EXPERIENTIAL SKEPTICISM AT THE SOURCE OF KNOWLEDGE POINT: DAVID HUME

Abstract

David Hume, a representative of the classical English philosophers after John Locke and George Berkeley, with skepticism about experience (experiment) also became the greatest spokesmen of empiricism which started with Francis Bacon in England. Berkeley was skeptical about the greatest achievement of the modern age in science, the causality principle, which is the main basis of the mechanistic science of nature, meaning "every activity necessarily has a cause", and this skepticism found its deepest meaning in Hume. Hume, who drew attention to himself after Immanuel Kant said that he had woken him up from his dogmatic sleep, questioned both causality and essence concepts, one of the main problems of the philosophy before him, and influenced many philosophers and philosophical schools that came after him through this questioning. Empirical principles and skepticism in Hume's philosophy are the two most important elements of his philosophy. On the other hand, Hume, thinking that science is related to human nature, has turned to the content and understanding of the mind in order to examine the human nature, human nature and its relation with science Hume's main works in this regard are A Treatise of Human Nature (2015) and An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (2017). In this study, in the context of the mentioned works, the answers will be sought in conjunction with the concepts of "habit", "belief", "imagination" to the questions in Hume's philosophy, which can be qualified as general problems about the nature of knowledge and nature, "What is knowledge / knowing?", "What is the source of knowledge?", "Does your knowing have a limit and is it possible to know everything?", "Is it possible to make knowledge claim?" "Is there any essence (s)?", "What is the principle of causality and its origin as the main problem of case problems?" Also in the result part, skepticism about experimentation together with the principle of causality in Hume's intellectual theory will be evaluated in relation to Edmund L. Gettier's article entitled "Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?" Published in 1963.