Philosophy

Philosophy Study Guide

was An Enquiry Concerning Human Under tanding : Of the Origins of Ideas, which details his core arguments, attacking the possibility of knowing an external world. He also highlights two principles that are integral to understanding the world: The principle of universal causation and the principle of induction. The principle of universal causation contends that every event has a cause or causes that can be discovered through observation or systematic investigation. The principle of induction contends that using our understanding of causal relations, we can make justifiable interferences and predictions about future events. Hume wants to differentiate the various elements in our experience and his criteria are lively and vivid. Impressions refer to those phenomena directly experienced through our senses, or emotions that are directly felt, and they are the most lively and vivid. Ideas are the product of our memory or imagination and they lack the liveliness and vividness of impressions. Despite their differences in liveliness and vividness, both impressions and ideas are contents of the human mind and in no way suggest or validate existence of an external world. Hume’s division of human knowledge into “relations of ideas and matters of fact” along with the insistence that every justifiable belief meets the standards of one or the other has been referred to as “ Hume’s fork ” (fork in the road). At one fork, the relations of ideas include the principles of mathematics and logic and these principles are discoverable by reason without reference to experience, they do not permit logical contradictions. The second fork deals with matters of fact that can be confirmed or disconfirmed by appealing to our experience. Unlike relations of ideas, they do permit logical contradictions. Hume clearly acknowledges that our belief in the principle of cause and effect is woven into every aspect of our lives. Hume lays the conceptual framework because it is his intent to eliminate cause and effect from his two forks of knowledge. Hume believes that not only does reason not provide justification for explaining cause-and-effect connections, but so does experience. You independently examine a “cause” and an “effect.” It is only because these events happen to be conjoined in a particular way that we make the inference that they are causally related but there is absolutely nothing in our direct observation of these objects and events to provide support for this inference. Hume details the principles of induction in which he had found that such an object has always been attended with such an effect and he believes other objects which are in appearance similar will be attended with similar effects. For Hume, the most rigorous and honest application of reason has led him to the conclusion that there is no sound reason to believe in the principles of cause-and-effect and induction. Instead, we must resign ourselves to the fact that these principles reflect custom and habit, not rationale necessity. 7.7 Kant: We Constitute Our World The self is ultimately viewed as the synthesizing activity at the core of each of us that integrates all of the disparate elements of experience into our experience, our world. Kant identifies this synthesizing “self” as the transcendental unity of apperception, an entity we experience as intensely personal. Kant is concerned with constructing a metaphysical framework for the “self” that will account for the phenomena of experience, what he describes as the unity of consciousness. Kant’s concept of the self

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