Treatise Of Human Nature By David Hume Essay

26. How did Kant respond to Hume’s doubts about conventional notions of space, time, causation, and the self?

David Hume’s epistemology was informed by empiricism and tempered by a skeptical bent which denied knowledge the privileged position of reliable foundation attributed it by Cartesians and other rationalists of his day. Throughout his Treatise of Human Nature, Hume’s broad strategy in discussing such topics as space, time, causation, and self involves argument that we cannot glean sufficient knowledge related to some crucial philosophical concept, our understanding grants us only a vague idea of that concept, and explanation as to how some false views of that concept are rooted in fallacy (Norton, 93). Hume discusses space and time in similar terms, insisting that our proper notions of them are grounded in our perceptions of them as dictated by out native biological processes; this precludes any talk of space and time removed from our perceptions of them. The account of cause and effect is rather involved

In the vast majority of cases, such an occurrence is detrimental to an organism (or neutral at best), but some in some instances the mutation proves useful from an evolutionary standpoint. If the change increases an organism’s fitness as outlined above, then that mutation will be increasingly prevalent in future generations in keeping with the basic laws of Darwin’s theory. We can thus recast Darwin’s model in more specific terms than were available to him, though his formulation of how it functions was right on: natural selection tempers evolution by way of preserving beneficial mutations in the genetic code and rejecting those which are harmful. In this way, evolution is a combination of chance and necessity; as Gould puts it, “chance at the level of [genetic] variation, necessity in the working of selection”