The paper studies and compares some of the values and beliefs of philosophers David Hume and Immanuel Kant.
This paper deals with the nature of knowledge and ideas. It begins by exploring Hume’s thoughts on the lack of connection between cause and effect. Connected to these ideas, are Hume’s thoughts on substance, “enduring objects” and their incompatible properties. Hume’s beliefs on substance are compared and contrasted with Immanuel Kant’s ideas on the same topic. Both philosophers’ models of the thinking process are discussed. Kant’s analogy of the mind as a computer is explained in comparison to Hume’s definition of ideas as reproductions of sense-data. The paper concludes with a discussion on the self and Kant’s concept of The “empirical ego.”
“David Hume believes that all ideas are derived and become knowable only from sense experience. From this standpoint, he rejects that we can know that every event has a cause, as he rejects the necessary connection between cause and effect, i.e., that the effect can proceed only from its cause. Just because something occurs after another on a regular and even observable basis does not mean that the former is the effect of the latter. To him, the effect may just happen without the connection to a cause. Not only is there more than one cause to an effect or more than one effect from a single cause, but also that certain causes to an effect “and the effects of certain causes” are still unknown in the world. The cause for cancer is one of these unknowns, although we are certain that there is a cause.”