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West Meets East

Some Solid Ideas

Bharatwaj Iyer examines substance with the help of Hume & Vedantic philosophy.

In his 1738 classic A Treatise of Human Nature, the Scottish philosopher David Hume criticised a conception of substance held by many philosophers throughout the long history of Western thought. He rhetorically asks these philosophers how they know of the existence and nature of substances. Hume considers two possible answers: sense perception or sheer thought. If our senses are the source of our knowledge of substances, then substance would need to be observable through taste, smell, touch, and so on. No one, of course, considered substance to be a smell or a taste or a touch, nor even the combination of all these.

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