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David Hume On Suicide Summary

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David Hume was all at once a philosopher, a historian, and an economist. He was a major part of the booming intellectual and social changes happening during eighteenth century Scotland, a period known as the Scottish Enlightenment. Hume was known for his focus on empiricism, skepticism, and epistemology. By questioning the many systems and matters-of-fact society has ingrained into the mind, he was able to deconstruct the assumptions we make and eradicate the fallacies we believe. Hume sought the truth through observation of the world through the five senses and experimentation. In On Suicide, he radically stated “the life of man is of no greater importance to the universe than that of an oyster” (Hume 1). By looking at man in an objective …show more content…

Ideas that are produced from memory come from previous experiences and impressions, while ideas that come from the imagination are simply the formation of new ideas from the combination of two different ideas. Hume continues to stick to his empirical point of view by claiming that the production of all thoughts in our minds come from matters-of-fact observations. However, by emphasizing mainly the empirical nature of the mind, Hume ran into the problem of induction. His problem of induction states that just because things happened in the past does not mean we can assume it will happen again. This claim established him as one of the greats associated with skepticism, because it will completely derail scientists who rely on inductive reasoning when creating theories. Although Hume was a believer in seeking the truth through senses and experiences, he declared humans understood nothing about nature, because all we can do is see how nature behaves and affect our experiences. Furthermore, he claimed there was no certainty in science or our understanding of anything, only great probability. Hume radically denounced the predominant Aristotelian view of his contemporaries that humans were the most intelligent and logical creature, and instead chose to look at humans empirically. By studying humans with the mind of a scientist, he was able to see how irrational and chaotic we really are, and that passions, not logic, reign supreme over

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