David Hume is a British empiricist which means that he thought that all knowledge is ultimately rooted in sense experience and that all of our ideas derive from preceding impressions of sense or reflection, this theory had a huge effect on Humes account of causation. In this essay I will look at Humes account of causation and examine if any version of the Regularity View of causation can be defended. Before we look at the Regularity View of Causation it is important to look at Humes Copy Principle as his view on causation is linked to this. Hume states that “all our ideas are nothing but copies of our impressions or in other words it is impossible for us to think of anything which we have not antecedently felt, either by our external or internal senses”.1 Hume is stating that experience and observation gives us all our ideas, there are no innate ideas. For example we can have an image of a mountain and an image of gold and our minds can make a mental connection and come up with an idea of a golden mountain- therefore simple ideas give us impressions of necessary connections. However Hume claims that there is no actual necessary connection and that “it is simply a constant conjunction of events” that the feeling of necessary connection stems from. The Regularity view of causation is: c causes e iff a) c is spatio temporally contiguous to e; b) e succeeds c in time; and c) all events of type c (I.e. events that are like c) are regularly followed by (or are constantly conjoined with) events of type e.2 Basically Hume is saying that c causes e when the two always occur together meaning that they are constantly conjoined. Where we find c we will also find e and we become certain that this conjunction will more than likely hap... ... middle of paper ... ... a cause, yet as stated above it is too difficult to specify a certain set of causes and to hope to have met all the criteria. Works Cited Hume, David, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, http://www.davidhume.org/texts/ehu#SBN60 Mackie, J.L, Cement of the Universe, URL http;// St andrews.ac.uk/mms/module/2011_2/S1/PY2002/Content/Lecture+2/Mackie_CH3.pdf Morris, William Edward, "David Hume", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2011 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = . Ninan, Dilip, PY2002 Lecture 1 Hume on Causation , Lecture Handout (St Andrews 2011). Ninan, Dilip, PY2002 Lecture 2 Mackie on the Regularity View Of Causation , Lecture Handout (St Andrews 2011). Psillos, Stathis, Causation & Explanation,(Acumen Publishing Ltd, 2002).
of factors contributed rather than an overriding cause. As a result, it is fair to
...dson, ‘Thinking Causes’, in Mental Causation, ed. John Heil and Alfred Mele (Oxford, Clarendon Press: 1993) p. 13.
Hume supports his claim with two arguments. Firstly, he states that when we reflect on our thoughts, they always become simple ideas that we copied from a first-hand experience of something, thus the idea has been copie...
His claim is that the mind is merely a bundle of perceptions that derive ultimately from sensory inputs or impressions. He follows on to say that ideas are reflections of these perceptions, or to be more precise, perceptions of perceptions, therefore can still be traced back to an original sensory input. Hume applied this logic to the perception of a ‘self’, to which he could not trace back to any sensory input, the result was paradoxical, thus he concluded that “there is no simplicity in (the mind) at one time, nor identity in different; whatever natural propension we might have to imagine that simplicity and
For centuries philosophers have debated over the presence of free will. As a result of these often-heated arguments, many factions have evolved, the two most prominent being the schools of Libertarianism and of Determinism. Within these two schools of thought lies another debate, that of compatibilism, or whether or not the two believes can co-exist. In his essay, Has the Self “Free Will”?, C.A. Campbell, a staunch non-compatiblist and libertarian, attempts to explain the Libertarian argument.
Russell, Paul. “Hume on Free Will.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Metaphysics Research Lab, CSLI, Stanford University, 14 December 2007.
David Hume is was a strong advocator and practitioner of a scientific and empirical way of thinking which is reflected in his philosophy. His skeptical philosophy was a 180 degree shift from the popular rational philosophy of the time period. Hume attempted to understand “human nature” through our psychological behaviors and patterns which, when analyzing Hume’s work, one can clearly see its relation to modern day psychology. Hume was a believer in that human behavior was influenced not by reason but by desire. He believed that “Ambition, avarice, self-love, vanity, friendship, generosity, public spirit—these passions, mixed in various proportions and distributed throughout society, are now (and from the beginning of the world always have been) the source of all the actions and projects that have ever...
Cause and effect is a tool used to link happenings together and create some sort of explanation. Hume lists the “three principles of connexion among ideas” to show the different ways ideas can be associated with one another (14). The principles are resemblance, contiguity, and cause and effect. The focus of much of An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding falls upon the third listed principle. In Section I, Hume emphasizes the need to uncover the truths about the human mind, even though the process may be strenuous and fatiguing. While the principle of cause and effect is something utilized so often, Hume claims that what we conclude through this process cannot be attributed to reason or understanding and instead must be attributed to custom of habit.
