PHL210Y1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Pineapple, Cartesian Doubt, A Priori And A Posteriori
Document Summary
Jan 23: hume vs. descartes (the epistemological approach) Epistemology = investigation of what distinguishes justified belief from opinion . Hume views moral philosophy as the science of human nature. He suspended judgment about the external world and then inquired into the nature of himself a priori. Hume, the anthropologist, takes a 3rd person perspectivestands outside of himself and views himself as just another creature moving around in the world. Hume"s approach is more like the approach you would take if i asked myself how does my cat know anything about the external world? he"s not projecting himself into the cat"s mind. This difference between hume and early modern philosophers is hidden in the title of his major work: a treatise of human nature . Hume is interested in human nature as it actually is. He tries to understand how we acquire external world knowledge based on how the human mind actually works.
