Philosophy
1711 to 1776, Edinburgh, Scotland
Experience, causation, the limits of reason, and a science of human nature.
Start learning David →Hume builds a science of the mind on one principle: every idea is a faint copy of a prior impression of sense or feeling. Any idea that cannot be traced to an impression is empty - a test that demolishes much traditiona…
Hume argues that we never observe a necessary connection between cause and effect - only one event constantly followed by another. Our idea of causal necessity comes not from the world but from a habit of the mind.
Hume asks what justifies our reasoning from past to future, from observed to unobserved. His answer is unsettling: nothing in reason can justify it. Inductive inference rests on an assumption that cannot be proved.
When Hume looks inward for the self, he finds no enduring ‘I’ - only a stream of fleeting perceptions. The self, he argues, is not a substance but a bundle of perceptions, bound together by memory and resemblance.
Hume overturns the rationalist picture of ethics: morality is founded not on reason but on sentiment. Reason is ‘the slave of the passions’, and you cannot derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’.
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