But philosopher most widely regarded as the greatest who has ever written in the English language is David hume, not an Englishman but a scot born in edinburgh in the year 1711 he did some of his best work very young at about 18 he experienced a sort of intellectual revelation and over the next eight years he produced a large and revolutionary book called a treatise of human Nature it met with little attention and even less Understanding in his own phrase it fell dead born from the press So in his 30s He tried to rewrite that book in what he hoped would be a more popular form This resulted in two smaller volumes one called an inquiry concerning human understanding And one called an inquiry concerning the principles of morals But these were scarcely any better received, and he gave the impression then of turning away from Philosophy in his 40s He wrote a history of great britain which for a hundred years was the standard work That's why he still sometimes categorized in libraries and books of reference as David hume Historian in his own lifetime he made his reputation - as an economist and his monetary theories have been reacting attention recently He was even in a modest way a man of affairs in the war of the austrian succession He served as a staff officer on two military expeditions and for a couple of years in his early fifties He was secretary to the British embassy in Paris and then after that under secretary of state in London In all the many different circles in which he moved he was popular for his good nature as much as for his genius Such was his gift for friendship that he almost brought off the impossible Task of defending his french contemporary Philosopher Rousseau Would one time actually propose making his home in Britain because hume was there in France hume was known as Leborgne Dalida and in his native edinburgh the street in which he lived was and is named after him, St. David's streets in view of the Latter Point, it's Perhaps Ironical, but in secret He'd been writing his final philosophical masterpiece Profound and damaging Critique of natural religion, which didn't come to light until after his death he died in 1776 and in 1779 his dialogues concerning natural religion Were published some people consider it his best work He's an unusually attractive figure who should also be seen as part of that great flowering of intellectual life in edinburgh in the 18th century Which we now refer to as the scottish enlightenment? in David hume Adam Smith and James Boswell the Scottish enlightenment produced the English languages for most Philosopher economist and Biographer and they all knew each other Adam Smith was one of humes closest friends and was greatly influenced by him basel Contemplated writing humes biography though alas he never did There's now a substantial literature on hume And one of the best books in it humes intentions was written by the person who is with me now to discuss his work Professor John Pass more of the Australian National University in Canberra, but there's a passed ball whenever hume gave a shorter exposition of his own philosophy which he in fact two or three times did he always put fundamental emphases on what he had to say about Causality that is to say what it is for one state of affairs to bring about or cause another state of affairs? The idea being that causality this cause-and-effect Relationship is what binds together the whole of our known world and he thought that what he had to say about that Was the Cornerstone of his philosophy and in fact it would be true to say that it's what he's best known for Today can you tell us what the nub of his argument on that was I think I'll try to by means of a practical example Suppose a small child whose parents have always given a soft cotton toys That had soft cotton dolls soft cotton dog so on and so on Everything's soft cotton one day somebody gives it a rubber ball the child drops the rubber ball over side of the bed and the next thing he notices if the rubber ball bounces Nothing else and his experiences. They were bounced before his this ball that begins bouncing Now the first thing that David hume says it Didn't matter how long the child had looked at that ball Turning it over looking at one side of another it could never have inferred that when it dropped the ball the ball would bounce this came to it as something it couldn't expect a Prior to experience now take an adult who's watching what happens at this point? they doubt will say Well what has happened is the child has caused the ball to bounce by dropping it It would say the ball has a power Which makes it possible for it to bounce? I'd say there's a necessary connection between dropping this rubber ball, and it's bouncing. That's how they add up would talk Now hume comes along. He says well What does the adult got which the child doesn't have? after all All this has really happened. Is that on a number of occasions? the adult has seen a ball drop and Seen it bounce in fact it has found this always happens is what he calls a constant conjunction So you have two things you first of all have somebody dropping a ball or doing something of that kind? And then you have bouncing, but suppose you've seen this a hundred times instead of like the child only once What difference can this make up well? It hasn't now seem something it hadn't seen before it hasn't seen a mysterious power in the ball It hasn't discovered a mysterious entity called the necessary connection and some sort of peculiar property all of the scene is Various people dropping balls and the balls bouncing and yet in fact the adult does believe that there's a necessary connection Between the dropping of the ball, and it's bouncing. Where's this idea come from? Because we hear more ideas had to come somewhere, and he says it comes from nothing except the constant experience of this constant injunction This works upon the mind. She says it forms the habit in us and Expecting a ball to bounce when we drop it But nothing I was involved in that I could put what you just said to us in since the gaps tract general terms I think by expressing it this way that we can't form any conception at all of an ordered world without the idea of causal connection between things But cause we discover when we try as something that we