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The Implication Of David Hume’s Philosophy Of Impressions And Ideas
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1.1 Statement of the Problem
The genesis of the history of
philosophy is the treatment of the Ionian philosophers whose main
concern was to determine the basic constitution of the material
substances of the universe[3].
In this immortal search, Thales
posited water, Anaximander posited air, and Pythagoras came up with
units i.e. the mathematical numbers. The departure of Pythagoras and his
subsequent followers was a gathering storm, which ushered in a sharp
digression in philosophical inquiry. Attention now shifted to the
problem of change and permanence. In this pre-Socratic era philosophy
was more cosmocentric in nature.
Plato in the ancient period posited
the world of forms, saying that the real things exist in the worlds of
ideas. Socrates also on his part believes that knowledge is certain,
objective and universal. It is quite possible for man to acquire
knowledge. His was the dialectical method i.e. beginning from particular
cases and concluding with universal knowledge.
In the Mediaeval
period, Augustine toes the line of Plato. Augustine distrusted the
senses as source of knowledge. The senses in his view do not give us
certain knowledge. The objects of knowledge are not the material things
of this world, but the external ideas in the mind of God.[4] St Thomas
is said by some scholars to have succeeded merely in Christianizing
Aristotle. These mediaeval or Christian philosophers were influenced by
the church supremacy at their time.
In this period, the movement was
actually a rebirth of knowledge, a revival of interest and zeal for
knowledge. It began with a renewed interest in Ancient writings and
eventually developed into humanistic and scientific movements, with
emphasis on man rather than God. Two important schools flourished in
this period.
The continental rationalists (Descartes Spinoza and
Leibniz) adopted the mathematical method and believed that reason alone,
using the mathematical method can attain truth without the aid of the
senses. They denied that sense perception was necessary in order to
attain knowledge. The empiricists on the other hand, asserted that
all-genuine knowledge derive from sense perception. Neither Locke nor
Berkeley was a consistent empiricist. But Hume was and he brought
empiricism to its logical conclusion.[5] He tried to portray this by his
philosophy of impression and idea. When we perceive objects, they make
impression on us. Ideas are formed from these impressions. Whether he
succeeded in doing this is what we shall be looking at in this work. We
shall be evaluating critically his position about impression and idea,
within which we shall portray the explicit implication of his position.
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