Hume and Kant: Philosophy Practice Flashcards

Vocabulary-style flashcards covering the key concepts and differences between David Hume's empiricism and Immanuel Kant's transcendental idealism as presented in the lecture notes.

Copy Principle

David Hume’s theory that all ideas come from prior impressions (sensory experiences), and any idea that cannot be traced back to an impression is meaningless.

Impressions

The lively, vivid, and forceful physical sensations of experience, such as touch, taste, smell, hearing, and seeing, as well as emotions and passions.

Ideas

Faint, less vivid copies of impressions in the mind that occur during thinking, remembering, or imagining.

Missing Shade of Blue

Hume's counter-example to the copy principle where a person who has seen every shade of blue except one might still imagine the missing shade without a prior impression.

Synthetic a priori judgments

Judgments that add new information (synthetic) but are known independently of experience (a priori), such as the equation $7+5=12$ or the principle that every event has a cause.

Intuitions

Kant's term for immediate, singular sensory representations where the subject is passively affected by an object, such as seeing a tree.

Concepts

Mental rules and general representations shared by many that rest on the functions of thinking and judgment to organize intuitions.

A Priori Intuitions

Representations of Space and Time that are not based on experience but are the forms that allow experience to happen.

Analytical Judgment

A judgment where the predicate is already contained in the concept of the subject, making it true by definition and identity (e.g., "all bachelors are unmarried").

Synthetic Judgment

A judgment that adds new information not already contained in the subject, where the opposite is not a contradiction (e.g., "the book is heavy").

Transcendental Idealism

Kant's argument that the mind actively shapes experience by providing the universal structures of space and time.

Beliefs (Hume)

Vivid ideas fixed by habit or custom rather than rational justification, such as the expectation that the sun will rise.

Constant Conjunction

The observation that one event regularly follows another, which leads the mind to associate them as cause and effect through habit.

Relations of Ideas

In Hume's Fork, these are intuitively or demonstrably certain concepts that are universal and necessary, corresponding to a priori analytic judgments.

Matters of Fact

In Hume's Fork, these are truths established by habit and custom where the contrary is still possible, corresponding to a posteriori synthetic judgments.

Sensibility

The stem of human cognition through which objects are given to us via receptivity (Aesthetics).

Understanding

The stem of human cognition through which objects are thought spontaneously through logic.

Judgments of Perception

Subjective judgments based on personal experience that are only valid for the subject (e.g., "the sun warms the stone").

Judgments of Experience

Objective and universally valid judgments that apply a priori categories like causality to objects (e.g., "the sun causes the stone to be warm").