Philosophy - Davide Hume
David Hume was the son of a minor Scottish landowner. His family wanted him to become a lawyer, but he felt an "insurmountable resistance to everything but philosophy and learning". Mr. Hume attended Edinburgh University, and in 1734 he moved to a French town called La Fleche to pursue philosophy. He later returned to Britain and began his literary career. As Hume built up his reputation, he gained more and more political power.
HUME'S WRITINGS In 1742, Hume wrote Essays Moral and Political. Then in 1748, he wrote An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding and An Enquiry Concerning the Principals of Morals.
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words, an impression is part of a temporary feeling, but an idea is the permanent impact of this feeling. Hume believed that ideas were just dull imitations of impressons.
Hume also attacked the idea of casualty. This idea states that for all effects there is a cause. Hume said that even though the cause preceded the effect, there is no proof that the cause is responsible for the effect's occurence.
Mr. Hume was a firm believer that the human mind invented nothing. Instead, he claimed, the human mind takes simple ideas, and turns them into complex ideas. A simple example of this is the idea of an angel. Angels are human figures with wings. What Hume claimed that an angel is formed of two simple ideas, the human figure and wings.
A more complicated example of this is heaven. When we attempt to break down the concept of heaven into simple ideas, we are left with things such as pearly gates, angels, and golden palaces. But these are all complex ideas as well (pearls+gates, ...
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called into question the fundamental laws of science, which are based on the premise that one event necessarily causes another and predictably always will. According to Hume's philosophy, therefore, knowledge of matters of fact is impossible, although as a practical matter he freely acknowledged that people had to think in terms of cause and effect and had to assume the validity of their perceptions, or they would go mad.
David Hume, who has been described as the most acute thinker in Britain in the eighteenth century, was born in Edinburgh.
His intellectual powers were recognised with the publication of his Essays, Moral and Political in two volumes in 1741 and 1742. Employed as ...
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