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British philosophy in the eighteenth century

4 important questions on British philosophy in the eighteenth century

Hume tells us that there are two ways in which impressions reappear as ideas:

There are ideas of memory
And ideas of imagination

-> ideas of memory differ from ideas of imagination in two respects: they are more vivid, and they preserve the order in space and time of the original impressions.

Hume believed that the meaning of the words in our language consisted in:

Their relation to impressions and ideas. According to him, it is the flow of impressions and ideas in our minds which ensures that our utterances are not empty sounds, but expressions of thought; and if a word cannot be shown to refer to an impression or to an idea it must be discarded as meaningless.

We can separate three novel principles of great importance in Hume's analysis of causation:

Cause and effect must be distinct existences, each conceivable without the other.
The causal relation is to be analyzed in terms of contiguity, precedence, and constant conjunction.
It is not a necessary truth that every beginning of existence has a cause.

Hume offers two definitions of causation:

A cause is 'an object precedent and contiguous to another and where all the objects resembling the former are placed in a like relation of priority and contiguity to those objects that resemble the latter. -> here, nothing is said about necessary connection and the activity of the mind
A cause is 'an object precedent and contiguous to another, and so united with it in the imagination that the idea of the one determines the mind to form the idea of the other, and the impression of the one to form a more lively idea of the other.

The question on the page originate from the summary of the following study material:

An Illustrated Brief History of Western Philosophy, 20th Anniversary Edition | 9781119452799 | Anthony Kenny

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