David Hume Research Paper

In philosophic inquiry, people have long disputed the way in which human beings acquire knowledge and come to know the world around us. According to Aristotle, “Nothing is in the intellect that was not first in the senses.” This quote mirrors concept empiricist philosophy which holds the belief that all of our ideas, thoughts, or concepts about the external world come from experience. David Hume, one of the most influential empiricists and skeptics, highlights his approach to philosophy in his “Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding.” A central theme of Hume’s philosophical approach involves the investigation of how humans understand the world given their perspective limits. Hume holds the belief that all of our concepts, such as ideas and

Those who believe in innate ideas believe that the mind is in fact not a blank slate at birth, like John Locke had argued, and that humans are born with some degree of knowledge. These people have strong arguments against Hume’s Copy Principle since it denies/contradicts the very premise of Innatism, claiming that ideas only derive from impressions and we have no inborn ideas about the world. Likewise, Rationalists would have strong concerns regarding Hume’s theory because they theorize that humans have some degree of knowledge gained through reason, independent of sensory experience, and that reason alone, either by intuition or deduction, is superior to experience as a source of knowledge. Therefore, Rationalists would argue that an idea is not a copy of an impression, but rather it is something you are born with or that can be logically

The second argument concerns hypothetical examples, the first concerning someone born with a defected organ who is unable to experience sensation. Hume claims that it would be impossible for that person to have any corresponding ideas about the world that would only be revealed by that sensation. For example, a blind man could have no concept of the color red, a deaf man no notion of the sound: their sensory deficiencies deny them of any impressions to copy and therefore no ideas of sight or sound could be constructed. If these senses were to be restored, arguably the man could now have an impression of the color red, and therefore an idea of it, his idea a more dull copy of his impression. Similarly, Hume introduces a “Laplander” as someone with no conceivable idea of wine because they have been denied the sensation of ever tasting wine before. With no experience of its taste, one could never construct an idea of what wine would taste like. Likewise, someone unable to feel a particular emotion, fear for example, could have no concept of what fear would feel like without having experienced that sensation. This is due to the principle that ideas are mere copies of our impressions, and so we can have no notion of what fear is if we have never experienced the sensation of being scared before. Hume