Is There A 'Right Way' To Think About Things?

Hume's skeptical challenge for philosophy

Еxperience

"David Hume thought that the most important thing for philosophy was that it stayed true to (оставаться верным) our experience of the world. His famous example to illustrate this was of two billiard [ˈbɪljəd] balls [bɔːlz] knocking [ˈnɒkɪŋ] into each other. We are prone to experience the first billiard ball is rolling into the second and causing it to roll off. But Hume suggested that all we really experience is a series of impressions of billiard balls at various times and places. And we never experience anything extra that connects those two billiard balls that we can call causation.

Hume’s ideas about philosophy doing

For Hume, by doing philosophy we can learn all about the various habits that we have of associating of impressions and ideas and the various propensities [prəˈpɛnsɪtiz] (склонности) that we have to draw conclusions about the world on the basis of those impressions. We can never really know whether those habits of association are the right ones, or whether those conclusions that we're drawing are really putting us in touch with the way that the world is. So this left Hume to conclude that the observation of human blindness and weakness is the result of all philosophy."

Hume and Kant

"Hume’s skeptical view, as the German philosopher Immanuel Kant famously said, awoke [əˈwəʊk] him from his dogmatic [dɒgˈmætɪk] slumbers [ˈslʌmbəz] (дремоты).

Kant thought that prior to [ˈpraɪə tuː] (перед тем как) reading Hume, he had just assumed [əˈsjuːmd] (допускал) that philosophy could put us in touch with facts about how the world was. And, in fact, he thought that all philosophers prior to Hume had just assumed that. But after reading Hume, Kant realized that we couldn't just assume that, we need to prove it, and in the critique of pure reason Kant tried to do that."

Differences between Kant’s ideas and Hume’s ones

"But where Kant differed from Hume, was that he though these weren't just facts about the way that our mind worked. He thought that these were also facts about the way that the world had to work. In fact, he thought that these were facts about what it was for there to be a world there at all.

So Kant argued, that if we try and imagine a world that doesn't have these features of space and time and causality [kɔːˈzælɪti] then we just have no reason to think of what we're imagining at a world at all. We just can't get a grip on (полностью контролировать) the thing that would mean, for a world to lack these things."

SOURCES

'Introduction to Philosophy' course (the University of Edinburgh)

https://www.coursera.org/learn/philosophy