Hume, Empiricism and the Generality of Thought

Abstract

Hume sought to analyse our propositionally-structured thought in terms of our ultimate awareness of nothing but objects, sensory impressions or their imagistic copies, “ideas.” The ideas of space and time are often regarded as exceptions to his Copy Theory of impressions and ideas. On grounds strictly internal to Hume’s Treatise, I argue that they are instead typical of Hume’s account of the generality of thought. This ultimately reveals the limits of the Copy Theory and of Concept Empiricism. The key is to recognise how very capacious is our (Humean) imaginative capacity to associate particular perceptions by various fine-grained determinable resemblances.