The Human Question

Somewhere Hume says it is conceivable that at least one thing can come into being without  a cause, and he illustrates this claim, I believe, with the example of a rabbit that at one moment is not imagined to be somewhere (i.e., at whatever location one is imagining) and at the next moment is in full view.  Hume thinks this illustrates the possible event of a thing coming to be without a cause.  But it seems to me that it might equally be an example of creatio ex nihilo .

David Hume divides knowledge into matters of fact, which are about things outside of our minds abut admit of no necessity, and relations of ideas, which involve necessity but do not inform us about the outside world. What if I had a hunch that all 3x4x5 triangles are right triangles?  That is, a hunch based upon a pattern I have observed in drawings of such triangles in the past.  Such a hunch or expectation would be a matter of fact, based upon experience, measurement, rather than a relation of ideas.  BUT what if I later proved tomyself (with the help of the Pythagorean formula) that such a triangle HAD to be a right triangle (with appropo qualifications re Euclidian vs. non-Euclidian geometry)?  The latter is, in Hume's schema, a relation of ideas; so it is not supposed (in Hume's opinion) to give one information about matters of fact. But it does.  Ask yourself:  after learning the Pythagorean formula don't you know MORE about the drawing of the ima...

Newton's third law (that every action has an equal and opposite reaction), seems to me to describe two aspects of the same whole, for the action and reaction occur during at the same time. Our ability to note how two things are contemporaneously interrelated via this third law totally belies Hume's crude conception of antecedent/consequent events as the only knowledge we can have of causality. (On the other hand, a Humean can object that this law is an example of superimposing a mathematical conception of objects [which involves a kind of simultaneity] onto the data of experience.) If they are simultaneous, however, then why do we call one the "action" and the other the "reaction"? Such language misleads us into imagining that one occurs before the other. The answer might be that in our experience, one of the two things exerting equal and opposite forces usually seems to initiate the process: e.g., when I run on a track, I initiate this process, even thoug...

F=MA expresses a simultaneously changing relationship between different variables. There is a kind of causal relationship between them. An increase in mass causes a decrease in acceleration (where force is constant). But it is not the sort of cause and effect described by Hume. Rather, it is an interrelation between two aspects of the same whole... more like per se causality as described by Aristotle rather than Humean characterization of causality as essentially a relation between antecedent and consequent events. In this way it is ironic that Hume sought to emulate Newton by identifying a psychological analog to universal gravitation.