Here's the seminar paper..

Hume:

Hume is important because he developed empirical philosophy to its logical conclusion. He was a young genius, publishing his chief work, the “Treatise of Human nature”, while still in his 20’s. As such he kind of flew under the radar. This wasn’t what he wanted because he wanted to prove himself by providing brilliant retorts to any criticisms of his work. Since his first work fell flat he resorted to essay writing and tutoring. He re-released the treatise with much removed and under the new name of “Inquiry into Human understanding” which proved far more successful. The treatise is broken up into three sections, dealing with the understanding, the passions and the morals. He made the important distinction between ‘impressions’ and ‘ideas’. Ideas are what are formed from impressions. The example in Russell is that we can imagine a winged horse without having seen one, this is the idea, but the constituents of this complex idea are made up from impressions. You’ve seen a horse, and you’ve seen wings so you combine the two. Without the impressions your ideas would not be able to take form. This is kind of in agreement with Berkeley’s doctrine that “all general ideas are nothing but particular ones, annexed to a certain term, which gives them a more extensive significance, and makes them recall upon occasion other individuals, which are similar to them” which put basically, as far as I know, means that general ideas are made up of many particular ideas, which then draw in other related ideas to form the general mass. Hume contends that when we have an idea of a man, it has all the particularity that the impression of a man has. The mind cannot form any notion of quantity or quality without forming a precise notion of degrees of each, abstract ideas are in themselves individual, and however they may become general in their representation. This has two objections. The first is that this is only applied to things and not words. Calling a cat a cat is no more specific because the word cat could essentially mean anything. The second problem is that Hume doesn’t take into account vagueness. Hume stated that “the mind cannot form any notion of quantity or quality without forming a precise notion of degrees of each.” However this is not applicable to the real world. Again, the example given in Russell is that if you saw a man who’s 6ft 1, you’ll retain an image or idea of him, but it’d probably fit a man who is a couple of inches shorter. Here his exactness is his downfall.

                Hume believed that there was no idea of self, because whenever you thought of yourself, you inevitably drew upon other perceptions, by which you judge yourself. There is the problem of whether the self exists because of this. However, we can say that unperceived things can always be defined by referencing perceived things and occurrences. We cannot know whether there is a simple self, and can assume that if there is such a thing it cannot enter into our knowledge.

Hume also focuses on probability, this is different from the probability of mathematics but instead focuses on uncertain knowledge, for example all knowledge as concerned with the future. Hume begins his justification by establishing seven kinds of philosophical relation: resemblance, identity, relations of time and place, proportion in quantity or number, degrees in any quality, contrariety and causation. He then divides these into those that depend on the ideas and those that can be changed without any change in the idea. Only relations that depend on the idea can give us certain knowledge, everything else is only probable. Here rise Hume’s theories about causation. Basically he is saying that causation cannot exist, just because we see something happen does not mean that, by this happening, something else is made to happen. There’s the example of the billiard balls, but essentially, we cannot prove that because the ball struck another ball this caused the movement, we can simply say that the two will be forever linked. 

There was some stuff about Addison but it's basically the same as what's in my lecture notes. Enjoy!