David Hume

Hume was a British empiricist who like other empiricists believed that human beings can know nothing beyond what is revealed to them by their experience. Hume also believed that the human mind, human reason, is severely limited in its power to interpret and understand that experience.

Hume took philosophical empiricism and skepticism to its ultimate conclusion, questioning whether it was possible for human beings to truly know anything whatsoever about themselves or their world: "So narrow are the bounds of human understanding, that little satisfaction can be hoped for in this particular" (8).

The process of induction, or the inductive method, involves the idea of causality. This involves the assumption that things and events have causes, that something causes them to be, and that there is a connection between the cause and the effect which we can determine and understand.

Hume, however, removes the power of reason from the equation of the interpretation of experience. To Hume, what exists in the human mind is not rational activity accurately and comprehensively analyzing the information gathe

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row because of laws we have apparently drawn from our experience, but Hume would argue that this is merely the result of habit we have picked up in observing objects and events in relation to one another. We assume, based on this habit, that causation is at work. What this denial of causation is, in effect, is a complete denial of the possibility of induction, of the process of inductive reasoning, or of any sort of inductive inference. However, as we have seen, science and knowledge are based on causality and inductive inference. If we take Hume seriously, then, and he certainly wants to be taken seriously, we can simply not know anything beyond what our mind simply reflects in impressions of our sensory experience. On one hand, it would seem that Hume's philosophy is aimed at discouraging the human mind from trying to know anything, and that such a pessimistic skepticism would seem to lead to moral collapse through pessimism. However, we must keep in mind that Hume was reacting strongly against the dogmatism of the rationalists who had preceded the empiricists. For example, Hume responds with incisive analysis of the rationalist Descartes' argument that reason can be based on experience because God would not create exp
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Approximate Word count = 1476
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)

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