VIEWPOINTS OF EMPIRICIST PHILOSOPHERS

Compares & Contrasts the Viewpoints of Empiricist Philosophers



Compares & Contrasts the Viewpoints of Empiricist Philosophers

Introduction

Continuing the line of philosophers of the Enlightenment, one of the most significant was David Hume (1711 - 1776), who also served as a historian and economist, is one of the most important figures in the philosophy of the West through his insights of skepticism and naturalism. David Hume is an empiricist believing that all knowledge comes from experience. He views there to be two types of knowledge as presented in his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, a knowledge emerging from different combinations and relations of ideas and a knowledge dependant on cause and effect reasoning. The latter is referred to as matters of fact knowledge and acts as the primary basis of all knowledge. In contrast, George Berkeley is best remembered for his attempt to reconcile religion and science through his empiricist philosophy that separated a phenomenon's true existence from attempts to explain it through scientific laws and theories.

Compare & Contrast

Hume argues that there are no innate ideas as presented by Descartes, eliminating metaphysical certainty from our knowledge. Ideas form three different types of associations among each other, based on resemblance, continuity of space and time and cause and effect relationship. A person is able to recognize another person just by looking at their picture; this is referred to as association of ideas by resemblance. Time elapsed affects the clarity and vividness of an idea and the further something away from you the harder it is to associate with it, indicating time and place relationships (Atherton, 1999, Pp.34).

The cause and effect relationship is a form of understanding that when a cause A produces an effect B multiple times, one comes to expect from this understanding that every time a cause A happens an effect B will occur, even though there could be nothing about the nature of cause that tells us anything about the effect. Hume presents two arguments for his view of ideas. When analyzing ideas one can simplify and derive impressions from them, and if a person does not have a certain impression he fails to form the corresponding idea and is forced to estimate the knowledge that would have been gained from that experience. The impressions form basis for ideas and ideas form the basis for all knowledge (Buckle, 2001, p269).

Hume's idea of necessary connection refers to the power that a cause has to bring about the effect. There is a necessary connection between cause and effect, and when a cause obtains the effect then necessarily obtains. When we observe events in the world, we observe a certain event followed by another event. If event A constantly occurs right before event B, our mind, though habit, forms a certain connection between the two events in which the first event would act as a cause for the second event (Fodor, 2003, p. 134). However, to make such a conclusion one must observe such a conclusion and it can never ...