(a) Critically analyse Hume's argument that causality is a matter of habit/custom involving psychological principle of…

(a) Hume on causality as habit: a critical analysis

Hume divides objects of inquiry into relations of ideas and matters of fact. Causal inference belongs to matters of fact, so it rests on experience (Enquiry IV–VII). Observation of one billiard ball striking another gives only contiguity, priority in time and constant conjunction; no impression of a "necessary connection" or power is found in the objects. Reason cannot supply it either, since the effect is not contained in the cause and the denial of any causal claim is conceivable. After many repetitions the mind, through the associative principles of resemblance, contiguity and cause and effect, passes from the idea of one event to the expectation of the other. This custom or habit produces the felt determination of the mind, and that felt necessity is the only impression from which the idea of necessary connection arises. The belief that the future will resemble the past cannot be justified by reason without circularity: this is the problem of induction, and Hume offers a sceptical solution.

Evaluation. Strength: Hume exposes the limits of rationalist claims to a priori causal knowledge and starts the modern study of induction. Weaknesses: Kant argues that causality is a synthetic a priori category, a condition of any experience of events in an objective order (Second Analogy). Thomas Reid said that day follows night regularly without being its cause, which regularity alone cannot explain. Habit and association themselves presuppose causal processes in the mind. Popper replaces induction by falsification, and Strawson argues that causal belief is a natural, unavoidable framework. The account also does not separate laws from accidental regularities. Judgment: Hume succeeds in the negative and fails as an account of objective causation.

(b) Aristotle on actuality and potentiality, and being and becoming

Parmenides held that Being alone is, so that change from non-being to being is impossible; Heraclitus held that all is flux and becoming. Aristotle's reply in the Metaphysics (Book Theta) is that being is said in many ways. Potentiality (dunamis) is the capacity of a thing to become something; actuality (energeia) is its realised state, the fullest sense being entelecheia, the thing at its end. Change is therefore the actualising of what exists potentially, not a coming from non-being. A seed is potentially an oak, bronze is potentially a statue, and a sleeping person is potentially a seeing one. The matter is what is potential and the form what is actual; the four causes (material, formal, efficient, final) explain the process. Actuality is prior to potentiality in definition, in time as to the species (a man begets a man), and in substance, since potentiality is defined by its end. The unmoved mover is pure actuality without matter. Does it solve the problem? It saves both: substance persists while its determinations change, so there is real becoming. Critics note that it presupposes the substance and the final cause, which Parmenides would not grant, and that "potentiality" can look like a name for the change it explains.

(c) Descartes' innate ideas and Locke's refutation

Descartes divides ideas into adventitious, from the senses, factitious, made by the mind, and innate, born with the mind (Meditations III). Innate ideas are the self, God, and the mathematical and logical truths; they are clear and distinct, they have more reality than the finite mind or experience can give, and the idea of a perfect being is like the maker's mark on his work. They are held as dispositions, not as thoughts always before the mind. Locke attacks innatism in Book I of the Essay Concerning Human Understanding. The argument from universal consent fails, since children and the uneducated do not know "whatever is, is" or the law of non-contradiction, and cultures differ on God and morals. Locke's dilemma: if an idea is innate only as a capacity, then all knowledge is innate and the claim is empty; if it requires actual awareness, it is false. Nothing can be in the mind without its being conscious of it. All ideas arise from sensation and reflection, the mind being a blank tablet (tabula rasa). Leibniz replied that innate ideas are dispositions, like veins in a block of marble. The dispute leads on to Kant's synthesis.