[Lecture Eleven] Founders of Western Philosophy: Thales to Hume
by Dr. Leonard Peikoff
Total Time: 2 hours, 43 minutes
Course summary: Presented as two complementary twelve-lecture courses—Founders of Western Philosophy: Thales to Hume and Modern Philosophy: Kant to the Present—The History of Philosophy covers the whole of western philosophy from its discovery in Ancient Greece to the twentieth century, including Objectivism. Dr. Peikoff argues that philosophy is the means by which we can understand any human culture and, more broadly, the history and changing course of a civilization. Read more »
In this lecture: The tradition of British empiricism reaches its skeptical conclusion in the ideas of Bishop Berkeley and David Hume. Berkeley’s abandoning of any belief in the external world collapses into subjective idealism and a rejection of the senses. David Hume’s attack on reason in the name of reason leads to complete skepticism, denying the senses, causality, and any possibility of general ideas via induction.
Study Guide
This material is designed to help you digest the lecture content. You can also download below a PDF study guide for the entire course.
| How does Berkeley reconcile empiricism with his deep religious belief? |
| What is subjective idealism? |
| Why does Berkeley collapse into pure idealism as a result of the appearance/reality distinction? |
| What is Berkeley’s answer to the primary/secondary quality distinction? |
| How does Hume’s commitment to empiricism lead to his nominalism? |
| What is sensualism? |
| What is the test of meaning that Hume proposes? |
| How does Hume destroy the idea of valid sense perception? |
| Why does Hume ultimately reject the idea of entities? |
| How does Hume undermine the law of causality? |
| Where does Hume’s theory of meaning lead him to in ethics? |
Q&A Guide
Below is a list of questions from the audience taken from this lecture, along with (approximate) time stamps.
| 2:23:37 | You said Kant removed reason from the scene altogether. It’s hard to see how he could have removed it further than Hume. Could you sketch out how he did it? |
| 2:24:56 | How could Hume ask “can we conceive of the opposite of the law of cause and effect,” since it is a conception and it would be meaningless to begin with? |
| 2:25:29 | According to Berkeley, how can God exist independent of his being perceived? |
| 2:26:11 | How would Hume deal with 100% predictability, for instance a certain mass of rock thrown with a certain force will always break a window made a certain way. |
| 2:26:57 | Is the issue of “meaningful” vs. “meaningless” terms as used by philosophers valid, i.e., is the standard of the existence of a referent for meaningfulness valid? |
| 2:29:33 | By Hume’s premises, how can our past experiences cause us to form a habit and hence arrive at our false idea of cause? |
| 2:30:38 | Do you recognize any validity in Locke’s view of simple ideas? Could you explain where he went wrong with this approach? |
| 2:31:55 | Will you give Objectivism’s differentiation between and definitions of 1) a concrete and 2) a concretization? |
| 2:33:47 | If Hume says that the meaning of a concept or a word is its referents, how can he accept the analytic-synthetic distinction, which depends on distinguishing meaning and referents? |
| 2:33:34 | How can Hume claim that his is a philosophy of reason when he claims to be an arch-empiricist and is against reason on principle? |
| 2:36:40 | If Hume has to fall back on the concept of natural creatures with instincts, emotions, and so on doesn’t necessarily refute his original empiricist premise of no innate ideas? If so, didn’t he see this and offer an explanation? |
| 2:37:51 | If you asked Hume to put his hand in a fire and see if this would be the time his hand wouldn’t be burned, would he do it? Assuming not, what would be his reason? |
| 2:38:40 | Why did certain philosophers develop a preference for certain psychological processes, namely sensation and perceptions, which they held to be valid or meaningful, and reject as meaningless or non-existent other psychological processes such as conceptualization and understanding whose existence are equally identifiable introspectively? |
| 2:40:30 | On Berkeley’s premise, is it enough for an object to be perceived by any mind in order for it to exist, or must it be by your mind? |
| 2:41:37 | Are metaphysics and epistemology two branches of philosophy as an effect of the adherence to the mind-body dichotomy in philosophy? |