David Hume (Intro to Philosophy Coursera Week 1)

Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end, amen. A continuation of the commentary of Week 1 of the Introduction to Philosophy course from Coursera. I tend to dislike Hume because of his skeptical attitude, but the death of his ideas shall certainly be fruitful. He is certainly wrong to be skeptical towards the existence of a right way of thinking and whether we can grasp it. The truth of my arguments regarding the right way of thinking is sufficient to defend itself from Humean skepticism.

Hume’s empiricism does not help either, that only empirical judgements are true or meaningful or valid sources of knowledge. Investigations into our thoughts as abstract objects and thus having a higher nature than empirical objects will reveal much about the nature of reality. After all the immediate object of reality is not anything separate from reality but really our awareness and perceptions. Everything else is either presupposed or follows from that awareness and perception. His claims about the weakness of sensation is actually interesting though, as follows.

When we observe causation, it is a mental addition to the perception of reality. Reality is change, but that is all, no true causation can be implied from there. On this aspect, he is actually correct. We cannot truly be certain on what causes what from one state to another state. However, when we speak of causation in theistic terms, it refers to the higher cause of things which are derived from asking the question of what causes the world as a whole in the first place. The cause of individual events may be undetermined, but the great cause of the world must be determined in an absolute necessity. The world begins, because of what? The only possible reason is God.

When we observe the self, it is also a mental addition to our perception of reality. Hume’s arguments flies in the face of the classical understanding of perception. If there exists perception, there has to be a perceiver. It is strange that Hume would argue against the self when in fact, he is an empiricist relying on a clear marker of the self, that is the body. It would be more interesting if Hume was trying to make the point that the distinction between the self and the non-self is less true than what we have always been thinking. In that sense, there is a truth to that. However, until I encounter the full breadth of Hume’s arguments, I cannot do anything about it.

Hume leads his skepticism to the bitter end, that there is not much that we can know about the world, or if there is anything that can be known about the world properly at all. Of course this flies in the face of modern science and logic. He claims that these ways of thinking exist, but we cannot know whether they are the right way of thinking or not. His skeptical atheism does not help to the contradiction with what I have established that is the theocentric way of thinking, or the Catholic mindset and the Catholic Faith. Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end, amen.

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