can't actually? Observe we may say that event a cause of event b but we find when we examine the situation that all we actually observe is event a Followed by event B and there isn't some third entity in the situation a causal link between them that we observe and It won't do to say that our will yes, but we know that if nth a is because of event b Because b. Always it invariably follows a Because the fact is for example, but day always it invariably follows night and night always and Invariably follows day But neither is the cause of the other So we have this Indispensable notion of calls which is at the very heart of our conception of the world and of our understanding of our own? Experience and yet this notion is not validated by experience or observation and it can't be validated by logic either and By making us aware of that Hume, it seems to me has put his finger on a problem to which there's still no generally agreed solution would you read that? Yes, there is people of course try various things most of which hume Discusses in the treatise and gets rid of someone say oh, well nature is uniform, so for ball bounces one will go on bouncing But that's only to say that the same cause produces the same effect all way So that's exactly the thing which has to be demonstrated. He's begging the question thinking the question by saying there, and this is true He says oh, well at least it's now more probable that the ball will bounce or not But all probabilities hume says are really based on our experience of connections So that this again is no real layout of the of the problem He used the same form of argument with another very fundamental question than dear that is The question of the self of the continuity of the self he said that well when we take it for granted that we have cells That we are continuous cells We discover that we can't actually locate this self in observation or experience, but when we look inside Ourselves what we actually see is individual thoughts feelings memories Emotions and so on but we don't observe some other entity a self that has them and this is a very Disconcerting and startling Doctrine isn't it what were its? Implications, I think one should add that hume was never really quite satisfied with this as you said he kept on going back When he's give me an account of his theory to the doctrine of causality because then he felt satisfied He'd done what he set out to do. He'd shown that there is something about Our characters human beings which compels us to believe that things are necessarily connected with one another Even although we don't observe in the world that necessary connection, but it gets terribly difficult when it comes to personal identity it said earlier that in respect to ordinary identity What happens is something like this actually every time we close our eyes something to sing in front of us disappears? It's no longer there is a perception, but when we open our eyes again This is very Rapid Crude what we see is so similar to what we saw before we closed our eyes that we confused retreat this as having been an Experience or identity because we because it's so like keeping your eyes open all the time and just having a single perception Now that's all right perhaps in respect to the identity of other people you might say the same sort of thing We see them today, and we see them tomorrow They're very like one another the actions that they perform on one occasion have certain sorts of causal connections with the one thing they Have on other occasions, but let's take ourselves Now if you can't say that really become confused between this succession of Sections and a strict identity because this is shown for some way there all the time to become confused And that's why hume says I think this is why human says in the long run that he's going to satisfy with this miss really Worried him because he began from the assumption that so long as one talked only about the human mind and human Perceptions one wouldn't get into any great intellectual problems or any intellectual confusions which couldn't be easily cleared away One thing that what he had to say about cause and what he has to say about the self Had in common is but in both cases He says let's look for the actual observation the actual experience on which this everyday Idea is based and in each case when we look for them we discover to our amazement that they're not there It's as if he's trying to base his philosophy on fact now. Is that what he was referring to in the famous Subtitle to his masterpiece of the treatise I've actually written it down here. He describes his treatises an Attempt to Introduce the experimental method of reasoning into Moral subjects. What are you trying to make? philosophy Scientific was that his idea but moral subjects of course intended very broadly he would have included and allowed everything we now call politics He would have included Anything we would call Psychology and as well as anything we would call Moral philosophy And he did want to make these more scientific in a certain sense than they had ever been What he says is that when you approach these subjects you'll find that people who usually Talk seriously and take Evidence into account start making wild statements without any real evidence They start preaching at us rather than telling us What things are like? They lay down laws for us rather than looking at the facts and that we ought to look at the facts in respect to political life and human affairs just as we Do in the natural sciences there's an implied theory of language and meaning Daran in this approach that we are now talking about because he very definitely thought that in order to For a word to mean anything at all it had to relate to a specific idea and for an idea to have real content It had to be derived from experience so in effect you may say if you want to know what a word means Look for the experience from which it's derived if you can't find an experience for an observation from which it derives Then it doesn't mean it That that so there's this whole theory of meaning is there not underlying The philosophical approach that you've just been outlining yet. He draws distinction. He's pretty keen on this although He doesn't mention it specifically very often between talking and