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Essay / Research Paper Abstract
A 5-page paper discussing specific questions about the relationship between the views of David Hume to Rene Descartes and George Berkeley. Specifically discussed are reality and knowledge, cause and effect, miracles and the nature of God. Lists 3 sources.
Page Count:
5 pages (~225 words per page)
File: D0_khumde.rtf
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Unformatted sample text from the term paper:
his use of constant questioning and skepticism to try the veracity of his own and others ideas, provided the springboard for many of the other twos ideas. The views of
all three were similar in a number of ways, but they differed sharply in their views of reality and knowledge, cause and effect and the existence and nature of God.
Humes approach to knowledge and reality are for the most part at the outer end of the dualist system of thinking. He agrees
with Berkeley that we cannot know anything beyond what is in the mind. Berkeley insists that it is impossible to prove that the ideas in our minds are the result
of actual contact with the real, material world, or in fact to know the real, material world at all (Berkeley 61). He also stresses that natural laws or principles, such
as Newtons, can be said to exist because they are ideas, not materialistic (Berkeley 75). We have experiences that tend to follow patterns and ideas which are consistent across groups
of men, and Berkeley explains this by saying that these ideas, as all ideas, are given to us directly by God (Berkeley 82). Humes ideas of human understanding, however, are
even more challenging. He takes dualism to its logical end by insisting that we not only cannot prove that the matter exists, but that the mind exists either. He extends
this to God himself, insisting that the existence of God cannot be proven outside of our own ideas (Hume 28). As to where these ideas and patterns of ideas come
from, Hume admits that there is no way of proving this, or even knowing it, for a certainty (Hume 29). We have knowledge, we arrange ideas in patterns and act
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