(Originally Written September 1, 2006 in Epistemology)
The Great Epistemological Traditions:
1. Rationalism - Parmenides, Zeno, Plato, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant
2. Empiricism - Heraclitus, Aristotle, Aquinas, Locke, Berkeley, Hume
Hume (1711-1776)
External objects (a fortiori)
A Fortiori argument - If "x", then how much more "y".
An a fortiori argument is to be used inductively
Hume argued that what we experience is a kind of constancy and a coherence.
He asked how can we know that the box in our mind correlates to anything in the real world?
Why can't our own mind form constancy and coherence? Are not dreams real to us?
The Law of Causality - every effect is necessarily connected to a cause
Hume argued against the law of causality in that you don't see the necessary connection, you see the event after event after event, etc.
Uniformity of nature
Two types of knowledge:
1) Relations of ideas - true by their nature
2) Matters of fact - empirically observed
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