David Hume Research Paper

David Hume was a very important philosopher and thinker of the eighteenth century who had obtained many of his ideas and beliefs from John Locke. Hume was a skeptic and an empiricist who believed that the mind is a clean slate and everything we know and understand is from all of our experiences we have had encounters with before. Within these experiences that we encounter Hume is a firm believer that the only way we interpret these experiences is through the five senses. David Hume's main goal in all of his beliefs was to attempt to explain the source and nature of all human knowledge and how we fully understand what we take in. Hume follows most of John Locke's arguments to come to his own conclusion about how we understand and comprehend

All of human knowledge has been enquired from experience with the five senses is what Hume firmly believed in. After Hume created that argument he continues to reflect on empiricism by creating a rule called the “Copy Principle.” The copy principle states “All of our ideas or more deeble perceptions are copies of our impressions or more lively ones.” (Petrik 189) Now the copy principle can help us fully understand where our knowledge comes from since everything we know is from experiences. Some may argue that the copy principle is invalid because our mind has the capability to create ideas of things we have not experienced before. It is true that we can imagine such creative things and ideas in our mind without having to experience it without sense. But the copy principle backs up the fact that when we make up different ideas in our mind it is a real combination of various impressions we have had before. For example Hume uses the example of a “gold mountain” to explain how we can formulate complex ideas from experiences. Hume argues that there is no such thing as a “gold mountain” and that no one has ever seen one before, but in our mind we could have an idea of what it would be. Hume says that since we have the impression of a mountain and gold, our minds can create the image of a “gold mountain” strictly from previous impressions and

Hume’s view on cause and effect has a direct relationship with experience and matters of fact. For example when we see the sun rise in the morning we are experiencing it with our sight. We assume every day the sun will rise due to it continuously happening every morning. There could be a chance that the sun does not rise but it has never happened before so we assume that it will always rise. Since we had the experience of seeing the sun rise the automatic effect of that would be, it will rise tomorrow morning again. Though we can never truly prove what comes out of causation which is an event that has causes. That is where we only have our assumptions because cause and effect can never be proven true or