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Summary Of David Hume's An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

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The views of matter fact and causation are rather interesting when reading “ An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding” written by David Hume himself. Being a great British Empiricists of the Early Modern period, and having similar empirical standards of knowledge like John Locke and George Berkeley. He speaks about necessary connection and how it is important in an individuals life due to the relation of ideas. He gives several differentials distinguishing the two definitions of necessary connections to better understand the logic behind these assumptions. Cause and effect play a big factor as well, because it ties to matter of fact and relation of ideas and lets us determines where they are founded. …show more content…

Neither characterization was truly relevant to what he was actually trying to say and he made it seem that he may have set himself up for an impossible task. He also tried to explain what some of our ideas were of a necessary connection and how the connection has to be a simple idea and yet you can’t say what a simple idea is an idea of. All events seemed loose and separate and as we know one event follows the other, but yet it is difficult to observe any tie between them. While digging deeper into these assumptions of Hume’s I soon came to realize that there is a tie and that is of necessary connections and constant conductions because we get the idea of necessary connection from the constant conjunctions of cause and effect. Including the fact that our ideas were usually copies of impressions that occurred some time in our lives, Hume’s stated “There are no ideas, which occur in metaphysics, more obscure and uncertain, than those of power, force, energy or necessary connexion, of which it is every moment necessary for us to treat in all our disquisition.” (page

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Therefore, we cannot say that there is a necessary connection between two events, for we can “only find that one does, actually, follow, on the other” . Hence according to the RI, Hume does not believe that there are causal powers, but merely speaks of constant conjunction and regularity. The RI’s strength lies in the absence of appeal to non-logical causal necessities. However, the question at hand is if Hume would have held such an opinion, and not if the RI’s account of causality is strong. While the RI is consistent with Hume’s empiricist views, Hume as a skeptic would have been more inclined to argue that we cannot know if secret connexions exist (as he does in Sections 4 and 7 of the Enquiry), resorting to non-committal skepticism and agnosticism, rather than making an ontological claim that constant

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