Hume's skepticism

Vance R.

Order the writing of a tailor-made Philosophy Term papers

Free quote online

Thesis Format .doc

Hume's skepticism

Download

Read an extract

Reader
Abstract
Contents
Extract

Abstract

Hume's skepticism of miracles centered around the use of them to explain things that could not be explained in any other way. Doing so sets a limit on what we can achieve through human understanding. Take for instance intelligent design. Intelligent design states that there are objects occurring in nature that are too complex to be able to able to have occurred naturally on their own and the only way that they could have occurred is to have been designed.

Introduction
The scope of human reason
Existence of God
The case in educated nations
Hume's criticism of Descartes
The idea of the evil demon
Hume: A empiricist
Conclusion

Get this table of contents for free after login.

Extract

[...] Being the empiricist that Hume was, Hume obviously would have taken issue with any amount of skepticism involving sensory perceptions or how we experience the world. If the evil demon really did exist, it is obviously beyond the scope of human knowledge, but what is not beyond the scope of human knowledge is what we are actually experiencing. Even though the evil demon is tricking us into perceptions that are actually false, it is difficult to say that to us as people that we could consider our perceptions to be false. [...]

[...] Hume's criticism of Descartes centered on the absoluteness of the skepticism which Descartes attempted to achieve. Descartes wanted to doubt anything that might not or didn't have to be true. For instance, we know from experience that the sun has risen every morning, but according to Descartes, this did not mean that we can know without any skepticism that it will rise tomorrow. The purpose of Descartes' skepticism was to get down to one single truth that had to be true no matter what. [...]

[...] Miracles attempt to explain things that we do not understand at the moment, and when people don't understand how something works, we turn to the invention of connections to attempt to fill the gaps in our knowledge. Hume noted a few things about miracles, such as the fact that people will often lie, and people tend to believe in things that will justify their beliefs. If people believe that God exists, and since God is something beyond human knowledge, anything that happens that is beyond the scope of human knowledge can be explained through the use of God in the form of miracles. [...]

doc