thinking We're thinking only when we're operating with clear ideas which have a real source in experience But he suggests that much of the time We're talking away And we're using what a really completely confused motions which have no Real foundation and experience if he looked at our contemporary political life in our contemporary. Talk. He'd find I think that it was full of nations which people use completely unreflecting If you ask what the foundation and experience was of let us say ideas like Social justice Or ideas like accountability you might find it extremely difficult to see what the actual factual situation was of these we're referring to a concrete what they Concretely mean and one of his main point is we should look and see what thing has concrete to mean you'd be absolutely Horrified by might see what mail passes for literary criticism for example that was something he was very interested in that he thought he had To related then he come quickly to literature and Now it becomes a maximun rather bad philosophy full of expressions which seem I think would very rapidly show have no meaning on his theory of meaning it led him to develop something with ten socks prefer to be known as humes fork Instead of any given body of ideas when you are approaching it to the first time you must ask yourself two main questions Do these ideas concern Anton's effect in which case do they rest on observation and experience? Or do they concern the relations between ideas as in? mathematics and logic if the answer to both those main questions is no, then he says commit those writings to the flames because they can contain nothing but Sophistry and Delusion. He was a great as you have said clearer away of intellectual rubbish Not only in Philosophy and politics, but in religion and all sorts of other fields Do you think that in the history of Philosophy that's one of his most important? Function so to speak that he was a clear level way of illusions I'm pretty sure about that the other thing was that there's one particular illusion is constantly clearing away And that is that we can prove a great many things Which we daily believe he's constantly showing, but really we cannot demonstrate Even such facts as the things exist externally to us or that they continue to exist when we're not looking at them or again that some things are necessarily connected with other things and This means that he often sounds extremely skeptical and indeed he sometimes does express himself in a very skeptical way But he thinks That is impossible for any human being to be an all an all-out skeptic inevitably you have to believe you have to act like any other human being and a certain measure of Skepticism what he calls mitigated skepticism is very useful because it prevents you from Falling into the trap of large ideologies Large ideas of every sort which have no real foundation experience you will say to yourself. Well look I'm not really Totally able to demonstrate the sun will rise tomorrow Perhaps it won't and why should anybody that's in that position think that they can say Something about the total existence of the world or some very elaborate concept of this kind Wouldn't it be true to say that his skepticism was not actually about the world but about the capacities of human reason? I mean, I don't doubt for one moment, but hume. Just genuinely did believe that there is an independently existing world of material objects in space and time, but causally into relate to each other and that we have Representations of these to our senses and that these representations are internal to us But give us an act an accurate picture of the world around us all that the whole common sense view of the world I'm sure hume believed But it seems to me that what he was contending was that none of this could be proved You couldn't actually show you couldn't prove that any of this was so and you had to just kind of take it for granted In ordinary living, but I don't think he doubted it Did he I don't think so after all it's essential to what he's saying about the possibility of constructing a theory of human Nature and he's able to say two things that this this will rest on one is our awareness of ourselves And the other is at awareness of other human beings at experience of other human beings well this does imply that human beings exist independently of Us We're not the only being on Earth just living in a world of his own Perceptions there are other human beings they behave in various ways their behavior has particular effects And so on none of this does he doubt. I think in the most serious sense of doubting and did it have to be a Madman too, so But he's showing that reason can't prove it But he's showing that what we can prove is very much less than people believe even the most fundamental affairs of life so that strict proof plays a very small part in human life outside special areas like Mathematics and he didn't even think that was all that important in human affairs Did you well he really felt was the important things well? He says politics morals literary Criticism, and what he calls logic Which is he where he uses rather broadly to mean the theory of the human understanding? Anything else the sort of thing that physicists talk about let us say was no doubt important that at the second order that to get a clear understanding of human beings and of human understanding which indeed and necessary preliminary Even to the soundly based physical science that learn to soundly based human science And I think he was a person to whom what mattered essentially we're human beings Now lots of Philosophers haven't been like this rather got rid of human beings or individual human being And human concerned with abstractions like a certain that factions apart and trace and Hume talks about these to some degree But basically the human being lies at the center of his interests and in the old phrase he counts nothing human alien to him what that brings out is that in that theme of subtitle to his great word which I read earlier and attempt to Introduce the Experimental method of reasoning to Moral subjects. It's not only the phrase the experimental method of reasoning. That's important which everyone has always Concentrated on but the phrase model subjects. He was applying it to