Does David Hume Believe in the Existence of the Table at Which He Is Sitting At [sic]?

You Might Ask Russell’s Chicken about This

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Hume remains neutral on the existence of an exterior world. He claims in more than one place in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding that any claims concerning the existence of real being must be based on cause-and-effect (inductive) reasoning.

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One cannot, according to Hume, prove that God exists with an ontological argument: an argument based on the definition or understanding of “God.” If one wishes to prove that God exists, one must produce empirical evidence such as God’s footprints.

Hume does not claim that our sensations of such things as the table before us are proof of their existence because he finds that there is no line of reasoning that can support a statement of a matter of fact (an empirical proposition).

His skepticism concerning the truth of empirical claims stems from this reductio ad incommodum that he erects in Section V of An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding: 1) All claims concerning the truth value of empirical claims are based on cause-and-effect…