“Throw it away. Throw it all away.” is what I said to myself as I put Hume’s opinion of skepticism in my own words. Hume, in his writing An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, questions the value of philosophy.
To start of his argument, Hume differentiates impressions and ideas. Hume believes impressions are perceptions that involve our senses such as sight, hearing and our emotions. For example, an apple has the capability to leave an impression because eating it would stimulate the senses. The sour taste or the smoothness of the skin would stimulate the sense and you would have an impression of an apple. After impressions of anything was obtained, we would then begin to form an idea of an apple.
Hume believed ideas were thoughts or beliefs that we connected to impressions. Ideas are created through similarity, contiguity, and/or cause and effect. For example, ideas formed through similarity would be examining a new brown chair and an old red chair. Both chairs have four legs and a seat and those similarities would be enough to label the new brown chair as a chair, based on the …show more content…
Matters of fact are the more common truths we learn through our experiences. We understand matters of fact according to its believed cause. Our interpretation of one event leads us to assume an unobserved cause. Hume then tells us that assuming a relationship between two events are not necessarily real or true. It’s possible to deny causal connections without contradictions because causal connections are assumptions, and assumptions are not subject to reason. Being that assumptions are not based on reason, we have no rational support for believing in causation. On the other hand, relations of ideas are usually mathematical truths meaning we cannot deny them without contradiction. Hume then concludes that if there is no cause and effect, then our actions are not predetermined, and we enjoy true free
To start of his argument, Hume differentiates impressions and ideas. Hume believes impressions are perceptions that involve our senses such as sight, hearing and our emotions. For example, an apple has the capability to leave an impression because eating it would stimulate the senses. The sour taste or the smoothness of the skin would stimulate the sense and you would have an impression of an apple. After impressions of anything was obtained, we would then begin to form an idea of an apple.
Hume believed ideas were thoughts or beliefs that we connected to impressions. Ideas are created through similarity, contiguity, and/or cause and effect. For example, ideas formed through similarity would be examining a new brown chair and an old red chair. Both chairs have four legs and a seat and those similarities would be enough to label the new brown chair as a chair, based on the …show more content…
Matters of fact are the more common truths we learn through our experiences. We understand matters of fact according to its believed cause. Our interpretation of one event leads us to assume an unobserved cause. Hume then tells us that assuming a relationship between two events are not necessarily real or true. It’s possible to deny causal connections without contradictions because causal connections are assumptions, and assumptions are not subject to reason. Being that assumptions are not based on reason, we have no rational support for believing in causation. On the other hand, relations of ideas are usually mathematical truths meaning we cannot deny them without contradiction. Hume then concludes that if there is no cause and effect, then our actions are not predetermined, and we enjoy true free