Possibilities of God Term Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words - 1

Possibilities of God - Term Paper Example rinciple, which will serve as his foundational or first principle for understanding human nature.2 Herein, I take Humes empiricist principle to mean that true knowledge must be derived from sensory experience alone. Thus, â€Å"trying to go beyond perceptions, as metaphysics must, inevitably involves going beyond anything that can have cognitive content† (Morris, â€Å"David Hume†). However, if one were to take the empiricist principle itself, questioning its own validity, then one would come to understand that it fails to answer to itself, for Hume’s theory of meaning itself is not readily traceable to an empirical impression on which it depends. Therefore, Hume’s principle is meaningless (Groothuis 5). The problem I will address in this paper then is: where does the impression of Hume’s idea of the copy principle lie? In this essay, I shall defend the veracity of Hume’s principle from the aforementioned criticism. For despite such criticism , Hume’s empiricist principle nevertheless remains to be a valid foundational principle for his philosophy. Hume acknowledges the role of psychology in our process of thinking. In his Enquiry, Hume’s aim was to track patterns in experience or through observation, which would give rise to knowledge and certainty. But where then does the impression of this said principle stem from, since it obviously isn’t derived from any of our sensory perceptions? Since it does not come from our sense perception; it must come from the mind, based on Hume’s explication on the psychological laws of association of ideas. He points out that the idea of necessary connection, i.e. cause and effect, cannot be found in the objects we observe, but resides only in our minds, and hence is simply a habit of the mind; it is but a mere subjective compulsion to relate things by the psychological necessity of associating an idea with another idea. Thus, could it be that he is also subject to the same subjective compulsion when stating his