David Hume Research Paper

1429 Words6 Pages

A blinding light is the first thing I see. Then a white hospital room comes into focus and a personal nurse informs me that I have been in a deep slumber for 300 years and my body has been miraculously preserved since. The nurse also informs me that the world that I once knew is gone and I will need to enroll in school again to learn the modern language and reform my ways of thinking. During my physical therapy sessions, Nurse filled me in about the great David Hume, whose ancient writings were accidently discovered and consequently brought forth a new enlightenment about a century earlier. By now, the vast majority of people have long accepted his philosophy and deemed him a hidden master of knowledge. I am told that Hume was an empiricist, …show more content…

Should I choose the sparkly burger or the bubbling orange soup? Unsure, I turned to the girl behind me and asked her which would be the better option. She furrowed her eyebrows and told me that I should have paid more attention in Existentialism class so I would know that it is nonsense to worry about finding the right decision because it does not mean anything until the action is taken. Existence of a substance or action comes before its essence, or the understanding and significance of it (Sartre 15). This means that the individual shapes the essence of an action by deciding the correctness of the choice after has been made. With my dilemma of food choice behind me, I happily choose any meal knowing that it is “up to [me] to give it a meaning, and value is nothing else but the meaning that [I] choose” (Sartre 49). Although this is an experience that affected me physically because I am directly consuming it, there were many other occurrences in school that changed me mentally as …show more content…

Because of Nietzsche’s critique on the English language, and the present time, or most vividly recalled, people’s admiration of his work, they have altered language by eliminating some basic grammatical rules. Now, people can speak of actions without having to attach it to a subject. This way, they could talk about thinking and not need an actual entity to perform the thinking. Nietzsche wrote that language is deceptive because it causes people to inaccurately think about reality by leading people to assume that an object must be available to execute actions, when there is no evidence of this (Nietzsche 24). And there was no greater blunder than Rene Descartes’ claim, “I think therefore I am,” because verbs and nouns are only linked through our language constructs. This says nothing about the reality of the relationship between actions and subjects. The direct result of this change is that people sometimes speak in fragmented