David Hume Skepticism

The basis behind Hume and everything that he teaches is quite simple. Hume is telling people that they must acknowledge the fact that scientific knowledge or knowledge in general is not quite what people think it is. It is not secure. This idea is thought provoking and very scary. This is telling people that they must throw out much of what they believe to be true and begin to question it. Knowledge is not always what people believe it to be. Hume based his teachings on skepticism rather than rationalism. Rationalism was unacceptable to him.
Hume’s skepticism is pretty hard to wrap my mind around. He is teaching that our minds naturally associate the past with the present and future. He believes that as individuals we seek uniformity in life. …show more content…
The natural association of the mind is mind bending. To think that one makes these associations out of comfort, or whatever reason their brain decides, makes me think a lot. My first thought went to young children and parents. As young children, we often listen to our parents and begin to mimic them or repeat phrases they say. We watch their actions and the words that go with them and suddenly begin to make those connections. When we are young we hear our parents curse and naturally repeat them like we do with all other words. This can become a problem because we have just associated these specific words with traumatic or negative experiences. These associations are not necessarily bad, but I began to question if we hadn’t made the assumption of those words to be negative or hurtful, would we consider them “bad” still? It is natural and acceptable in society to believe negative words to be unacceptable. This shows that our knowledge now is really based off of what we are taught. We go with the flow and avoid questioning these ideas. Hume questioned so much and changed the way people …show more content…
Two people could be playing the same sport such as football and one person could be enjoying the sort while the other person isn’t. Hume taught to question knowledge and its universality. With this is situation one of the players is going to believe that football is the best sport. The other person is going to fail to see the joy and goodness that the first player has gotten out of football. One of the players may find connections and uniformity out of football, while the other makes no sense of it. This is good because this is breaking the connections and adding difference in