Hume (1711-76) as an Empiricist
 Was Scottish Philosopher
 David Hume agreed with his predecessors, Locke and Berekely, but carried their ideas farther.

 all knowledge derives from experience (his term for the way that the mind is "impressed" by external sensations).

 He said impressions are all the sensations, passions, and emotions that we experience.

 We know nothing of an external world and so we cannot know the origin of our impressions. We can only know the ideas and impressions. We believe in an external world but cannot justify these beliefs since no logical explanation can be given. For this reason metaphysics is impossible. Hume says it comes from custom or habit. By always observing B follow from A, we, by habit, assume this conjunction.

 Hume proposes is that human beings learn through association and that “truth springs from an argument among friends (Myers, 2004).

 As an empiricist, then, his method is "inductive' instead of "deductive," and he favored "a posteriori" truths over "a priori" ones. Hume, like all true empiricists, questions the role of reason in deriving ultimate principles. For Hume, all principles must be based on experience, or else they are illegitimate. This hard-nosed approach makes him appealing to guys like Popper, Russell, Quine, and the analytic naturalists of the 20th Century.

 He concludes that since a large part of our study of matters of fact depend on causal relations, our knowledge must be regarded as both limited and uncertain. Hume branded an extreme form of intellectual skepticism. We cannot be sure of the existence of self, an external world, or the law of cause and effect.
Human’s knowledge is divided into 2 categories (all done by sensation)
1-Retional Ideas (ringing phone-knowledge
2-Matter of Fact (mathematics-factual knowledge
All knowledge derived from senses