Descartes & Hume Essay

Rene Descartes was a rationalist, means he thought that reason alone, non sensation or escort, was the source to attaining association close the double-dyed(a) truths of the universe, such as mathematics, epistemology, metaphysics and the existence of God. He excluded physics from this list, admitting that cognition of physics tho comes through hump (Descartes). Regardless, his rationalistic epistemology made it so that Descartes could yet accept the truth about something if it was found upon a principle that was clearly and distinctly certain. Innate, a priori have sexledge is fundamental to Descartes philosophy.A priori refers to every knowledge that is attained without sympathetic to sensation (OConnor, Class Notes). Being a rationalist, he completely doubted every sensory(a) experience he had ever had. gumption is ever-changing and sometimes misleads or deceives us, so according to Descartes, trusting in an experience of sensation to provide us with any kind of un iversal truth would be foolish (Descartes). Whereas rationalism directly focuses on reason as being the only focusing to attain knowledge about the world, empiricism concentrates fully on all knowledge being a posteriori, or attained through experience and sensation.In an obvious way, David Humes empiricist epistemology directly contrasted Descartes rationalism, specifically by how he believed military man privy attain knowledge. According to Hume, humans run into the world by experiencing different perceptions impressions/sensations and ideas/thoughts. The totality of force and vivacity of the perception allows humans to say between the two. Impressions and sensations atomic number 18 more exclamatory and lively since they ar a crossway of direct experience. Ideas and thoughts are simply light-colored recreations of the original impressions that were perceived.While Descartes believes that certain ideas are innate, such as the existence of God, Hume absolutely denies th e possibility of innate ideas. He claims that humans could never fully know or comprehend anything beyond our impressions. If an impression is not perceived, then it kittynot be acknowledged. Since our knowledge is check to the impressions we perceive, we have no real way of comprehending causality, instead it is often confused with correlation. source and effect events tend to occur in close temporal order, but that does not mean we can know whether those events are intrinsically related or not.Instead, we can only place our faith in the customs and habits of human life. Oppositely, Descartes believed we gain knowledge a priori, and we can only know that which we have clear and distinct defense for. In order to justify what we know, we cannot prayer to anything except for reason. Lastly, we must judge those confirm ideas by applying Descartes specific and logical mode of reflection. Thusly, by accepting Descartes method, the universal and eternal truths of the world can be k nown.