Top Highlights

• Here, Hume is stating two things, the first being that we can't know the effect of any cause without referring to prior experience. For example, if a person has never seen water turning into ice after being exposed to a low enough temperature, s/he will not know the effect that cooling has on water. If you ask such a person what the effect will be,...
• This, in itself, seems like a simple enough claim about how human beings learn things, but Hume's assertion is about more than the functioning of the human mind; it's about the nature of the universe itself. What Hume is saying is that there is nothing in the cause and effect that actually links them, that they are two separate events that we have ...
• Hume became a candidate for the Chair of Moral Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. However, there was a great deal of opposition to his appointment because of certain passages in the Treatise which indicated, perhaps rightly, that Hume was an atheist. Hume never came out in defense of such a stance but it's possible that the ambiguity with w...
• Hume's philosophy aims to be scientific in nature; he wants to apply the principles of Newtonian physics to the study of human beings as well. This is why he begins both, the Treatise and the Enquiry, with the distinction between "impressions" and "ideas". This distinction is the cornerstone of his philosophy and the idea from which all his other t...
• The fact that all human ideas are taken from impressions leads to the problem of induction which is also connected to the problem of cause and effect.