David Hume, an empiricist within the British tradition, who nurtured his philosophy within John Locke’s tenets of empiricism, embarked on his philosophical thinking with a severe perspective of empiricism. According to him, when we exercise our mental faculties in thinking, we acquire ideas which essentially are experientially generated. By seeing, hearing touching, tasting or smelling something, we therefore attach a sensory inkling to it. Hume therefore emphasizes the finality of our sense familiarity towards the formation of our ideas and thoughts (Govier, 1997).
According to Hume, our subjection to experiences or feelings gives rise to impressions. Impressions are distinct from ideas in the degree of compulsion and sparkle with which they impact upon the mind and wend their way into our reflection and awareness (Govier, 1997). Our thoughts about it later, according to him, lead us into an idea which stems from, and corresponds to, what we felt before. Hume posits that we have two categories of ideas or impressions, simple and complex ones. Complex ideas can be severalized into various facets or elements. Simple impressions or ideas are the diametric opposite of the complex ones.
Although Hume radically castigates sceptics, he inevitably demonstrates lapses in his empiricist philosophical thought to accommodate sceptical propensities. For instance, he in one of his treatises dismisses the views that the future will always be like the past, that events have to be necessarily connected with each other, that there exists an external world beyond the mind, or even the mere existence of the mind itself. A particularity to this effect is where he mentions that the notion that the sun would rise in the future has a vague philosophical justification, though to him the affirmative opinion is premised on basic human convention since it is predicated on past regularities (Govier, 1997).
Kant tries to concur with Hume that experience begets knowledge, but however disputes the view held by the latter that all knowledge begins with experience. Accordingly, he posits that there are two sources of cognition, our own reason and familiarity. He describes that which comes to us sensually as empirical. A priori knowledge he says, affords us a conceptual framework by which to have experience a posteriori (Kant viii). In my view, Kant has managed to escape from Humean empiricism by postulating that knowledge does not solely emanate from experiences but from reason, reinforced by experience, which is contrary to Hume’s position.
Kant has succeeded in overcoming the problems of traditional rationalism and empiricism since he opines that reasoning per se is imperfect if it attempts to explain transcendental realms like Godly existence, the immortality of the human soul and the like.
Wittgenstein would have sharply differed with both philosophers on when one acquires knowledge, which seems to be a critical defining path in so far as knowledge acquisition is concerned. He would have severely criticised Hume, especially for harbouring the view that knowledge acquisition is entirely empirical (Benson, 1999). This is because to him (Wittgenstein) we only acquire knowledge after we learn the basics of language, the import of words to denote phenomenon, without which it would be hard to communicate.
Finally, it cannot be gainsaid that each scholar is entitled to strongly hold his views (Benson, 1999).
References
Benson, C. (1999). God & Caesar: Troeltsch’s social teaching as legitimation. Piscataway: Transaction Publishers.
Govier, T. (1997). Socrates’ children: Thinking and knowing in the western tradition. Peterborough: Broadview Press.