David Hume Perception

A man who could be considered ahead of his own time during the 18th century would be David Hume, a Scottish native and enlightenment leader. Hume adopted to Locke’s theory “that at birth the human mind is a “tabula rasa” or blank slate waiting to be written on by experience” (Badiou). His work in “A Treatise of Human Nature” is one of few theories on how human beings build knowledge upon their feelings, and what they have experience and return causes them to think ideas and develop their perception. In other words, he helped set the framework for what is now known as, Merriam-Webster defines, Cognition—the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through experience and the senses. Three different examples of what Hume’s …show more content…
“Hume frequently denies that we can know the causes of our impressions; however, he urges us to clarify the value of our ideas by tracing them to the impressions from which they derive” (Waldow 105). Of these two, human impressions form before their ideas and “that our ideas are images of our impressions, so we can form secondary ideas, which are images of the primary” (Katz, Rizzo 48). Although biologically, research has proven cognition not to be the sole source of how human comprehension of all knowledge, for instance, humans do not need the impression of someone else’s hunger to gain the idea of what hunger is or feels like first. But to tell and describe a pineapple or a coconut to someone whom may never seen nor tasted one, would need that impression in order to obtain that idea and understanding or else the conversation would not go far (Katz, Rizzo …show more content…
When humans started expanding to other regions of the globe it is hard to imagine what each race thought of the other during their first encounter. When thinking about the men traveling from North Europe fully clothe going to an island, Africa or even when discovering America, to people the encountered, who may have wore hardly anything. The difference in the way each other smelt, the way foreigner bodies reacted to the environment, the language barrier and what effect the lack of understanding between two different races coming into contact with one another had, and lastly the biological different in appearance. The fact that human beings share the same composure, but different features—lips, nose, hair texture and complexion, definitely played apart, in the idea in realizing “wow, we’re not the same, but who’s right and who’s wrong”. Which leads to valid point Hume makes that once an impression happens that flourishing of ideas can come out of it, but it all originated from the impression itself (Katz, Rizzo, 48). Therefore, humans can only understand racism as a concept after the experience of race affecting their life in some