Hume - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

1 / 28
About This Presentation
Title:

Hume

Description:

Defective sense organs. Missing shade of blue? Principles of Association ... we need but inquire from what impression is that supposed idea derived? ... – PowerPoint PPT presentation

Number of Views:105
Avg rating:3.0/5.0
Slides: 29
Provided by: jerryri
Category:
Tags: hume

less

Transcript and Presenter's Notes

Title: Hume


1
Hume
  • PHI 185

2
Topics
  • Two Species of Philosophy
  • Humes Theory of Mind
  • Two Objects of Human Reason
  • Skeptical Doubts
  • A Skeptical Solution
  • Liberty (Free Will)
  • The Self and Personal Identity
  • Moral Distinctions

3
Two Species of Philosophy
  • Man as an active being sentimentalism
  • Taste and sentiment
  • Examples from common life
  • Feel the difference between vice and virtue
  • Easy and obvious philosophy
  • Man as a reasonable being intellectualism
  • Form the understanding
  • Seek original principles
  • Accurate and abstruse philosophy

4
The Right Course
  • Man is a reasonable being.
  • Man is a sociable, no less than a reasonable
    being
  • Man is also an active being.
  • Indulge your passion for science, but let your
    science be humanwith direct reference to
    action and society.
  • Be a philosophy but, amidst all your
    philosophy, be still a man.

5
Human Understanding
  • The only method of freeing learning, at once,
    from these abstruse questions, is to enquire
    seriously into the nature of human understanding,
    and show, from an exact analysis of its powers
    and capacity, that it is by no means fitted for
    such remote and abstruse subjects.

6
Reconciliation
  • Happy, if we can unite the boundaries of the
    different species of philosophy, by reconciling
    profound enquiry with clearness, and truth with
    novelty! And still more happy, if, reasoning in
    this easy manner, we can undermine the
    foundations of an abstruse philosophy, which
    seems hitherto served only as a shelter to
    superstition, and a cover to absurdity and error!

7
The Mind
  • Perceptions
  • Thoughts or ideas
  • Impressions
  • All our ideasare copies of our impressions
  • Survey of the mind (introspection)
  • Defective sense organs
  • Missing shade of blue?
  • Principles of Association
  • Resemblance, Contiguity, Cause/Effect

8
Meaning and Nonsense
  • When we entertain, therefore, any suspicion that
    a philosophical term is employed without any
    meaning or idea, we need but inquire from what
    impression is that supposed idea derived?

9
Objects of Human Reason
  • Relations of Ideas and Matters of Fact
  • Relations of Ideas
  • Analytic Judgments
  • Contrary is impossible
  • Intuitively or demonstrably certain
  • Matters of Fact
  • Synthetic Judgments
  • Contrary is possible
  • Reasoning based on cause and effect

10
Knowledge of Cause and Effect
  • Causes and effects are discoverable, not by
    reason, but by experience.
  • The effect is different from the cause and not
    discoverable in it. Not knowable a priori.
  • What is the foundation of our conclusions from
    experience?
  • All inferences based on experience suppose that
    the future will resemble the past.

11
Will the Future Resemble the Past?
  • Can experience of past events give us knowledge
    about future events? Will the future be like the
    past? Is nature uniform?
  • Not by a chain of reasoning no intuitive medium
  • Not by deduction opposite not impossible
  • Not by induction circular appeal to experience

12
The Problem of Induction
  • Different kinds of inductive inferences
  • A future event is predicted on the basis of a
    past event (inductive forecasting)
  • The whole population is predicted to have a
    feature that the sample does. (inductive
    generalization)
  • The nature of inductive reasoning
  • The conclusion contains more information than the
    premises
  • The evidence only makes the conclusion likely

13
Justifying Induction
  • We are justified in using induction in the
    future because it has always worked in the past.
  • Justification is a normative project
  • An inductive justification for the practice of
    induction.
  • Is this circular?
  • If inductive reasoning cant be justified by
    induction and cant be justified by
    demonstration, is there any way to justify the
    practice?