Hume, David. “A Treatise of Human Nature. Excerpts from Book III. Part I. Sect. I-II.”
David Hume’s two definitions of cause found in both A Treatise of Human Nature, and An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding have been the center of much controversy in regards to his actual view of causation. Much of the debate centers on the lack of consistency between the two definitions and also with the definitions as a part of the greater text. As for the latter objection, much of the inconsistency can be remedied by sticking to the account presented in the Enquiry, as Hume makes explicit in the Author’s Advertisement that the Treatise was a “work which the Author [Hume] had projected before he left College, and which he wrote and published not long after. But not finding it successful, he was sensible of his error in going to the press to early, and he cast the whole anew in the following pieces, where some negligence in his former reasoning and more in the expression, are, he hopes, corrected.” (Hume 1772, xxxi) Generally the inconsistencies are cited from the Treatise, which fails to recognize the purpose of the Enquiry. This brings us to the possible tension between the two definitions. J.A. Robinson, for example, believes the two definitions cannot refer to the same thing. Don Garrett feels that the two definitions are possible, but only with further interpretation. I will argue that the tension arises from a possible forgetfulness on the part of the reader about Hume’s aims as a philosopher, and that Hume’s Enquiry stands on its own without any need for a critic’s extrapolations. To understand Hume’s interpretation of causation and the arguments against it, we must first follow the steps Hume took to come to his conclusion. This requires brief consideration of Hume’s copy princi...
Hume, D. (1748). Skeptical doubts concerning the operations of the understanding. In T.S. Gendler, S. Siegel, S.M. Cahn (Eds.) , The Elements of Philosophy: Readings from Past and Present (pp. 422-428). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
The closest we get to cause and effect are two distinct phenomena arising together often and the mind thinking one produces the other. Hume regards this as a constant conjunction, not cause and effect. Although this is a leap in reasoning, and we have no reason to believe this to be true, Hume regards this as custom, which is the great guide of life (28). Life would be chaos if we believed in things completely contrary to the regularity of our experience, but the formation of habit is where we can lead ourselves to erroneous judgments. Although Hume's skepticism appears to clear up the mind, it leads him to believe that there is no such thing as causation, which Spinoza disagrees with. Rather, Spinoza argues that nature is all a long chain of causation which gives all causes effects and all effects causes. This system recognizes nature as a mechanism. All causes are a result of nature and the conditions imposed by it. Judging cause and effect individually is missing the point. To say that a billiard ball causes the other one to move only focuses two select phenomena. Rather, God, or nature, is that which connects all phenomena. Thus, the chain of causation cannot be understood of by two simple "links, it must be assessed as a whole. Spinoza argues that there are no free causes, only necessary ones. Thus, all causes are free causes and are a result of nature. This great chain of
In the debate regarding liberty (i.e. free-will) and necessity (i.e. causal determinism), Hume places himself firmly in the compatibilist camp by arguing that both notions can be reconciled. Though some of the arguments he presents in the Enquiry are unconvincing, Hume nonetheless still contributes to compatibilism by defining free-will and determinism in such a way as to avoid the logic of the incompatibilist position.
“Relations of ideas are indestructible bonds created between ideas and all logically true statements and matters of fact are concerned with experience and we are certain of matters of fact through cause and effect“(Hume Section IV). This proves that the both the mind and body are one because of the cause and effect. He believes that there are connections between all ideas in the mind, and that there are three different kinds. The first is resemblance that describes looking at a picture then thinking of what it represents in the picture. Then there is contiguity looking at something then thinking of about something different. Then there is the cause and effect of something happening to you and then to imagine the pain of the wound. Once again beginning able to look at something and then create an idea from it only proves that without senses we couldn’t just come up with an idea out of the blue.
Hume states that in nature we observe correlated events that are both regular and irregular. For instance, we assume that the sun will rise tomorrow because it has continued to do so time and time again and we assume that thunder will be accompanied by lightning for the same reason. We never observe the causation between a new day and the sun rising or between thunder and lightning, however. We are simply observing two events that correlate in a regular manner. Hume’s skepticism therefore comes from the belief that since we do not observe causal links, we can never truly be sure about what causes anything else. He then goes so far as to say that if this is the case, it must be a fact that nothing causes anything else. In Hume’s theory, there is not only no objective causation, but no objective principle of cause and effect on the whole.