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David Hume coined a sceptical, reductionist viewpoint on causality that inspired the logical-positivist definition of empirical law that "is a regularity or universal generalization of the form 'All Cs are Es' or, whenever C, then E". [1]
Hume's account of causality has been influential. His first question is how to categorize causal relations. On his view, they belong either to relations of ideas or matters of fact. This distinction is referred to as Hume's fork. [4] Relations of ideas involve necessary connections that are knowable a priori independently of experience.
The philosopher David Hume used the phrase frequently in his discussion of the limits of empiricism to explain our ideas of causation and inference.In An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding and A Treatise of Human Nature, Hume proposed that the origin of our knowledge of necessary connections arises out of observation of the constant conjunction of certain impressions across many instances ...
Hume was born on 26 April 1711, as David Home, in a tenement on the north side of Edinburgh's Lawnmarket.He was the second of two sons born to Catherine Home (née Falconer), daughter of Sir David Falconer of Newton, Midlothian and his wife Mary Falconer (née Norvell), [14] and Joseph Home of Chirnside in the County of Berwick, an advocate of Ninewells.
Modern version of law of universal causation is connected with Newtonian physics, but is also criticized for instance by David Hume who presents skeptical reductionist view on causality. [12] Since then his view on the concept of causality is often predominating (see Causality, After the Middle Ages). Kant answered to Hume in many aspects ...
David Hume, a Scottish thinker of the Enlightenment era, is the philosopher most often associated with induction. His formulation of the problem of induction can be found in An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, §4. Here, Hume introduces his famous distinction between "relations of ideas" and "matters of fact".
Hume's strong empiricism, as in Hume's fork as well as Hume's problem of induction, was taken as a threat to Newton's theory of motion. Immanuel Kant responded with his Transcendental Idealism in his 1781 Critique of Pure Reason, where Kant attributed to the mind a causal role in sensory experience by the mind's aligning the environmental input by arranging those sense data into the experience ...
Hume interpreted the latter as an ontological view, i.e., as a description of the nature of causality but, given the limitations of the human mind, advised using the former (stating, roughly, that X causes Y if and only if the two events are spatiotemporally conjoined, and X precedes Y) as an epistemic definition of causality. We need an ...