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David Hume Research Paper

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An empiricist can be described as someone who believes that all knowledge is gained through sensory experience. Among this group of individuals is philosopher David Hume. Hume is of the belief that men should keep their heads out of the clouds when practicing philosophy and base their judgments on real world experience. Hume proposes that philosophy can be divided into two types. The first is easy and obvious philosophy which is concrete and appeals to sentiment and ethics. The second type is profound philosophy. This type focuses on abstract and often obtuse ideas that are impossible to prove. Practical Hume believes that a man should philosophize somewhere between the two types and never be placed firmly in either. Falling within the realm of profound philosophy is the study of reality or being. This is called metaphysics. Despite the arguments of philosophers before him, David …show more content…

Of the two, impressions are the more vivid. An impression is the product of an immediate experience. It can be recognized externally from the senses or internally by way of emotion. In one case of this, a girl called Sally falls off her bicycle. The pain she feels is an impression caused by external stimuli. In another case, Sally meets a boy called Jason who tells her that he loves her for the first time. The happiness she feels is an impression caused by internal stimuli. The second way the mind can conceptualize is through an idea. Ideas are mere copies of the original impressions they represent, so they are much duller. If Sally tries to recall the pain of falling off of her bicycle or the way she felt when Jason first expressed his love for her, she will experience an idea. These ideas may be clear to her, but she will never again experience the sharpness of the initial impression. Both ideas and impressions are acquired through sensory experience and support Hume's empirical

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In James Geary’s I Is An Other his essay, “Metaphor and the Brain” breaks down the significance of synesthesia and its help in creating metaphors. Geary states, “Synesthesia creates the experience of one sense in the context of another” (93). For example, one may see the number one as the color red or it carries a rude personality with it.

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In “The Empathy Exam,” Leslie Jamison. She wrote about one of a psychologist’s test and the test tells that imagining pain could affect our body. The author writes, “Jean Decety, a psychologist at the University of Chicago, use fMRI scans to measure what happens when someone’s brain responds to another person’s pain. He shows test subjects images of painful situations (hand caught in scissors, foot under door) and compares these scans to what a brain looks like when its body is actually in pain. Decety has found that imagining the pain of others activates the same three areas (prefrontal cortex, anterior insula, and anterior singulate) as experiencing pain itself” (26-27).

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Therefore, Hylas is right in that what we perceive when looking at the oar half-submerged in water is that it is crooked, however, we are wrong in our judgement. If the perceiver would “conclude that upon taking the oar out of the water he shall perceive the same crookedness; or that it would affect his touch, as crooked things are wont to do: in that he is mistaken…his mistake lies not in what he perceived immediately, and at present (it being a manifest contradiction to suppose he should err in respect of that) but in the wrong judgement he makes concerning the ideas he apprehends to be connected with those immediately perceived.” (Berkeley, 1988). Therefore, the illusion we perceive only becomes misleading if we were to infer from it that when we touched the oar it would feel crooked or when we pulled the oar out of the water then it would look crooked. However, Berkeley argues that in immediate perception, there is no inference, simply the perception and collection of the sense-data and this “indubitability of immediate perception is one of the essential aspects of Berkeley’s theory of perception” (Stack, 1970).

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When it comes to the difference between ideas and impressions, from Hume’s philosophical view, all content of the mind is divided into simple and complex ideas and impressions. According to Hume, “simple ideas are copies of impressions” (Lacewing 2)He argues that all ideas can be considered into simple ideas. He also stated that complex ideas may be “well known by definition, which is nothing but an enumeration of those parts or simple ideas, that compose them” (Hume 59). Although Hume does not claim that “complex ideas must be copies of impressions”, he argues “that all complex ideas are constructed out of simple ideas, which are copies of impressions” (Lacewing 3). If we analyze complex ideas, we can come up with the conlclusion that they are copies of feelings.

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In a similar vein, Hume claims that ideas of relations and causes cannot be known a priori. Experience alone is

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The statement “Hume takes Empiricism to its logical, most radical endpoint.” Considering his views on the “copy principle”, causation, and the self. The “copy principle” argument by Hume discusses the relationship between simple ideas and simple impressions. He believes that impressions are formed by ideas and he uses the example of a golden mountain.

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I tell my friend that I hate cheese, by which he knows that cheese displeases me; nonetheless, he does not understand in what way and to what extent my exact feeling is. Although I can further specify each moment of my traumatizing experience with cheese and how these past events collectively formulate my current idea, such an explanation involves more choices of words with more personal ideas attached, which eventually becomes an almost infinite process. Hence, subjective experience renders ideas private, while private ideas make it impossible to fully specify the subjectivity of experience. Consequently, people

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In the movie 12 Angry Men it showed many examples of Hume’s ideas such as skepticism, pluralism, relativism, and reasonable doubt. First let me explain what skepticism is, skepticism doubts the validation of knowledge or particular subject. Pluralism is the position that there are many different kinds of belief—but not all just as good as any other. Relativism is when the position that each belief is just as good as any other, since all beliefs are viewpoint dependent. Reasonable doubt is lack of proof that prevents a judge or jury to convict a defendant for the charged crime.

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He also differentiates between impressions that are felt and ideas that are thought. The disadvantage in to this realistic view as Hume addresses is that

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The way a person sees it can influence them to remember it in a certain

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He had a huge influence on later philosophers and many were inspired by his skepticism of the established order. Being an Empiricist, Hume’s skepticism mainly was concerned with epistemology and the teleological argument. Hume States in section 49 of An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding that all our ideas are nothing but copies of our impressions. He

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The computational representational theory of the mind (CRUM) is a theory devised to model the complexities of the human mind in cognitive science. Human thought processes have been simplified by thinking about abstract thought processes in terms of concrete computational procedures (Thagard, 11). CRUM theory surmises that thinking is the result of the application of operations to mental representations (Thagard, 11). Recent literature suggests our emotions are intrinsically tied to cognitive processes (Dalgleish and Power, 1999). Emotions are influential factors that affect mental representations such as concepts, analogies and imagery in cognitive science.

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n my life there have been many people and things that have been huge influences on me. Soccer is one thing that has been a big thing I my life. I have played soccer for almost twelve years, so it has taken up most of my life. Even though soccer is such a big deal to me, there is one thing that has influenced me much more then soccer or anything else.

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Impressions are the original thought. Ideas are copies of impressions, or memories. These ideas make up the entirety of the mind. For instance, we remember that touching a hot stove will hurt, so we will not do it in the future. Sometimes an idea is scarier than the actual impression.

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We conjure images; we combine incongruent elements to evoke emotion in a more efficient way than wordier descriptions can, and we use unconscious and tangential associations rather than logic to tell a story”.

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