Descartes & Hume Essay

Rene Descartes was a rationalist, meaning he estimation that reason alone, not sensation or experience, was the source to attaining intimacy to the highest degree the eternal truths of the universe, such as mathematics, epistemology, metaphysics and the existence of God. He excluded physics from this list, admitting that association of physics only comes through experience (Descartes). Regardless, his rationalistic epistemology made it so that Descartes could only accept the truth about something if it was based upon a normal that was clearly and distinctly certain. Innate, a priori hold upledge is fundamental to Descartes philosophy.A priori refers to all knowledge that is attained without appealing to sensation (OConnor, Class Notes). Being a rationalist, he completely doubted ever soy sensory experience he had ever had. Sensation is ever-changing and sometimes misleads or deceives us, so according to Descartes, trust in an experience of sensation to provide us with any la rge-minded of universal truth would be foolish (Descartes). Whereas rationalism trailly focuses on reason as beingness the only way to attain knowledge about the area, empiricism concentrates fully on all knowledge being a posteriori, or attained through experience and sensation.In an straightforward way, David Humes empiricist epistemology directly contrasted Descartes rationalism, peculiar(prenominal)ally by how he believed humans digest attain knowledge. According to Hume, humans understand the world by experiencing contrastive perceptions impressions/sensations and ideas/thoughts. The amount of force and vivacity of the perception allows humans to differentiate between the two. Impressions and sensations ar more forceful and lively since they argon a product of direct experience. Ideas and thoughts are simply weak recreations of the original impressions that were perceived.While Descartes believes that certain ideas are innate, such as the existence of God, Hume absolute ly denies the 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 cannot be acknowledged. Since our knowledge is limited to the impressions we perceive, we build no real way of comprehending causality, instead it is often confused with correlation. develop and effect events tend to occur in close temporal order, however that does not mean we can know whether those events are intrinsically tie in or not.Instead, we can only place our faith in the impost 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 justification for. In order to disembarrass what we know, we cannot appeal to anything except for reason. Lastly, we must judge those justified ideas by applying Descartes specific and logical method of reflection. Thusly, by accepting Descartes method, the universal and eterna l truths of the world can be known.