April 5th

Today we encountered David Hume. As we saw, Hume defends a division of our mental lives into ideas and impressions. Vividness distinguishes impressions from ideas. Hume defends the 'Copy Principle', which states that every idea is a copy of an impression. And yet, strangely, Hume immediately allows for an exception to the copy principle in the missing shade of blue example. Maybe that's because his project is psychological. As evidence for that view, we saw today that Hume has interests that would be called psychology today, for example, he is interested in how ideas fit together in the mind.