Hey, just because I've always been wrong about every other case, doesn't mean I'm wrong about this one!
One of David Hume's central skeptical ideas was that we could never observe causation directly. So, for example, when we see that a billiard ball hits another billiard ball causing it to move, we only see the two events occur next to each other (Hume called this "constant conjunction"), we don't actually observe any "causation". Hume was a strict empiricist, meaning that he thought all knowledge came from the senses, so this lead him to doubt that we could ever have any knowledge about causation, or know for certain if some event caused another event to occur.
Stupid God, giving us eternal paradise. Who put this asshole in charge anyway?
And for my next trick, I will move my body around using only my soul! But my soul is immaterial and my body material, how I am doing it? Magic. That's how.
The wax "trick" is a reference to Descartes Wax Argument, in which he argued that even simple objects can't be known from only their empirical content, because that content can easily change in almost all regards without the object essentially changing. Further on in Meditations, he argues that the entire world could theoretically be an illusion, and there would be no way to discover this empirically, because our sense can be deceived.
Okay, I promise this is the last time I'll do a "radical freedom" joke. Although when you think about it no promise that I make today can actually determine my future actions, on account of...well, you know.
Thales is probably the oldest Western philosopher that we have record of, so in that sense he "invented philosophy" (although I'm sure there were people before him that asked the same kinds of questions, whose work was lost). His theory, basically, was that all that exists is composed of a single substance: water. Today we know that water is composed of other things, but the idea that everything is only different modalities of a single thing is still alive, whether that thing is a certain kind of boson, or quantum fields, or whatever. How Thales would respond to questions about whether abstract concepts like "infinity", or subject experiences like "sadness" were also simply made of water we don't know, but those kind of questions are probably what motivated Plato to have a more complex theory of existence beyond simply matter, in his theory of forms.
Anaximander and Anaximenes were students of Thales who worked on similar problems, who also believed in a kind of monist system, i.e. that reality was made of only a single thing.
Anaximander and Anaximenes were students of Thales who worked on similar problems, who also believed in a kind of monist system, i.e. that reality was made of only a single thing.