Impressions and ideas

Berkeley thought that material objects were just collections of ideas partly because he used the word 'ideas' to cover everything that the mind perceives, from abstract ideas about God or physics to sensations of color, sound, smell, etc.

Hume thought that we should discriminate a little more than that. So he distinguished between impressions, which are what we actually sense or feel while we are having a sensation or feeling, and ideas, which are slightly faded copies or memories of past impressions and also made up combinations of ideas and impressions (such as the made up idea of a golden mountain).

All ideas come from impressions, Hume maintains. Any alleged idea that cannot be analyzed into its original component impressions is bogus and has no real meaning. We should remove it from our thinking and thereby remove all needless obscurity from philosophy.

Download ebooks on http://www.frenchtheory.com/ - See that post with different algorithms in metabole - See the journal French Metablog with today different posts -