PHIL 100W Lecture : phil 100 lec 18 + 19 notes
Document Summary
Hume, scottish empiricist and skeptic, is one of the most influential figures in the history of modern philosophy. Like locke and berkeley, hume maintained that any factual knowledge that we have is acquired through experience. By the eighteenth century, the term idea was used so broadly that hume made a clear distinction between impressions and ideas. By impressions hume refers to what we might call sense impressions. By ideas hume refers to images in the mind. If i see a green tree, i have an impression of green. If i close my eyes and imagine what i saw, i have an idea of green. Hume regards ideas as weak copies of impressions. All our ideas can be traced back ultimately to impressions. Hume maintains that in order for a term (such as a word) to have meaning it must be possible to specify from what impression the supposed idea is derived.