David Hume

An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

• Broschiertes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

David Hume (born David Home; 7 May 1711 NS (26 April 1711 OS) - 25 August 1776) was a Scottish Enlightenment philosopher, historian, economist, and essayist, who is best known today for his highly influential system of philosophical empiricism, scepticism, and naturalism. Hume's empiricist approach to philosophy places him with John Locke, George Berkeley, Francis Bacon and Thomas Hobbes as a British Empiricist. Beginning with his A Treatise of Human Nature (1738), Hume strove to create a total naturalistic science of man that examined the psychological basis of human nature. Against philosophical rationalists, Hume held that passion rather than reason governs human behaviour. Hume argued against the existence of innate ideas, positing that all human knowledge is founded solely in experience. In what is sometimes referred to as Hume's problem of induction, he argued that inductive reasoning and belief in causality cannot be justified rationally; instead, our trust in causality and induction result from custom and mental habit, and are attributable only to the experience of "constant conjunction" of events. This is because we can never actually perceive that one event causes another, but only that the two are always conjoined. Accordingly, to draw any causal inferences from past experience it is necessary to presuppose that the future will resemble the past, a presupposition which cannot itself be grounded in prior experience. Hume's opposition to the teleological argument for God's existence, the argument from design, is generally regarded as the most intellectually significant attempt to rebut the argument prior to Darwinism. Hume influenced utilitarianism, logical positivism, Immanuel Kant, the philosophy of science, early analytic philosophy, cognitive science, theology, and other movements and thinkers. Kant himself credited Hume as the spur to his philosophical thought who had awakened him from his "dogmatic slumbers". (wikipedia.org)

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Bibliotech Press
• Seitenzahl: 120
• Erscheinungstermin: 10. Juli 2019
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 229mm x 152mm x 7mm
• Gewicht: 187g
• ISBN-13: 9781618955760
• ISBN-10: 1618955764
• Artikelnr.: 57110708

Autorenporträt

David Home, a Scottish Enlightenment philosopher, historian, economist, librarian, and essayist who lived from 7 May 1711 NS (26 April 1711 OS) to 25 August 1776, was most recognized today for his very important school of philosophical empiricism, skepticism, and naturalism. Hume worked to establish a naturalistic science of man that looked at the psychological underpinnings of human nature, starting with A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-1740). Hume contended that there are no inborn notions and that all human understanding comes only through experience. As an empiricist, he is so grouped with Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and George Berkeley. Inductive reasoning and the notion of causation, according to Hume, cannot be supported by logic; rather, they are the products of mental habits and custom. Due to the induction problem, it is impossible to provide the basis for the premise that the future will resemble the past, which is required in order to draw any causal conclusions from the past. Hume also rejected the idea that people have a true sense of who they are, asserting that what we actually experience is a collection of sensations and that the self is nothing more than this collection of causally related experiences.