Quest on the Mind: David Hume

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David Hume, the insightful philosophical wonderer who asks the questions about ourselves the limitations we are bound to, and what truly makes human beings what we are. In specific Hume is trying to persuade us into the understanding of matters of fact, in which we base our lives upon and form habits towards certain things and how we grow accustom to other things surrounding us. After all, we do not know how things are going to turn out to be, we can only assume from previous experiences we have had, that things will turn out the same as they did in past through cause and effect and in Hume’s words custom and habit.

Hume starts off by differentiating between Impressions and ideas, both are perceived through our minds but according to Hume impressions are formed by the actual sensory experiences we achieve by experiencing things first hand. While ideas are just the remains left of our impression and are now just a fleeting memory of the past. Hume explains it as the copy thesis; “…all our ideas or more feeble perceptions are copies of our impressions or more lively ones.” (13) I can say for example; having sex on first experience leaves a lasting impression through the senses and emotions on what sex is really like and becomes a powerful vivid experience. They’re on after, having the idea of sex is only as powerful as the memory of your impression of it, and cannot be as vivid or as powerful as the impression you first had with the experience. A person, who has not had the experience of sex, cannot say with all honesty that they know what sex is like. Even if they have the idea of sex through impression they get from watching pornography or by any other means, they still lack a sufficient understanding that a real impression of ...

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...e a form of custom or habit. Hume believes knowledge of matters of fact is held within one’s own beliefs and is bound to the force of custom in which your mind unwillingly conceives the things around us to build an association of ideas that results in the belief of something.

With accordance to Hume, knowledge is just a belief, something that humans have been mistaken with in the past, leaving room for being unsatisfied with an answer that can potentially be unjustified. The world we live in is ever so changing, and with gradual time even the most constant of things can be susceptible to change, like the matter of fact that the world continues to spin on an axis. David Hume sought for the answer to how our minds work and may have actually attained some of those answers, but with all his success, he may have just arrived at as many questions as he did answers.

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