David Hume Research Paper

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Thomas Barnes Mr. Hardy Christian Apologetics, B3 10/7/2015 Something witty about David Hume David Hume is one of the most famous skeptics and British Empiricists who lived from May 7, 1711 to August 25, 1776. He was born in Edinburgh, Scotland and was raised by his widowed mother. He was raised as a Calvinist, however he grew up to carry on the works of John Locke, and George Berkley. He stated that by age 15 he knew that he wanted to write a book on his beliefs, which he based off the ideologies of the two previously mentioned philosophers. He did not, however, right this book until age 28 while he was living in France. At this time he was visiting Jesuit College in La Fleche in northern France. While there he met John Noon, through whom…show more content…
Hume did this by separating the process by which we gather opinions and beliefs into two distinct parts: impressions and ideas. Impressions are what we see as we move through reality. These are what our senses directly take in, followed by it fabricating memory based off of this stimulus. Ideas however are the beliefs that we form based off of these fabricated memories of impressions. An example of this in action would be touching a tree; by touching it your mind fabricates the idea of a tree for you to remember. If later on you said "trees tend to have bark", this is an idea; the differentiation is because unlike before where you physically grasping the concept of trees, this time you have stated something you took away from that impression, meaning it has now become an idea. He states this process in his book An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding "I say, then, that belief is nothing but a more vivid, lively, forcible, firm, steady conception of an object, than what the imagination alone is ever able to attain"(Hume, "Skeptical Solution of these Doubts"). This is the grounds for his skeptic belief, because this means that any idea or belief is simply a fabricated memory of the human

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