David Hume
David Hume, a Scottish philosopher and historian who lived from 1711-76, carried the empiricism of John Locke and George Berkeley to the logical extreme of radical skepticism. Although his family wanted him to become a lawyer, he felt an "insurmountable resistance to everything but philosophy and learning". Mr. Hume attended Edinburgh University where he studied but did not graduate, 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. He discarded the possibility of certain knowledge, finding in the mind nothing but a series of sensations, and held that cause-and-effect in the natural world derives solely from the conjunction of two impressions. Hume's skepticism is also evident in his writings on religion, in which he rejected any rational or natural theology. Besides his chief work, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40), he wrote Political Discourses (1752), The Natural History of Religion (1755), and a History of England (1754-62) that was, despite errors of fact, the standard work for many years. "Nothing seems more unbounded than a man's thought," quoted Hume. Hume
With Hume's assumption that " our ideas reach no further than our experience," would lead him to raise skeptical questions about the existence of God. Most attempts to demonstrate the existence of God rely upon some version of causality. Sometimes experimental models are built with no present knowledge of what the finished model will be like. Is the universe a trial model or the final design? By this line of probing Hume tried to emphasize that the order of the universe is simply an empirical fact and that we can not infer from it the existence of God. This does not make Hume an atheist; he is simply testing out idea of god the way he had tested our ideas of the self and substance by his rigorous principle of empiricism that I spoke about earlier. Hume also thrived on ones self. Hume denied that we have any idea of self. This may seem paradoxical, that I should say that I do not have an idea of myself, but Hume again tests what is meant by a self by asking "from what impression could this idea derive from"; do you see a trend forming? Hume compares the mind to "a kind of theatre where several perceptions successively make their appearance," but adds that "we have not the most distant notion of the place where these scenes are represented." Hume believed that all knowledge came from experience. He also believed that a person's experience's existed only in the person's mind. Although our body is confined to one planet, our mind can roam instantly into the most dis
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Approximate Word count = 1001
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)
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