everything that directly concerns human being exactly In my introduction to our discussion professor possible when I referred to hume moving on from writing Philosophy to writing history. I deliberately used the phrase he appeared to turn away from philosophy I didn't actually say he did because I know that you in your book about q have argued that in fact in his mind This was not a turning away at all But a continuation of the same concerns, and I'd like you to expand that a little bit well I think in the first place of course the use of the word philosophy in its very narrow Modern sense is Well as I said very narrow very Modern Philosophy had a much broader sense when he wrote and even later Indeed in Cambridge much later physics was called natural philosophy and subjects like economics and politics were included in Moral philosophy and that's the very broad sense of philosophy that humors working with but I think there's another thing he wrote these works the Treatise especially he said as a necessary Preliminary to working on the subject she took to be important morals and politics an essential preliminary Nobody paid any real attention to them He tried to present them in a different form as you pointed out near Introduction in the inquiries people did still didn't pay any real attention to and it would have been absurd for him to go on Working at seeds it had. No real critical certain optimum. He was quite convinced He was right in terms of his own views about things it was perfectly proper for him then to go on writing essays on politics writing history writing about economics I think about the population of the ancient world and discussing all these broad issues literary Criticism again which had always regarded a central it would have been idiotic for him to have continued all his life with what he regarded as Being only preliminary to these centrally important inquiries because all of it was in his eyes What one might roughly call social? Philosophy wasn't it in some formal and in a very broad sense is what we were now called Social philosophy But the first part one might very crudely call humes methodology of the social sciences it ran Beyond that but it's as if the social scientists were to spend all his life talking about his methodology and never actually doing any social science and him would have felt the Same way if we'd spent all his life talking about his methodology. He said it's all the logic That's really needed and indicated And that gone on to do the actual work that he thinks was the greatest consequence now underlying this very broad concern with human affairs there was a Theory of human or a conception anyway of human nature and you referred to that actually a few minutes ago in our discussion Can you now bring out what that conception of human nature was? Well, it's a long story because really most of his subsequent work is a study of human Nature in action in Practice the qantas thing he never doubted was that there was such a thing as human nature And this is a point at which he differed from Locke Locke had been particularly intent on getting rid of the conception of original sin. This was fundamentally important to him we see what a religious thinker as well as a as well as a Philosopher and he had argued the timid beings are born into the world with minds which are like blank sheets of paper and then in his works on education for example the suggestion was but you could turn human beings in any Direction you want to and many of the later thinkers of the French enlightenment and really running on even to To modern Marxism have taken the same sort of view that at least society is the thing that makes Human beings what they are and hume didn't think that? He says that he thought this was a ridiculous view that human beings do have Angers Fears all the rest our affections which are innate which are inborn in them and which are constant throughout human history human In different societies and they had different forms and some of them may be strengthened in some weakened But there is a permanent human nature there in which the passions are central striking I think in most of the thinkers of this period that they put an emphasis on Passions and interests in a way in which many subsequent philosophers have not there are of course important exceptions to that Part of the basis for what he had to say about human nature being always the same was his deep learning in the classical Languages wasn't it He he was deeply and widely read in Greek and latin literature and history and what struck him one of the things that struck him about Those times was that human behavior in very considerable detail had been just the same 2,000 years before the time he was reading when he saw it around here as he saw it around him in his own time Yes He was particularly understood in writers like Cicero and in what Cicero said about human nature and human beings and human Society and he thought it wasn't so difficult in century England the material beings were still behaving in much the same kind of way It was the latin writers rather than the greek writers who to clean first him at that level he constantly produce Israel so that was some of the evidence that he would have given for there being a Permanent human Nature, but also when he writes about let us say the natural history of religion It's again on the assumption that human beings have been much the same been faced by the same threats the same Anxieties it had much the same ideals throughout history even in Much Ilia societies and the Greek and Roman society not only of assumption is it I mean he tries to Demonstrate this with a great deal of effect for example a car should demonstrate by sex for example But it is all the same I think to some measure something that he thinks is you can't seriously Question although as I many subsequent writers and locke before him have seriously questioned When one looks at you from the standpoint of our time? I think one is very struck by the sort of modernity from our point of view very much of it. I mean He was centrally concerned with this problem of the self Well some of the best philosophy that's been done in Britain in recent years has been about problems of the self Scientists in the Twentieth Century have been deeply