Hume's Philosophy

I find David Hume’s philosophy absolutely intriguing. He was a Scottish philosopher and empiricist who believed that "Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions.” Unlike Descartes and the rationalists before him, he believed that desire rather than reason governs human behavior and examined moral philosophy and free will within that context. He also believed that innate ideas do not exist, arguing that before humans can have impressions of the world, they must first directly experience them and learn from them, akin to the "tabula rasa" philosophy of Locke. For this reason, he felt that in scientific reasoning, we have to be careful about the things we include because they are biased by our perceptions. Our morality and ethics are based on feelings rather than abstract principles inherent in nature. Finally, he noted that we develop our scientific reasoning about the phenomena around us by noting the “constant conjunction” of causes and effects that occur, all based on the proximity of two events occurring in time. I think that this does indeed shed light on how we observe phenomenon in the world and form theories about why and how they occur. We do need to be careful about observing phenomenon in a controlled setting so that we rule out third variables as being the cause for something. Our passions do cause us to see the things we are looking for in the world and do color our perceptions of the things we experience. I look forward to learning more about his thoughts!