David Hume Research Paper

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Pages: 2

The eighteenth-century empiricist, David Hume, rejects the concept of cause and effect by arguing that there is no evidence or knowledge that any particular thing causes another thing to occur. Philosophy: The Power of Ideas explains that Hume believes that, because of human nature, humans tend to believe that things have causes. Moreover, Hume theorizes that humans assume cause and effect based on perceptions and associations. For instance, if event A repeatedly occurs and is repeatedly followed by event B, then humans naturally assume event A causes event B. Hume, however, believes this is incorrect. Instead, he proposes that humans are not actually experiencing event A causing event B. Instead, he argues that humans are experiencing event A and event B occurring in a constant conjunction or …show more content…
Philosophy: The Power of Ideas describes Kant’s belief that knowledge begins with experience, but is not limited solely to experience (Moore and Bruder, 113). Kant proposes that the mind processes sensations in a specific way and filters how we understand the world. It is responsible for how we experience things. Further, he argues that two situations are necessary for a stream of sensations to be deemed an experience. First, the mind needs to conceptualize the sensation and needs to recognize the object as an object. For example, the mind must recognize a dog as a dog, a rose as a rose, and so forth. Secondly, the mind must unify the sensations to perceive them as existing in space and time (Moore and Bruder, 131-132). Additionally, Philosophy 101 addresses Kant’s claims that knowledge of the world comes from the mind, also known as the phenomena mental world. Those things that exist outside of the mind’s interpretations are, according to Kant, a part of the noumena world and can never be known (Kleinman,