Hume's philosophy

My last two posts have been on the topic of theology, so it thought it was time for a refreshing breath of philosophy, specifically atheist philosophy from David Hume.

Hume is credited with the ontological thought known as bundle theory, bundle theory states that every (at least) tangible thing in existence is nothing more than a sum of its properties and that the actual object does not really exist. This at first glance this position seems completely nonsensical however Hume then challenges us to think of an object without its properties, his example was an apple, but the activity works with any object. Hume therefore arrived at the idea that no object really exists. This also stretches beyond the inanimate and can be directly applied to a human being such as yourself (unless of course my blog has a much wider audience than I expect!) this means that you don't exist other than as a set of senses that you are made up of, Hume concluded from this that there is no sense of self. This was Hume's way of telling René  Descartes that he was wrong in his position which he summed up by saying “Cogito ergo sum” or to those of you who aren't familiar with Descartes (or Latin) “I think therefore I am”, Descartes believed that the world around us might be an illusion or that we might be dreaming of our world, but at least if we are seeing the illusion or dreaming we are thinking, ergo we exist. Both have strong arguments however I feel obliged to go with Descartes otherwise I must concede that I do not exist, however Nietzsche would argue that I am accepting Descartes truth because it comforts me to believe it, rather than its actual truth or falsehood.

Hume also believed in sense data, a branch of John Locke's empirical scepticism, stating that all knowledge is meaningless unless it originates from human experience and that the real world (if there even is one!) is unknowable, as in empiricism the only knowledge we can truly have is derived from the senses as this as close as we can ever get to what we call “truth”, this is why Hume was an atheist as he believed it was impossible to arrive at God through this process of sense data. Although Hume believed in sense data he found himself constantly puzzled by the problem of induction, this is the idea that all scientific method is based on a logical fallacy, as just because we observe something we can't assume it's going to happen again, no matter how many times it appears to happen, so essentially all the laws of physics are unreliable. For example if you live your whole life only seeing white cups, you might find it logical to assume that all cups are white until someone gives you a handful of multi-coloured cups to which you would have to draw into question all you think you know about ceramics. Although Hume may have been confused by this defective induction modern scientists don't seem too bothered about it because it seems to work, and if it doesn’t we can always change it later.

"That the sun will not rise tomorrow is no less intelligible a proposition, and implies no more contradiction, than the affirmation, that it will rise." - David Hume.