The seminar today was given by Josh who had David Hume as his subject and more specifically, the Enquiry into Human Understanding. I found it interesting to discuss Hume as I was not entirely confident on the subject of his theories and ideas so here are the notes I made on the seminar.
It interested me that Hume defined two types of philosophy; one that appeals to the sense and one that endeavours to form an understanding to which Hume belongs. On the subject of understanding he believes that you get impressions which imprint on you and so you recollect them to form ideas. The mind can therefore go beyond reality, the image of a winged horse can be imagine because we have seen a horse and we have seen a bird so the mind makes the link. In the same way he reasons that we experience good and intelligence so we believe in a God but there is no way to actually prove it. In the same way we can imagine shades of colour that we have never seen because we have seen other colours; Hume himself acknowledges that this actually goes against his theories as it promotes innate ideas. In the seminar we talked at length about the existence of a greenish purple and whether because you know of green and you know of purple, you can imagine the colour in the middle.
We understand things in sequences so for example we understand injury in the order of things that happen; drop a hammer on your foot, it hurts, sequence. Hume also talks about sceptical doubt which is linked to relation of ideas; if a machine is in a desert for example, our mind tells us that someone must have been here before us to put the machine there but this is not necessarily true. There is absolutely no way we can prove this to be true as it is just a thought process, it is not based on facts. In this way he is not particularly a fan of Descartes obsession with breaking down knowledge as it suggests that all the ideas you have are innate, something Hume would not agree with. He also does not agree with the idea of matter of fact with the example of stone and metal, if you drop a stone we expect it to drop but we cannot assume it will do that next time. We have a concept of upward movement so the next time the stone could shoot upwards. Just because we have seen something happen once does not guarantee it will happen again. In the same way, Hume argues that when in billiards, the white hits the red ball, you cannot assume that this action caused the red ball to move. You cannot assume that A causes B in anything; this is central to his ideas on causality.
His induction theory relies on two types of thought, analytic such as all spiders are arachnids, and synthetic thought where you need to accept the axiom (to use the example from Josh, "men are pigs, I am a pig"). These are irrational thought processes that lead people to unfounded assumptions. This helps form part of his work on miracles and these are not the kind of miracles we might think of, (Chilean miners surviving being trapped underground for 70 days) but actually miracles as in those from scripture. He reasons that you do not know them from experience so why do you accept them as truth; he asks that you weigh up miracles, if someone has been raised from the dead, can you really believe this? If you can't which Hume would say you can't then you can also no longer be a Christian as Hume says you need a miracle to be a Christian. Because of the time in which Hume was writing he could not be totally explicit with these views and so he comments that people who experience miracles must be different as a miracle is unexplainable. In the seminar we talked for a short while about miracles saying that things can only seem miracles without prior scientific knowledge. Penicillin must have seemed like a miracle at first but now it is accepted as standard because we have the scientific proof of how it works and the scientific testing to show what happens. Miracles are defined as something that breaks natural laws so whilst the light bulb would at one point have been seen as something unnatural then now it is accepted as a natural law in itself.
Some final notes on the seminar from our discussion throw light on the issue with colour as colours are not synthetic as may have been suggested earlier. They are vivid impressions so it is practically impossible to imagine the greenish purple colour from before as colours are just fact. Hume also believed that the names we give to objects was secondary to the nature of the thing. He was not a political writer like Locke but believes in provisional truths. With the issue involving the stone and metal, this is not applicable in space for example as things only go up and down in space in relation to you. We also discussed that there was no morality in circumstance; normally stealing is seen as morally wrong but Hume questions why. If you are stealing to save your starving family and feed them then no one would find this reprehensible; this means that stealing must not be a moral thing. As a final point, if Hume were around today he would be anti extremist as he took the view that no one knew all the answers, not even him.
Until next time. You stay classy Internet.
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