The problem of causality and human freedom in David Hume

David Hume, along with John Locke and George Berkeley, is an important philosopher who gained fame as one of the most important representatives of British empiricism and made original contributions to philosophy. The doctrine of causality that Hume conceived through mental processes is one of the original contributions he made to philosophy, and together with his understanding of freedom, the doctrine forms the subject of this study. Although Hume is an empiricist, instead of deriving knowledge from the mere external world for the acquisition of knowledge, he places an important place in the processes of the human mind or the abilities of the human mind. Hume connects our belief that objects exist independently of perception along with all their qualities, to the power of imagination of the mind. He maintains his attitude about the epistemological role of mental processes in the problem of causality and sees the source of our conviction about the existence of causality in a mind-created principle, not in objects itself or in a relationship between objects, but in a mind-based principle of repetition of experiences. This principle, called habit, is an expectation that the future that the mind has entered into with the repetition of experiences will resemble the past. Hume, who also has extraordinary claims about the freedom of man, states that our will and actions are necessarily bound to our character and motives and, moreover, this is the freedom itself. Considering that the legality and the causality we see in nature are equally valid for the human will and actions, Hume argues that thanks to these obligations, the types of people and societies are categorized by certain laws and thus enable individual and social science.