What did Hume argue?
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Hume argued that inductive reasoning and belief in causality cannot be justified rationally; instead, they result from custom and mental habit. We never actually perceive that one event causes another but only experience the “constant conjunction” of events.
What is the key terms of Hume?
Hume considers three elements of the causal relationship; contiguity, temporal priority and necessary connection. Objects that are understood as cause and effect are immediately or mediately contiguous.
What did Hume believe about the self?
To Hume, the self is “that to which our several impressions and ideas are supposed to have a reference… If any impression gives rise to the idea of self, that impression must continue invariably the same through the whole course of our lives, since self is supposed to exist after that manner.
What influenced Hume philosophy?
Influences. Hume was heavily influenced by empiricists John Locke and George Berkeley, along with various Francophone writers such as Pierre Bayle, and various figures on the Anglophone intellectual landscape such as Isaac Newton, Samuel Clarke, Francis Hutcheson, and Joseph Butler.
What is the function of reason according to Hume?
Reason can only serve the ends determined by our passions. As Hume explains in another well-known quote “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions” (T 2.3. 3.4). Reason and passion have fundamentally different functions and, thus, cannot encroach upon one another.
What ideas did Hume think are meaningless?
What does Hume think about an idea without sense impressions? It is a meaningless idea. Meaningful ideas come from sense impressions.
Did Hume believe in causation?
Hume argues that we cannot conceive of any other connection between cause and effect, because there simply is no other impression to which our idea may be traced. This certitude is all that remains. For Hume, the necessary connection invoked by causation is nothing more than this certainty.
What is Hume’s argument for reason?
Reason for Hume is essentially passive and inert: it is incapable by itself of giving rise to new motives or new ideas. Although he thinks the argument from motivation is decisive, in T 3.1.1 he offers a battery of additional arguments, which are intended to show that moral concepts do not arise from reason alone.
What is Hume’s view of metaphysical theories?
But Hume argues that in attempting to go beyond anything we can possibly experience, these metaphysical theories try to “penetrate into subjects utterly inaccessible to the understanding” (EHU 1.11/11), which makes their claims to have found the “ultimate principles” of human nature not just false, but unintelligible.
Does the future resemble the past according to Hume?
The core of Hume’s argument is the claim that all probable arguments presuppose that the future resembles the past (the Uniformity Principle) and that the Uniformity Principle is a matter of fact. That the future resembles the past is, however, not something we derive from reason but from experience alone.
What is Hume’s skeptical claim?
(1) Hume’s skeptical claim here is that we have no valid conception of the existence of external things ( Treatise, 1.2.6.9). (2) Nevertheless, he argues that we have an unavoidable “vulgar” or common belief in the continued existence of objects, and this idea he accounts for. His explanation is lengthy, but involves the following features.