HUME

Hume is the topic.

1. Describe the distinction between Hume’s concepts and impressions. What depends on what else? Why? and then go into why this is important for Humes’ understanding of empiricism.

2. Why does Hume think that our ideas’ flow or stream is governed by the rules or laws of connection or association rather than by pure chance? Create his three connecting or associating tenets: likeness, continuity in time or space, and cause or effect. Give evidence to back up each claim.

3. According to Hume, there are two types of propositions (items of human reason or inquiry): relations of ideas and matters of fact. The Humes Fork is this division. What specific illustrations of connections between ideas does he give? What subjects or branches of science do they commonly inhabit? only in mathematics? Are they discovered or learned before or after the fact? Give an explanation of the difference between a posteriori and a priori.

4. According to Hume, we can never learn about cause-and-effect relationships a priori; rather, we can only learn about them a posteriori, or through experience. Why did the Adam thought experiment happen? When dealing with novel items or those that are radically different from what they are used to seeing, do people often think they have a priori knowledge of causal linkages? How about situations where the causal mechanism is supposedly very complicated or relies on a hidden structure? What about circumstances when the events are well-known, simple, and seem to have no hidden structure, like the collisions and motions of normal billiard balls?

5. Explain Hume’s claim that a miracle can never be expected on a firm basis. What does he mean in this context by a miracle?

6. Explain Hume’s criticism of the Design argument and why, in your view, it falls short.