What can we know? David Hume thinks that all we can know are our own impressions, i.e. what our moment-to-moment experiences tell us. Funny thing, though: he thinks that no experience shows us one event causing another event. We only experience one thing happening, then another, and these sequences tend to display a lot of uniformity. So, if we have any legitimate idea of causality at all, it must just be that: regular patterns of conjoined events.

So what does this view imply for our experience of ourselves as freely acting beings? What about that God as first cause business? Are we ever justified in believing someone’s account of a miracle, which by definition violates all previously experienced patterns of causality?

You can probably guess, but you don’t need to, because we’ll tell you, and Wes will probably pooh pooh Hume’s conception of knowledge, and we will fight, and there will be blood, but from whence will be its cause and hence fault? David Hume’s, of course.

Read with us: http://18th.eserver.org/hume-enquiry.html.