Locke, Berkeley & Hume Essay Example for Free

Locke, Berkeley Hume EssayEnlightenment began with an unpar onlyeled confidence in human reason. The virgin cognizances success in making clear the natural existence through Locke, Berkeley, and Hume affected the efforts of philosophy in two ways. The first is by locating the footing of human knowledge in the human mind and its encounter with the physical world. Second is by directing philosophys attention to an analysis of the mind that was capable of such cognitive success. John Locke set the tone for enlightenment by affirming the foundational principle of empiricism There is nothing in the intellect that was not previously in the senses. Locke could not accept the Cartesian rationalist belief in innate ideas. According to Locke, all knowledge of the world mustiness eventual(prenominal)ly rest on mans sensory(prenominal) experience. The mind arrives at sound conclusions through reflection after sensation. In other words the mind combines and compounds sensory impressi ons or ideas into more analyzable concepts building its conceptual understanding. There was skepticism in the empiricist position mainly from the rationalist orientation.Locke recognized on that point was no guarantee that all human ideas of things authentically resembled the external objects they were suppose to represent. He also realized he could not reduce all complex ideas, such as substance, to sensations. He did know there were three factors in the process of human knowledge the mind, the physical object, and the perception or idea in the mind that represents that object. Locke, however, attempted a partial resolving power to such problems. He did this by making the distinction between primary and secondary qualities.Primary qualities produce ideas that are simply consequences of the subjects perceptual apparatus. With focusing on the Primary qualities it is panorama that science can gain reliable knowledge of the material world. Locke fought off skepticism with the argu ment that in the end both types of qualities must be regarded as experiences of the mind. Lockes Doctrine of Representation was therefore undefendable. According to Berkleys analysis all human experience is phenomenal, limited to appearances in the mind.Ones perception of nature is ones mental experience of nature, making all sense data objects for the mind and not representations of material substances. In effect while Locke had reduced all mental circumscribe to an ultimate basis in sensation, Berkeley now further reduced all sense data to mental contents. The distinction, by Locke, between qualities that travel to the mind and qualities that belong to matter could not be sustained. Berkeley sought to overcome the contemporary tendency toward atheistic Materialism which he felt arose without just cause with modern science.The empiricist powerful aims that all knowledge rests on experience. In the end, however, Berkeley pointed out that experience is nothing more than experienc e. All representations, mentally, of supposed substances, materially, are as a final vector sum ideas in the mind presuming that the existence of a material world external to the mind as an unwarranted assumption. The idea is that to be does not mean to be a material substance rather to be means to be perceived by a mind. Through this Berkeley held that the individual mind does not subjectively determine its experience of the world.The reason that different individuals continually percieve a similar world and that a reliable score inheres in that world is that the world and its order depend on a mind that transcends individual minds and is universal (Gods mind). The universal mind produces sensory ideas in individual minds according to certain regularities such as the laws of nature. Berkeley strived to preserve the empiricist orientation and solve Lockes representation problems, while also preserving a ghostly foundation for human experience. Just as Berkeley followed Locke, so did David Hume of Berkeley.Hume drove the empiricist epistemic critique to its final extreme by using Berkeleys insight only turning it in a direction more characteristic of the modern mind. be an empiricist who grounded all human knowledge in sense experience, Hume agreed with Lockes general idea, and too with Berkeleys criticism of Lockes theory of representation, but disagreed with Berkeleys idealist solution. Behind Humes analysis is this thought Human experience was indeed of the phenomenal only, of sense impressions, but there was no way to ascertain what was beyond the sense impressions, spiritual or otherwise.To strike his analysis, Hume distinguished between sensory impressions and ideas. Sensory impressions being the basis of any knowledge coming with a force of liveliness and ideas being faint copies of those impressions. The nous is then asked, What causes the sensory impression? Hume answered None. If the mind analyzes its experience without preconception, it must re cognize that in fact all its supposed knowledge is establish on a continuous chaotic volley of discrete sensations, and that on these sensations the mind imposes an order of its own.The mind cant really know what causes the sensations because it never experiences cause as a sensation. What the mind does experience is simple impressions, through an standoff of ideas the mind assumes a causal relation that really has no basis in a sensory impression. Man can not assume to know what exists beyond the impressions in his mind that his knowledge is based on. Part of Humes intention was to disprove the metaphysical shoots of philosophic rationalism and its deductive logic. According to Hume, two kinds of propositions are possible.One view is based purely on sensation while the other purely on intellect. Propositions based on sensation are always with matters of concrete fact that can also be contingent. It is raining outside is a proposition based on sensation because it is concrete in that it is in fact raining out and contingent in the fact that it could be different outside interchangeable sunny, but it is not. In contrast to that a proposition based on intellect concerns relations between concepts that are always necessary like all squares have four equal sides.But the truths of pure reason are necessary only because they exist in a self contained system with no mandatory reference to the external world. Only logical definition makes them true by making explicit what is implicit in their own terms, and these can claim no necessary relation to the nature of things. So, the only truths of which pure reason is capable are redundant. Truth cannot be asserted by reason only if for the ultimate nature of things. For Hume, metaphysics was just an exalted form of mythology, of no relevance to the real world. A more disturbing consequence of Humes analysis was its undermining of empirical science itself.The minds logical progress from many particulars to a universal certainty could never be absolutely legitimated. Just because situation B has always been seen to follow event A in the past, that does not mean it will always do so in the future. Any acceptance of that law is only an ingrained psychological persuasion, not a logical certainty. The causal necessity that is apparent in phenomena is the necessity only of conviction subjectively, of human imagination controlled by its regular association of ideas. It has no objective basis. The regularity of events can be perceived, however, there necessity can not.The result is nothing more than a subjective feeling brought on by the experience of apparent regularity. Science is possible, but of the phenomenal only, determined by human psychology. With Hume, the festering empiricist stress on sense perception was brought to its ultimate extreme, in which only the volley and chaos of those perceptions exist, and any order imposed on those perceptions was arbitrary, human, and without objective founda tion. For Hume all human knowledge had to be regarded as assessment and he held that ideas were faint copies of sensory impressions instead of vice versa.Not only was the human mind less than perfect, it could never claim access to the worlds order, which could not be said to exist apart from the mind. Locke had retained a certain faith in the capacity of the human mind to grasp, however imperfectly, the general outlines of an external world by means of combining operations. With Berkeley, there had been no necessary material basis for experience, though the mind had retained a certain independent spiritual power derived from Gods mind, and the world experienced by the mind derived its order from the same source. Word Count 1374.