3.4 David Hume and Causation

David Hume (1711–1776) was a Scottish philosopher and one of the most influential thinkers of the Enlightenment period (1685–1815). Like Locke, he was an empiricist and believed that all knowledge comes from sensory experience, but his approach was to take empiricismThe idea that knowledge comes from experience. to its extremes.

Taking Empiricism a Step Further

According to Hume, the human mind starts with “impressions”, which are vivid, immediate experiences like the taste of a blueberry. It then forms ideas by reflecting on those impressions. However, Hume took empiricism further than Locke by questioning whether we can ever truly know certain things about the world, and this includes ideas that we take as being obviously true. For instance, one of Hume’s most famous contributions to Philosophy was his analysis of causation, the commonly accepted idea that one event causes another.

Indeed, Hume argued that causation is not a property of the events themselves actually occurring, but more of a mental habit. In other words, our minds are so used to seeing one event follow another that we assume a connection between them. We also come to expect events to cause one another.