Bio-David Hume

 

DAVID HUME 

 (1711–1776)

Historian and Philosopher

  

( Tabula Rasa or 'Clean Slate'-famous line-- the empty state of our mind when we are born)

 

 Hume’s major work was in epistomology,(  study of knowing?) where he argued that men have no a priori knowledge of fact and no empirically based knowledge of facts beyond their present experience.

  Thus, while people know the experiences they presently have, this provides no foundation for proving anything else. The problem, he pointed out, is that any inference to things beyond present experience depends on a cause-effect relation of which experience itself leaves us ignorant. This skeptical conclusion affects the traditional arguments for the existence of God, the immortality of the soul, and almost every other belief one might hold.

 Yet Hume’s last word is not of skepticism but of belief.

 That is, while we cannot prove even that material things exist outside our present experience, we properly believe that they do. Repeated experiences instill in us the mental expectations and habits we call “belief.”

 And while he criticized the theistic arguments in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, he described the psychological grounds of religious belief in The Natural History of Religion. His famous essay on miracles appeared in the same context. Defining a miracle as “a violation of natural law,” he argued that belief in natural laws is so well established by repeated experiences that only experiences of greater regularity—or else a miracle—could upset that belief and lead one to believe in miracles.
 

 But the evidence offered, for miracles, he says, is not that good: it is spotty, inconsistent, from out-of-the-way places, by prejudiced observers. How could it overthrow the better-established belief in uniform natural laws? Hume was indeed skeptical of man’s ability to know, but he allowed the legitimacy of beliefs that have psychological rather than logical grounds. But, it is objected, Hume had too limited a conception of belief.

 On his criterion, much of history would be quite unbelievable. But his skepticism elicited work on the psychology and justification of belief that continues to the present day.