explain and discuss Hume’s contribution to the free will argument
The Enlightenment
The Enlightenment was to be the beginning of David Hume as we know him today. The Enlightenment was a period during the 18th century, one of great realisation on and increasing freedom, especially the freedom of thought. The montage of contributing factors paved the way for a new way of thinking and revolutionary change, most notably the political and intellectual authority of the church was changing. During the medieval period the church had incredible authority over the land and its people, but as Protestantism infiltrated what was seemingly set in stone it allowed people to remove themselves and there minds from the prior constraints. The reduction in the churches authority in turn meant a loss of faith in the traditional authority on part of the people leading to a greater sense of freedom.
The enlightenment aloud for the growth in scientific method. In the case of Hume he wanted to create the ‘scientific man’. This new stand of philosophy took human nature to be the premises and used scientific method to form its conclusion, its held that knowledge about how we examined the world was equally as important as the fact of the world themselves.
Science technology and society were also prosperous throughout the enlightenment, the main contribution was that of making philosophy and it’s inquisitiveness the inherent to a wider range of people.
Even so this new way of thinking was constantly under attack. The enlightenment was the birth place of sceptical thought, although it was not without its intellectual breakthroughs such as that of the motion of the planets, the most noted impact was the use of sceptical analysis through argument to reach a sound basis of what we can call knowledge. Hume without doubt used this as his approach in his quest to apply scientific method to philosophy.
Hume was an empiricist ascribing all knowledge to experience, allowing him to...