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References
Hume:
Empiricist Naturalism Philosophy
Talk: Hume David
Hume Hume's
Enquiry: An Interactive Guide
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David Hume
Hume's impact on the theory of knowledge, ethics, and the philosophy of religion is enormous. Some of the issues he raised, for instance the problem of induction, remain as part of the philosophical problem-set. The power of his thought stems from a remarkably compact and incisive analysis of the human mind. Hume asks the reader to reflect on the contents of your own mind. You will find there many types of mental activity that you can group in various ways: perceptions, feelings, ideas, beliefs, emotions, expectations, doubts, and so on. Hume argued that all of these -- indeed everything that can be contained in the mind -- are reducible to two types of perceptions (any content of the mind of which we are conscious). These are impressions and ideas.
An impression is a perception which involves actual sensation, such as seeing, feeling, tasting. hearing.
An idea is a mental perception which arises by thinking of something, rather than by experiencing it.
Perhaps you can perceive the
taste of a plump juicy lemon right now. Imagine slicing the yellow skin,
the juice spurts out, you put the wedge to your lips bite down, sucking
out the juice. Does it work for you? Can you call up the lemon taste in
your mind and 
almost
feel the puckering of your lips in response to the sour juice? If so,
you have focused on an idea, in Hume's sense of the word. That idea is
in you because you have tasted actual lemons before. You have impressions
of lemons in your mind and can make idea copies based on them; and (this
is crucial) you can call an idea into consciousness without having
the object (the lemon) of the original experience
(tasting) present (on
your tongue).
You can form an idea of something without being in its presence, but you cannot have an impression of something that is not present. Hume argues that ideas are actually copies of our impressions and that we can form complex ideas by combining simpler ideas. An argument against Hume's theory that all ideas (hence anything in the mind) come from impressions is to point out that humans are capable of forming ideas of things that they never have, perhaps never could, experience and have an impression of.
| "Nothing,
at first view, may seem more unbounded than the thought of man,
which not only escapes all human power and authority, but is not
even restrained within the limits of nature and reality. To form
monsters, and join incongruous shapes and appearances, costs the
imagination no more trouble than to conceive the most natural and
familiar objects. And while the body is confined to one planet,
along which it creeps with pain and difficulty; the thought can
in an instant transport us into the most distant regions of the
universe; or even beyond the universe, into the unbounded chaos,
where nature is supposed to lie in total confusion. What never was
seen, or heard of, may yet be conceived; nor is any thing beyond
the power of thought, except what implies an absolute contradiction." |
Hume counters this objection with a very important move. He points out how complex ideas may be formed by combinations of simpler ideas. For instance, you can right now form an idea of a unicorn - a horse with a horn. You probably have actually seen horses and seen horns in animals -- your ideas of horses and horns came from impressions (perceptions) of actual horses and actual horns. By putting the ideas together, you can create a complex idea of an animal that you have never perceived directly. Your mind has no impression of a unicorn, even though the idea can be constructed. More and more complex ideas are possible via this method of combination.
| "But
though our thought seems to possess this unbounded liberty, we shall
find, upon a nearer examination, that it is really confined within
very narrow limits, and that all this creative power of the mind
amounts to no more than the faculty of compounding, transposing,
augmenting, or diminishing the materials afforded us by the senses
and experience. When we think of a golden mountain, we only join
two consistent ideas, gold, and mountain, with which we were formerly
acquainted. A virtuous horse we can conceive; because, from our
own feeling, we can conceive virtue; and this we may unite to the
figure and shape of a horse, which is an animal familiar to us.
In short, all the materials of thinking are derived either from
our outward or inward sentiment: the mixture and composition of
these belongs alone to the mind and will. Or, to express myself
in philosophical language, all our ideas or more feeble perceptions
are copies of our impressions or more lively ones." |
This move, is important because it introduces the main tool of Hume's thought - the ability to identify the relations between ideas.
If all we had to go on were impressions and ideas, we could not do much more than have perceptions and notice past experiences. Hume, however, develops a powerful account of the mind by identifying the ways in which ideas may be related to one another. We can mentally link ideas together in three ways:
Our mental processes are all made up of linking ideas together in these three ways. We have the ability to be aware of the ideas that we have and to be aware of the relations that hold them together. Hume argues that all human beliefs -- all of your beliefs -- result from applications of these simple associations. From our simple ideas and associations we build very complex system ns of thought and belief. yet, no matter how complex an idea or belief system, it is always possible in principle to analyze it into its simpler component parts -- ideas and relations between them.1) Resemblance: A and B share similar features
2) Contiguity: A and B occur together in space and/or time.
3) Cause & Effect: A brings B about.
This theory of mind and method of analysis provided the tools that Hume used to arrive at remarkable conclusions about knowledge, understanding, metaphysics, the self, morality, justice, religious belief, and a host of other key philosophical topics.
Aquinas
Aristotle
Augustine
Berkeley
Confucius
Descartes
Douglass
Foucault
Hobbes
Hume
Hypatia
Kant
Kierkegaard
Lao Tzu
Leibniz
Locke
Marx
Mill
Montaigne
Pascal
Plato
Protagoras
Rand
Russell
Schopenhauer
Socrates
Spinoza
Thales