David Hume.

David Hume (1711-1776) was a Scottish empiricist, he is regarded alongside John Locke as a key philosopher in empirical thinking. I have been looking into his most noteable essay, 'An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding' where he outlines his empirical philosophical ideas with regards to human thinking and where our ideas come from.

He begins by seperating ideas and impression. He believes that impressions come first, these are supposedly strong and vivid and come directly from sense experience, and these consist of things such as pain, love happiness and sadness. Ideas, he says follow on from and are made up from our impressions, complex ideas are made up from bundles of simple ideas. For example, as far as I am aware, i have never seen a gold mountain; however I have seen gold, and I have seen a mountain. I can put these two simple impressions together to create the complex idea of a gold mountain. This is easily criticised as the terms he uses seem somewhat vague and sketchy.

He later discusses his ideas about causation, which I find fascinating, but hard to realistically apply to real life. He states that necessity exists in the mind, not in objects, meaning that in reality nothing is necessary. A famous example is of the sun rising: just because it rose today, and yesterday, and every day in my experience, that is not to say it will tomorrow. When the white ball hits the red ball in a game of billiards, the red ball moves, Hume would say that this was not necessarily caused by the white ball. To live thinking like this would surely drive anyone insane, but this understandably relates to journalism. Everything must be done to ensure that what you are saying is truthful. Just because your trustworthy friend, or Wikipedia, or both claim something to be true, this does not make it true, we still need to find out with empirical certainty that something is true.

An idea that made me sympathise with Hume was his assertion that concepts such as heat and pain are only formed in word, or in our minds. To an extent this seems to make sense, as it is heard of for people to undergo hypnotism instead of anaesthetic before painful operations. This is similar to the way that people don't notice that they have suffered an injury, until they see physical damage, and then begin to feel the pain.

'Hume’s fork' is used, in a similar way to Ayers verification principle, to seperate relevant ideas from nonsense. One side of the fork contains relations of ideas, for example, a bachelor is an unmarried man. These can be proved with certainty. These are analytic, necessary knowable and apriori but tell us nothing new about the world. They are tautologies. On the other side of the fork sit 'matters of fact'. These are things that can be proved using our senses, for example, the bus is red, or it is raining outside. These are synthetic, contingent, aposteriori. Immanuel Kant would argue that synthetic apriori knowledge would give us true knowledge of the world, he believes the closest we have to this is intuition. The problem with Hume’s fork, much like the verification principle, is that it is neither a relation of ideas or a matter of fact, so it fails its own test.

I like to think that the basic idea that Hume is trying to assert, is that we should be slightly sceptical, and that there is no such thing as a rational belief. I think that he wanted us to see that certainty and maths are good, and gossip, small talk and assumptions are bad. I like to think that David Hume didn't walk around constantly amazed that he still existed, and that he didn't judge the man who thinks that he is a poached egg in the same way as people who think that they are human. He either exaggerates his point to make it clear and understandable, or he genuinely did lead a very strange and confusing lifestyle.