SOC SCI H1G Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Empirical Evidence, Foundationalism, Empiricism
28 Sep 2016
School
Department
Course
Professor
Document Summary
Hume vs. descartes: a tale of two skeptics" no accident that descartes is so concerned with knowledge, justification, and the possibility that we are massively deceived (hume, too) Descartes" response was foundationalism, grounding all of our knowledge on propositions that he found it impossible to doubt: find a foundation for all knowledge and only believe things that could be built upon that foundation. Hume placed into 3 important categories: naturalist, empiricist, skeptic. Newton unified principles and laws of the physical world. Empiricist: one lesson of that naturalistic investigation, hume things, is that the foundation of all significant human knowledge and belief is sense experience. We never have an idea until we have the sense experience impression of something always comes before the idea: for hume, skepticism wins. We lack rational justification in everything we believe doesn"t start off as skeptical but because he is skeptical, he ends up with a much deeper skepticism that descartes.
