Hume Flashcards
Where is Hume from?
What type of enlightenment was he from?
-Scottish
-From the Scottish enlightenment
What is the enlightenment point of view?
Reason liberates
Is he an empiricist/empirical or rationalist philosopher?
He is an empiricist/empirical philosopher
What is an empirical philosopher/empiricist?
- Practical common sense- ‘what I see is what I get’
-Empiricist means you learn through the senses, knowledge is derived through the senses
What are the two things we experience when we know things? Define them
(3 pts)
-Impression: images that immediately strike our senses, sensations, passions and emotions
-Ideas: Reflected images of impressions, they are mental copies in my mind of those sense impressions
-Simple ideas are mental copies of corresponding simple impressions
What is the rule for the impressions and ideas as the two things we experience when we know things?
(1-2 pts)
-An idea cannot create an impressions, the impression must come first then the idea
-You cannot derive the idea of something, without an impression
What does Hume say about reason and passion?
(3 pts)
-Reason is the slave of passion
-Passion can mean a sense impression- meaning I am affected by sensations
-The reasoning I do with my ideas always comes after what I have received through my impressions, the impression comes first, ideas come after
What are complex ideas?
(3 pts)
-Complex ideas are simple ideas combined
-Principles of the imagination meaning; it synthesis ideas together through the principles of imaginations, what brings these individual ideas into complex ideas
-Complex ideas are not copies of complex impressions
In regards to complex ideas, what are the 3 important principles the imagination operates through, why are they of importance?
-These principles explains how ideas come together in the imagination because they resemble each other, they are copies of contiguous impressions, or causality
-Resemblance, Contiguity, Causality
Principles of the imagination: Resemblance
-Ideas may come together because they resemble one another and form a complex idea
-Similar to generalization
Principles of the imagination: Contiguity
Give an example.
-Things are connected/joined together
Ex- a tree, different parts of the tree are connected. The idea of the leave is contiguous with the idea of the twig, contiguous with the idea of a trunk and so on
-This becomes a complex idea of a tree
Principles of the imagination: Causality
(5 pts)
-Cause and effect is a process of the imagination
-When something happens and something happens after it, we say “this caused that to happen”
-Hume argues that is our imagination, we imagined that because we see these things associated with one another
-When in reality, there is nothing there that make it a cause nor that makes the other an effect
-“Cause” is something that occurs all the time but has no necessary
connection
Knowledge involves; BLANK, BLANK, BLANK
-Habit, belief, and likelihood
The BLANK and its principles are BLANK features of BLANK
The imagination and its principles are universal features of selfhood
What does Hume believe regarding knowledge and our limit?
(3 pts)
There are limits to what we can know, limits to our knowledge
-The world is dubious, beyond our knowledge
-There is a skeptical (doubt) limit
