John Locke And David Hume Research Paper

John Locke and David Hume both had similar yet distinguishable views in their pieces describing the origin of our knowledge and ideas. Locke and Hume appear to be empiricist philosophers but Hume can be seen as a bit of a skeptic. Both philosophers claimed that our ideas and thoughts are created through and by our sensory experiences in the world. Hume’s purpose was to describe how we come to understand the world around us, and to prove if we really “know’ anything. He seems to appeal to skepticism, meaning he doesn’t believe that we have a rational reason to believe anything that we claim to “know.” One of Hume’s inquiries involved whether or not there is a relation between cause and effect. He eventually makes the claim that there is no connection between these events, and because there is no cause and effect, that humanity is experiencing free-will. The strength of Hume’s argument lies within his evidence. For example, he states that our assumptions about what will happen next, or

These impressions come from our experiences in the world and are then made into complex ideas. Hume says that complex ideas can be broken down into simple ideas which have to be a copies of an impression. Therefore, ideas are created by experience. He uses the example of a blind man’s mental imagery as a defense for this argument, stating that a blind person cannot for a mental image without actually having the impression of it first. Hume makes a good case for his argument, he basically wanted to show that it is difficult to find any idea that has not come from an impression. The only weakness that I could find in Hume’s argument is that in the end it leads us to skepticism because we cannot find any solid reason to believe we “know” anything, reality is just a bunch of impressions and ideas, Hume seemed to be skeptical of his own