philosopher David Hume maintained in A Treatise of Human Nature (1739) that the essential forms of association were by resemblance, by contiguity in time or place, and by cause and effect.

So Hume hopes “to explain the principles of human nature”, thereby “propos[ing] a compleat system of the sciences, built on a foundation almost entirely new, and the only one upon which they can stand with any security.” But an a priori psychology would be hopeless: the science of man must be pursued by the …

Hume worked for four years on his first major work, A Treatise of Human Nature, subtitled “Being an Attempt to Introduce the Experimental Method of Reasoning into Moral Subjects”, completing it in 1738 at the age of 28.

A master stylist in any genre, his major philosophical works—A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–1740), the Enquiries concerning Human Understanding (1748) and concerning the Principles of Morals (1751), as well as his posthumously published Dialogues concerning Natural Religion (1779)—remain widely and deeply influential …

Hume suggests that the self is just a bundle of perceptions, like links in a chain. Hume argues that our concept of the self is a result of our natural habit of attributing unified existence to any collection of associated parts. This belief is natural, but there is no logical support for it.

I offer a reading of Hume’s writings on religion which preserves the many criticisms of established religion that he voiced, but also reveals that Hume believed in a genuine theism and a true religion. At the heart of this belief system is Hume’s affirmation that there is a god, although not a morally good.

Hume begins by dividing all mental perceptions between ideas (thoughts) and impressions (sensations and feelings), and then makes two central claims about the relation between them. First, advancing what is commonly called Hume’s copy thesis, he argues that all ideas are ultimately copied from impressions.

Accordingly Hume says (Enquiries p. 115ff) that “no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous, than the fact, which it endeavors to establish.” We must always decide in favor of the lesser miracle.

If you judged David Hume the man by his philosophy, you may judge him as disagreeable. He was a Scottish philosopher who epitomized what it means to be skeptical – to doubt both authority and the self, to highlight flaws in the arguments of both others and your own.

Normative moral skepticism, as defined earlier involves the rejection of all established morality. By this definition Hume is not at all a normative moral skeptic since he is advocating that we act in ways which promote utility and agreeableness.

Argument against identity: David Hume, true to his extreme skepticism, rejects the notion of identity over time. There are no underlying objects. There are no “persons” that continue to exist over time. There are merely impressions.

We do not know the nature of these things in themselves, but Kant is certainly not skeptical about their existence. Alternatively, Kant’s theory can be interpreted as a form of skepticism for the reason that he regards noumena as ‘beings’ outside the phenomena that are immediately apparent and intelligible to us.

Pyrrhon of Elis

Hume asks on what grounds we come to our beliefs about the unobserved on the basis of inductive inferences. He presents an argument in the form of a dilemma which appears to rule out the possibility of any reasoning from the premises to the conclusion of an inductive inference.

Hume suggests that we make inferences by means of the imagination, but draws a careful distinction between fiction and belief. Belief is a combination of imagination and a certain sentiment that we cannot control that suggests to us that our imaginings correspond with reality.

Which of the following does Hume think we can know? According to Locke, simple ideas come in two varieties: ideas of sensation; and ideas of reflection. According to Hume, we can have certainty only about the relation of ideas, not about matters of fact in the external world.

Hume’s answer is that a “particular idea” comes to serve as an “abstract” or “general” representation; in other words, it comes to represent all the particular things of some sort. He explains how this happens by appealing to the association of ideas.

Hume argues that we cannot conceive of any other connection between cause and effect, because there simply is no other impression to which our idea may be traced. For Hume, the necessary connection invoked by causation is nothing more than this certainty.

Hume recognized two kinds of perception: “impressions” and “ideas.” Impressions are perceptions that the mind experiences with the “most force and violence,” and ideas are the “faint images” of impressions.

David Hume, (born May 7 [April 26, Old Style], 1711, Edinburgh, Scotland—died August 25, 1776, Edinburgh), Scottish philosopher, historian, economist, and essayist known especially for his philosophical empiricism and skepticism.

Aristotle

Alternative Titles: causality, cause and effect. Causation, Relation that holds between two temporally simultaneous or successive events when the first event (the cause) brings about the other (the effect).