Hume Human Experience

In Book 1 Part 3 Section 1 of David Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature, the philosopher—grounded in the British skeptical and empirical tradition—attempts to offer his standard and criteria for epistemological certainty, presumably in response to René Descartes’ epistemology presented in his Discourse and Mediations. Hume asserts “there is no single phenomenon, even the most simple, which can be accounted for from the qualities of the objects, as they appear to us, for which we [could] foresee without the help of our memory and experience” (Treatise 1.3.1.1). In other words, Hume argues that knowledge of the world and its objects is only possible a posteriori, but, he asserts in 1.3.1, that statements about the relations of ideas—primarily

Hume asserts that impressions—our sense perceptions of human experience—lead to ideas—our memory of these perceptions, which act as building blocks for understanding the world (Treatise 1.1.1.8). Additionally, Hume argues that our ideas are, for the most part, “less forcible and lively” forms of our impressions, meaning that our memories of external stimuli are faint reminders of the actual experienced sense impressions (Treatise 1.1.3.1). Hume’s doctrine of impressions leading to ideas undergirds his epistemology and contextualizes and elucidates the philosopher’s postulations respecting math and geometry in 1.3.1 of the

The latter, according to Hume, “draws its first principles…from the appearance[s] of objects [emphasis added]”; we as human beings have no “standard of [geometric concepts] so precise as to assure us of the truth” of them (Treatise 1.3.1.5). Hume’s language is rather unclear, but in essence he argues that geometric demonstrations—like the fact that “no two right lines can have a common segment’’—can be known a priori, but human beings have never and will never truly experienced perfect, parallel lines in reality. Hume asserts that geometry—like arithmetic and algebra—does examine the relations between ideas (a priori analytic judgments), but human experiences and impressions of geometric concepts often run contrary to the mathematical conclusions of the geometers (Norton 447). For example, while geometers can demonstrate the Pythagorean Theorem and the necessary relations between the ideas and components of a right triangle, no human being will ever witness a perfect right triangle that conforms to the mathematical formula . On the other hand, during the course of human experience, individuals perceive and intuit logical relations between ideas that mirror and follow pure arithmetic and algebraic demonstrations. As an empiricist, Hume struggles with the incongruity between Euclidian geometry and the real-world manifestations of lines and shapes. To Hume, this