Comparing John Locke against David Hume : Empiricism
John Locke and David Hume, both great empiricist philosophers who radically changed the way people view ideas and how they come about. Although similar in their beliefs, the two have some quite key differences in the way they view empiricism. Locke believed in causality, and used the example of the mental observation of thinking to raise your arm, and then your arm raising, whereas Hume believed that causality is not something that can be known, as a direct experience of cause, cannot be sensed. Locke believed that all knowledge is derived from our senses, which produce impressions on the mind which turn to ideas, whereas Hume's believed that all knowledge is derived from experiences,…show more content… This was Lockes response to critiques that if knowledge was derived from senses everyone would perceive everything the same.
Hume's theory of knowledge was a bit different. He believed that knowledge was derived from ones own experience with an object or idea, that we have knowledge only of perceptions, because our perceptions may vary from the real world. Perceptions can be categorized into either ideas or impressions, where ideas are more imaginative, and impressions are the immediate data of an experience. Humes entire theory contradicts lockes in the way that by having knowledge derived from ones personal experience, nothing can ever be known for certain. This is because everyone perceives everything diffferently, referring back to the cat example, the person that had a traumatic experience with the cat will have different knowledge of it then the one who didn't.
Lastly, Locke believed that non material ideas, such as god, could be known with the combination of many simple sensations that are already known. As the mind combines simple ideas into complex ones they can be divided into two categories. Ideas of substances and ideas of modes, where ideas of substances would include god, and ideas of modes would include the attributes of an something, for example god was tall, white haired, and fair skinned. This theory helped explain how humans