14
Skeptical Solution
  • Doubts about induction shouldnt limit our
    enquiries in common life.
  • The principle of custom or habit guides our
    inductive practice.
  • Not reasoning or grounded in the understanding
  • All inferences from experience, therefore, are
    effects of custom, not of reasoning.
  • Custom makes our experience useful to us.
  • The imagination is the source of our beliefs
    about induction

15
Philosophical Problems
  • From what impression could this idea be
    derived?
  • Normativity How are inductive inferences
    justified?
  • Normativity How are human actions justified
    (moral)?
  • Necessity What are necessary (causal)
    relationships?
  • Necessity How is human behavior necessary or
    free?
  • What is the nature of the self? Substance?
  • Hume rejects any talk about anything that
    transcends experience as nonsense.

16
Necessary Connection Whence the Idea?
  • We dont arrive at the idea by observing external
    objects.
  • We dont arrive at the idea by reflecting on the
    operation of our minds on our bodies.
  • The union of mind and body is mysterious
  • We cant move any part of our body at will
  • We move something internal to move our arms

17
Necessary Connection Whence the Idea?
  • We dont arrive at the idea by reflecting on the
    operation of our minds on our ideas.
  • The relation of mind to idea is mysterious
  • Minds command over ideas is limited
  • Self-command of mind is not uniform
  • In no case are we acquainted with anything that
    can be called a power.
  • Appealing to God wont help
  • Dont know what Gods power would be

18
Necessary Connection
  • Objects are conjoined, but not connected.
  • This connection, therefore, which we feel in
    the mind, this customary transition of the
    imagination from one object to its usual
    attendant, is the sentiment or impression from
    which we form the idea of power or necessary
    connection.

19
Cause
  • Definition 1 an object followed by another and
    where all the objects similar to the first are
    followed by objects similar to the second.
  • where if the first had not been, the second
    never had existed.
  • Definition 2 an object followed by another and
    whose appearance always conveys the thought to
    that other.

20
Liberty and Necessity
  • Free actions cant be thought of as uncaused
    since we want to assign responsibility.
  • We cannot surely mean that actions have so
    little connection with motives, inclinations, and
    circumstances that one does not follow with a
    certain degree of uniformity from the other and
    that one affords no inference by which we can
    conclude the existence of the other. (771)

21
Liberty
  • By liberty, then, we can only mean a power of
    acting or not acting according to the
    determinations of the will. (771)
  • Hypothetical liberty
  • Compare with Locke (618)

22
Liberty and Morality
  • All laws being founded on rewards and
    punishment, it is supposed as a fundamental
    principle that these motives have a regular and
    uniform influences on the mind and both produce
    good and prevent the evil actions. (772)
  • Person not answerable for actions
  • From something not durable and constant
  • Performed ignorantly and casually

23
The Nature of the Self
  • Descartes
  • What kind of thing am I?
  • Leibniz
  • Monads and perceptions
  • Spinoza
  • My relation to nature?
  • Locke
  • Suspicious of substantial accounts

24
Self
  • From what impression(s) is the idea of the self
    derived?
  • Not from one impression constant and invariable
  • when I enter most intimately into what I call
    myself, I always stumble on some perception of
    other. I never can catch myself at any one time
    without a perception.
  • Bundles of impressions (803)

25
Identity
  • Identity or sameness
  • an object that remains invariable and
    uninterrupted
  • Diversity
  • A distinct idea of several objects existing in
    succession and connected together by a close
    relation.
  • Transition of the mind from one object to another
  • Imagination
  • Relations of resemblance and cause/effect

26
Examples
  • Mass of matter
  • Small and large changes
  • Common ends - living things
  • Continued existence of based on common cause
  • Slow and fast changes - river

27
Personal Identity
  • our notions of personal identity proceed
    entirely from the smooth and uninterrupted
    progress of thought along a train of connected
    ideas. (806)
  • Resemblance and Causation
  • Soul compared with republic or commonwealth (807)
  • Memory discovers, not produces, personal identity
  • Compare with Locke (630)

28
Write on one of the following
  • How does Hume understand the nature of cause and
    effect (necessary connection)?
  • Compare Hume and Descartes on the nature of the
    self.
  • Compare Hume and Locke on personal identity.
  • Compare Hume and Locke on freedom.
Write a Comment
User Comments (0)
About PowerShow.com