Keywords
scepticism
probability
belief
knowledge
How to Cite
Abstract
It was Hume's concept of knowledge that marked Masaryk's philosophy more than influential Kant. Masaryk devoted Hume his inaugural lecture The Probability Calculus and Hume's Scepticism at Prague University in 1882. He tried to face his scepticism concerning causation and induction by a formula P = n:(n+1) or P = (n+1):(n+2) where P means the increasing probability that an event that had happened n times in the past will happen again. Hume stresses that there is an essential difference between probability and certainty, and we have no logical reason to presuppose that the past experience (however massive) is legitimate for expectation that the future will resemble to the past. Only our belief, not knowledge, leads us to that. Although Masaryk did not accept Hume's scepticism, he had deep understanding for his way of thinking. Reflection of Hume's influence on Masaryk in Czech philosophy is unsatisfactory, which is stated in this article.
Since 2019, TEORIE VĚDY / THEORY OF SCIENCE journal provides open access to its content under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
Authors who publish in this journal agree that:
- Authors retain copyright and publication rights without restrictions and guarantee the journal the right of first publishing. All published articles are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution license, which allows others to share this work under condition that its author and first publishing in this journal was acknowledged.
- Authors may enter into other agreements for non-exclusive dissemination of work in the version in which it was published in the journal (for example, publishing it in a book), but they have to acknowledge its first publication in this journal.
- Authors are allowed and encouraged to make their work available online (for example, on their personal websites, social media accounts, and institutional repositories) as such a practice may lead to productive exchanges of views as well as earlier and higher citations of published work.
There are no author fees, no article processing charges, or submission charges.
The journal allows readers to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of its articles and allows readers to use them for any other lawful purpose.
A summary of the open access policy is also available in the Sherpa Romeo database.