Hume & Experience
Where ideas really come from
Hume and Experience
Hume insisted all our ideas trace back to experience: to vivid impressions of sight, sound, and feeling. No experience, no genuine idea. This led him to a famous worry: we expect the sun to rise tomorrow because it always has, but past patterns never prove future ones. Custom, not reason, is what makes us count on the world.
“Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions.”
Where this sits in the course
“Hume & Experience” is lesson 2 of 3 in Reason Awakens, a course about modern philosophy begins by rebuilding knowledge and duty.. The lessons are sequenced rather than a menu, so this one assumes what came before it.
Reason Awakens is itself one of 18 courses in thinkr. The set opens with what philosophy is, moves through the Stoics and the Eastern traditions, then into what can be known, what exists, how to act and how power works — closing on practical reasoning you can use in an argument this week.
More from David Hume
“Beauty is no quality in things themselves: it exists merely in the mind which contemplates them.”
“Truth springs from argument amongst friends.”
“A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence.”
In the app this lesson is followed by 4 exercises that check whether the idea actually landed — and every answer, right or wrong, is explained rather than scored. That is the part a written page cannot reproduce.