powerful, especially in their thinking about quantum physics about the presence or absence of causal connection and only yesterday so to speak the logical positivists Or at least the chief representative of logical positivism in the English-speaking world a jair We're constantly talking about how much they owed to hume and how almost everything there is constantly saying that almost everything he has to say Has previously been said by Q1 comes up against this modernity to us again and again and one of the 20th century problems of Philosophy that he is credited with having Formulated for the first time is the famous problem of induction isn't it that is to say that the Theological basis on which Scientific theories were traditionally said to rest Can you tell us a little about that well? It's very closely related what I said previously about causality go back to my baby is Dropping this ball out of the well I suppose it does this on Monday night does it on Tuesday? And it doesn't know where to stand and dust on Thursday Every tire clubs for the ball bounces then certainly he would say it comes to believe That whenever it drops the ball the ball about it comes to expect the ball to bounce Whenever it Drops it but suppose We ask why because all this happen is the same thing as has occurred on many occasions But we all know quite Well the things can occur on many occasions and then on some occasions And they don't occur anymore. There's a change The way things happen who have been accustomed to relying on these regularities But the regularity breaks down now all of human saying is we can never be quite sure That this won't happen in respect to any regularity whatsoever There's no way of arguing from the premises that things have happened in a certain way on very many occasions in the past to the Conclusion that they're bound to happen in exactly the same way in the future and of course the point here Is that every scientific law is an unrestrictedly general statement which is said to rest on a number of particular? Observations or experiments or instances and the logical Link can't be made There's a marvelous example of this enacted in the history of philosophy itself in logic books in some logic books of the middle ages One sentence that was used as an example was all swans and white and of course for literally thousands of years there'd be swamp that any western man had ever seen was right and there must have been millions of instances of white swans and not a single counter example, but in the 18th century when Western Man Discovered your country, Australia For the first time Europeans or black swans and it's a Marmot illustration of the fact that however many Thousands or millions of times a particular thing has been observed and found to be so and so it does not follow from that That the next one will be and therefore this is the logically important point no finite number of specific observations can ever logically entail an Unrestrictedly general for universal conclusion, but all scientific lore of that character and therefore They are not logically entailed by the observations that are supposed to be their basis, and this is an exclusive Insight isn't it. I mean it seemed to people to knock away the foundations of Science as they understood it if I think it's more more widely agreed by scientists themselves That scientific propositions are in some major hypothetical many Very firmly based ones have been over throughout in the past people used to say that Einstein didn't overthrow Newton. He simply Produced a more general theory of which Newton's theory is part, but that's not really true there was something as a mutant said that have now been shown to be false and Newton was for a long time the supreme example of a kind of certain Demonstrative side bertrand Russell in his famous book a history of Western philosophy after he's said something about humes doctrines on these various fundamental things that we've considered a cause-And-effect relationship the Nature of the self the inductive basis of Scientific laws Russell then goes on to say that in many of these respects. We still haven't got beyond him that he pointed out very Fundamental problems, but no one has yet solved This is true because secretly through that played out pointed out very fundamental questions that nobody as yet saw because unfortunately it's much easier in in Philosophy to ask questions great difficulties than to produce solutions But I think one crucial thing that hume is the question she asked I think was also called plato were very fundamental ones so that we can say that if a person doesn't take humes Question seriously. He can't really be counted as a philosopher. Yes, these are absolutely fundamental to what philosophy years aren't days Yes, they aren't fundamentally. They're not the only issues with the president, but they have done to mental issues What sort of a man was he I get the impression when I read his work? And I've been rereading it so this discussion. Just recently I get the impression of a kind of massive Humane this which is enormous, ly attractive Yes I his friend Adam Smith said he came as near to perfection these sort of respects of any human being possibly could and Biographers have explored his life in great detail. I don't think anything found a single example of a mean or a malicious action, it occasionally timid well not unnaturally he had views about religion which were scarcely popular in the society in which he was in education a little design, but this is a form of Sin, if it is that which I can easily forgive, but he doesn't ever Act Meanly or maliciously and I'm quite sure that if there was a sort of celestial Philosophers parterre dinner party It's David he might want to sit next to I I think in many ways plato was the greater philosopher, but it's David hume I would want to sit next to and I think almost everybody else would he had this warm humanity He was without pretensions. It was a man of very considerable personal courage He was dying of cancer in his last year's he still received his friends as usual He knew or believed in you that he was certainly not immortal But this did miss tell him in the least it's very much disturbed possible when Boswell interviewed him towards the end But he managed to retain that