This is the second in a series of posts on my own philosophical journey; the first post is here.

When we left off, I had expressed my disappointment with Descartes: he’d achieved a new start, but at the cost of excluding most of what he knew from experience. (And at the cost of throwing away most of what had come before in philosophy, though I didn’t understand that, then.) To be fair, his was a methodological rather than real doubt—he fully expected that everything he excluded would be pulled back in during the course of his analysis.

Then along came the Empiricists; and they agreed with me (if I’m allowed to put it that way) that ignoring sense experience was a Big Mistake. The three major Empiricists were Berkeley, Locke, and Hume, and given the time available we spent our time on last of the three, David Hume.

Like Descartes, Hume was happy to start from scratch. And his basic principle was that the only way we come to know anything is through our senses. I was overjoyed. At last, here was some sense.

And yet, there was still something wrong. Hume said that the only way we come to know anything is through our senses—and our senses are not always to be trusted. And consequently, how can we know anything for sure? How can we know anything at all? It became clear to me that Hume’s point of view, if followed to its end, led inexorably to solipsism: I exist; I imagine that other things exist, but I can’t know that for sure.

This struck me then, as it strikes me now, as a reductio ad absurdem, a reduction to absurdity. Clearly something had gone deeply wrong.

Part III