人类理解研究

The Philosophy of Skepticism The author also devotes his book to an analysis of skeptical philosophy. He argues that there are excessive skepticism and moderate skepticism. The ancient Greek Pyrrhonian skepticism is excessive skepticism, which is not beneficial to society and therefore will not have a long-lasting influence, while his own skepticism "advocates limiting our research to those topics best suited to the narrow faculty of human understanding", which is moderate skepticism, beneficial to society and therefore will endure. The author is subjectively opposed to Pyrrhonian skepticism and advocates taking into account the limits of understanding in the process of recognition. Posthumous Influence The philosophical ideas that Hume expounded in his book have had a great influence on modern Western philosophy. First, his skepticism was still "the form of all non-religious philosophical thought" in 19th century England. Secondly, Hume's influence on Kant's philosophical thought is also well known. Third, although Hume's thoroughgoing empiricism put an end to traditional Western empiricism in the modern era, it provided the theoretical premise for modern Western empiricism. The Study of Human Understanding, which takes subjective impressions as the basis of all knowledge, avoids the fundamental problem of thought reflecting objective existence while denying the dynamism of human cognition, and confines knowledge to passive, narrow sensory experience, fully revealing its one-sidedness. Hume's analysis of the concept of cause and effect revealed the scientific law that sense experience cannot establish universal necessity, which inspired Kant to make a more profound exploration, and his skepticism contributed to the transformation of Kant's thought. Various modern Western empiricist philosophical schools, such as positivism and logical positivism, inherited Hume's epistemological ideas. Evaluation of Works Clifton Feldman, an American author of "A Lifetime of Reading": A Study in Human Understanding is a book with no language barriers, but still not easy to understand, because the author refers to various primitive sensations he names "impressions".