David Hume: Empiricism, Impressions, and Ideas

Fill-in-the-blank practice flashcards reviewing David Hume's empiricist philosophy, including perceptions, impressions, ideas, operations of the imagination, and core arguments.

__________ is the view that all knowledge of the world comes from experience and the senses.

Empiricism

According to Hume, a __________ is anything that appears in the mind, such as thoughts, feelings, sensations, and emotions.

perception

Hume defines impressions as vivid, clear, and __________ experiences.

immediate

In Hume's terminology, ideas are less vivid __________ of impressions that we remember or imagine.

copies

__________ impressions are impressions that come from our minds and emotions, such as anger, love, fear, and happiness.

Inward

__________ impressions are impressions that come from the external world through the senses, such as seeing a cat, feeling heat from a fire, or smelling perfume.

Outward

Ideas that cannot be broken down into smaller parts, such as red, cold, and sweet, are classified by Hume as __________ ideas.

simple

Ideas made by combining simple ideas, such as a house, a dragon, or a golden mountain, are called __________ ideas.

complex

Hume notes that feeling heat from a fire is an impression, whereas remembering the heat later is an __________.

idea

When considering whether we can imagine things we have never experienced, Hume concluded no, because everything we imagine is built from impressions we have already __________.

experienced

The mental operation of __________ involves increasing size or scale, such as imagining a mouse the size of a tall building.

augmenting

The mental operation of __________ is the opposite of augmenting, such as imagining a tiny elephant or an elephant with a barely audible trumpet.

diminishing

To __________ means to change the position of a thing or substitute one part of another, such as placing animal parts onto human beings to imagine monsters.

transport

The operation of __________ occurs when the imagination takes two or more ideas from memory and puts them together to create a new idea.

compounding

In Hume's golden mountain example, the complex idea of a golden mountain is formed by compounding the outward impression of seeing gold with the outward impression of seeing a __________.

mountain

To form the complex idea of a virtuous horse, the mind compounds the outward impression of seeing a horse with the inward impression of experiencing or recognising __________.

virtue

Hume suggested that the idea of God is created by taking human qualities such as wisdom, goodness, and power and augmenting them to an __________ degree.

unlimited

Hume's Argument 1 asserts that all ideas can be traced back to earlier __________.

impressions

Hume's Argument 2 states that if someone has never had the original impression, they cannot form the matching __________.

idea

Due to malfunctioning senses, a person who is blind from birth cannot have an idea of colour because they have never had the visual __________ of colour.

impression

A person who has never tasted a pineapple cannot know what it tastes like because of an absence of relevant __________.

experience

Humans cannot form certain ideas because our senses are restricted due to __________ limitations, meaning we cannot detect what another species can experience.

species