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Skepticism In Hume's View Of Stoicism

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Visualize someone hitting your hand with a hammer until it breaks. Instead of stopping them you simply say “you’re going to break my hand if you don’t stop.” After more hitting, they break your hand and your response is “see I warned you, you would break it.” That’s how I think of Epictetus’ stoicism, an unrealistic view of human’s internal situations. In contrast, Hume’s view of scepticism applies more to the reality and truthfulness of human internal and external insights and beliefs.

In stoicism, Epictetus focuses on “internals,” things he thought human could control with will power. Hume’s skepticism addresses the fact that “externals” do have an affect on humans and set up a logical system of dealing with situations beyond our own control, …show more content…

This is an assumption of an external and objective fact that is represented by my internal and subjective representation. It is very difficult to attribute any truth to my perception. If the capability between the mental image and the external object suggests the truth, since the only proof I have of an external world consists of internal pictures then a true word of objects is impossible to establish. However, Hume recognizes that this sort of skepticism violates a certain level of common sense. Hume suggests complete skepticism is not useful since "nature is always too strong for principle" (Hume #), making this philosophical view unrealistic to human nature. Hume, therefore, came up with the idea "mitigated skepticism." This method tries to limit philosophical inquiries to the abilities of human intelligence while also exercising caution in reasoning. Even so, the application of “mitigated skepticism” in everyday life is a hard task. Calculating each of our decisions with a system of logical steps is very time consuming. Life is short and people don’t have enough time and motivation to find the most logical result. Skepticism, specifically “mitigated skepticism,” is a philosophy that is not easy to live up to yet it is doable and can be moderated to everyday

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