For the days leading up to Valentine's Day, my hall (aka all the girls here, lol) is doing a different Valentines-y event every day for our secret valentine (we drew names in a hat). Today we made a card and snuck it into their room or put it in their mailbox. I put my valentine's under her pillow, and when I was reading Hume I heard her find it, and she was trying to figure out who it belonged to. She was adamantly insisting to her roommates that she knew exactly whose it was--someone other than me, lol. It was so funny. I had to leave to go study somewhere else though, because they were being so loud trying to guess who all their valentines were. Tomorrow we're supposed to give a red/pink gift, Friday is sneak a hug day, and Saturday is give a verse day.
Speaking of studying, currently I'm reading David Hume's An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. I really don't like this as much as Descartes. For those of you who don't know, basically Descartes discusses knowledge as a priori, innate within us. He begins his reasoning by doubting everything--the world he lives in could all be false, like something in "The Island" or "The Matrix." After he left everything that he could possibly doubt as false, he tries to build it back up starting with what is absolutely true. He is thinking about things, therefore he knows without a doubt that he exists, because if he didn't exist then he couldn't think. "Cogito ergo sum:" Next, he reasons that, because he has innate knowledge of a perfect being (to paraphrase), and because no cause is greater than its effect, he (the effect) must have had a creator (the cause). This is his first argument for God. Then he goes to describe how God, because he is perfect, cannot be a deceiver because to deceive is to have a fault. Thus God is not deceiving him and the world around him is real. But where does error come from, then? He argues that error comes because God gave man a will that is both fallible and infinite and reason that is infallible and finite. If we, as humans, really reasoned things out, we would not err. But the will often wins over reason (we are hasty), thus we err.
Hume, on the other hand, says that all knowledge comes through the senses and experiences: posteriori. I really don't care for his argument as well as Descartes. His argument against God is that we don't understand the power between our mind and body, thus how can we understand a power greater than us: the power of a supreme being? Thus a supreme being must not exist.
As for the world around us, it is discovered in two ways: through the senses as experiences, and then through reason: combining these experiences (thus we take our experience of gold and our experience of mountains to invent a gold mountain). The three ways we combine knowledge is: contiguity, cause and effect, and resemblance.
I'm still reading Hume, so I can't give a definite opinion yet, but that's what his argument appears to me so far.
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
I remember being in Theology Class at Olivet, and the professor using the arguments of Descartes to disprove Hume's. He didn't like it very much when I raised my hand and pointed out that he had his timeline backwards. Descartes didn't write to disprove Hume, Hume wrote his to disprove Descartes. The professor's answer was "well Hume is obviously wrong so now we do it this way". Glad to see you're getting a better education than I was . :P
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