Note | Hume’s Skeptical Empiricism | Jean-Michel Serres, Composer-pianist (Apfel Café Music): Website

Radical Skepticism

David Hume exhaustively criticized epistemology. He didn’t accept external things and the existence of the God as a cause of idea. He thought “Our perceptions can’t get out of our minds.” For John Locke and George Berkeley, experience is the path to catch ideas from the external world. But, by Hume, experience is movements themselves of ideas in a mind.

And Hume questioned identities of the world and personality, and their causality the basis of our ordinary life.

Perception, Impression and Idea

First, Hume called idea of Locke and Berkeley perception. And Hume divided perception into impression and idea.

Impression is perception has force and liveliness, and an original of idea , enters our senses, as a fondamental, original and vivid sensation in now and here. Idea is a copy of impression, remains in our minds.

Association of Ideas: Resemblance, Contiguity and Causality

Ideas reappear as a memory or an imagination. Ideas associate and unite each other, then make new impressions. Hume thought these associations or units are free also proper, and there is the universal principle of relation of ideasas resemblance, contiguity and cause and effect.

Ideas are produced by ideas and reflections called secondary impression. The process of impressions produce ideas, ideas produce impressions, and perceptions form themselves and develop continuously. This process of perceptions is experience of Hume.

Bundle of Perceptions

Hume thought perception is only certain thing. Also, even external object or personality isn’t a constant and unchangeable real existence.

Impressions which continue the same and changeless during our lives, isn’t exist. To observe internal of self, to deeply enter myself, we can grasp only perceptions of cool or warm, light and dark, love and hate, pleasure and pain. Hume stated “In any cases, we can’t grasp my self without perceptions in the least.”

For Hume, there is not a coherent mind or personality. Man is a bundle or collection of different perceptions in perpetual flux and movement, which succeed with an inconceivable rapidity.

Necessity of Cauality: Custum and Belief

Also Hume denied the objectivity of causality. There isn’t absolute necessity of unity of cause and result. Causality is only a subjective unity (one of a complex idea) based on custom (repetitions of experience). But by custom effects for imagination , we can infer another object from an object. Inference of causality is by the custom of mind. Causality is a connection of beliefs derive from custom, and is a kind of invention or fiction.

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