sort of equanimity and a moderation and every we also do which was his own idea on yeah And his style has had great influence hasn't it I mean I mentioned earlier in this discussion to 20th Century British Philosophers both of them famous a jair and Bertrand Russell who have been consciously Influenced by the hume way of doing things and they've been many others yes, well he did places Great Emphasis on Clarity and indeed on Elegance I recently Heard Clarity and elegance referred to as old-fashioned virtues which nobody now attempts? That's certainly Erin Russell attempt with them and certainly humor template them, and he said a certain pattern Of British philosophizing which one tries to be clear one tries to be critical one tries? Not to make large assumptions unclosing look all the while at what one doing in a critical spirit and one tries to tie it up To what actually happens in the world humans approach does Raise one? Important difficulty doesn't it You refer to the fact that he stresses that most of the things that we take for granted? We don't actually know and can't prove can never prove that being so how are we to distinguish between the sort of view that it's reasonable to hold and the sort of view that it's unreasonable to hold what then becomes the criteria of A Reasonable man's belief this is a very difficult question at times whom Seems to be saying nothing more than that well in general It's much more sensible to rely on constant conjunctions and on me a chance He gives rules for judging of cause and effect and other times he seems to suggest There's really no answer to this question But that is something that I think would satisfy Nobody and one might say that is the principal problem that hume said I referred to it in a way a little while ago We agree let us say that scientific Laws are not demonstrable in the strict sense Why however it is still far better to? Depend on these in our practical affairs of life than in some silly idea that someone thinks up in a best-seller I think that what hume had to say about all this is very germane to the ideas about science that most people have Today in the twentieth Century my impression is that most people including most well-educated people Have the idea of science, but it consists of a body of known of demonstrated proved Certainties and that the growth of science consists in adding new certainties to the body of already existing ones Anybody who has that view of human knowledge or that view of science really has a very fundamental lesson to learn from hume Don't they I mean human retains his full power to disconcert? Today doesn't yes, hume is an extremely disconcerting thinker I think it's still true in respect to science that science does make certain There's all sorts of things we know about the world We didn't know before scientists got going but certainly when ronnapee for example think of science or something there is no room for the imagination at all and that's new I Believe that you have all sorts of need for the imagination if you're writing a novel or writing a play But when you're doing sighs, it's just a question of going into a laboratory and seeing what happens now This is nonsense any kind of scientific work above the most fulfilled It's an enormous feat of the imagination if you take contemporary cosmology for example It's so this is admittedly a very extreme example. It's an extraordinary Imaginative lead the same is true of things like Dna genetics any of the great discoveries require not merely careful work in laboratory, so this is essential and careful thinking at all levels, but also a Capacity to make imaginative lives and it's interesting that in hume the idea of the imagination Constantly realises of beings of Central importance the imagination who thinks is essential to all our thinking about the world even what we call our perception of facts there is always an element of the imagination at work and the centrality of the Imagination is one of the things I find most fascinating and David hume It's directly to main to what you've just said that the greatest of all 20th century scientists Einstein once said he said in 1928. I remember he made the remark, but he would never have dared to Overthrow the Science of Newton can't he not read hume Well, I'd like to I'd like to finish our discussion really by asking you to say a little more about the influence of hume on major thinkers Subsequent to him. He did you've already referred to his influence on calm, too I think most philosophers would regard as the greatest of all philosophers since you What was his influence on cons? I think that count and like we british critics of hume? Really did see what hume was about he sorry had to do philosophy in a quite different kind of way If he was going as he wants to do to answer here And particularly to get rid of what he took to be skeptical elements in hume. He had to say that really Our perception of the world is a quite different kind from the social thing that human his Predecessors have taken it to be we don't humor always presumes Have isolated perceptions simply following one another we are from the beginning aware of things as being Causally connected closely linked with one another one gets encounter of a great emphasis on the creative power of the mind as well suggestions this order is imparted posed by the mind and that leads in the direction that you wouldn't have life it leads in the direction of Subsequent German idealism in the Direction of Writers like Hegel, but can't did see you didn't hear that if you've started with empiricist assumptions Hume, then posed problems that on empiricist assumptions you couldn't answer at the head field and Khan's Solution was to reject the assumptions and and start holding you approach He does see I think the essential thing that if you begin From the position that what we're aware of our Isolated events whether in our own mind with their perceptions or on the surface of a scheme or in the world You cannot create out of them simply as your sole material the kind of ordered world Which in fact we experience in our daily life? Well to continue the discussion Beyond this point would take us into a discussion of calm, so I think we will stop there Thank you very much indeed professor possible Thank you
