Carlos asked:

I have a question concerning Hume's philosophical account of causes and effects. He says that
causes and effects are based on experience, but what would Hume say about Nostradamus' vision of
the future when he predicted the symbol of the Nazi party? Nostradamus never experienced that, did
he?

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What you really are asking is whether there can be knowledge of the future which is not grounded on
observation and memory. If Nostradamus genuinely foresaw events that were to happen in the future
— that is to say, if he possessed the power of clairvoyance— what we are saying is that his state of
belief was caused directly by something happening in the future, rather than by events preceding the
formation of that state of belief. In other words, for his state of belief to be anything other than a lucky
guess, a cause would have to occur afterits effect.

You don't have to go along with Hume's analysis of causation, or his account of belief, in order to find
the concept of 'clairvoyance' problematic, on the grounds that we simply cannot understand what it
would meanfor a cause to occur after its effect. Suppose I discovered that whenever I say 'Humpty
Dumpty' three times as the postman is walking up the road towards my house, I receive a letter
containing a five pound note. But when I fail to say 'Humpty Dumpty' no such letter arrives. Then it
looks as though, by some mysterious process, saying 'Humpty Dumpty' three times brings it about
that yesterday someone put five pounds in an envelope and posted it to me. Isn't that weird? How
could that possibly happen?

One answer would be, 'We just don't know howa cause can occur after it's effect, but still we can —
for example, in the Humpty Dumpty case — know thatit does. I am very unhappy with that answer.

Your example could be disputed. It seems to me more than likely that the Nazi who first decided to
reverse the Christian symbol of the swastika to use it as an emblem of the National Socialists had
read Nostradamus' prediction. However, that is not the point. The point is that we seemto understand
the idea of a capacity to seethe future. The question, which I leave open for discussion, is whether
any sense at all can be made of that idea.

Geoffrey Klempner