Descartes vs Hume
Descartes VS Hume
René Descartes and David Hume touched upon epistemology on the same question, “where does human knowledge come from?” They both came to very different conclusions. Descartes claimed that our knowledge came from human reasoning alone and this is an absolute certainty principle. This faculty of reasoning is innate tool that came with human species. He called this tool, “mind,” which is separated from our body. Hume on the other hand, claimed that human learned from observing the empirical world, and connecting ideas using, “cause and effect.”
René Descartes realized that many of the things that he have accepted as the truth was false opinions, and consequentially the principles that were built upon them. He wanted to start anew by try to find out “the truth”, and then build upon that, because the foundation of science requires absolute certainty. In his attempt to find “the truth,” he started to criticize all of the things he had formally believed: applying the method of doubts, and then remove from the foundation what he found to be doubtable or deducible. He did this as he believed as his doubt increase, certainty decrease and vice versa. By the end of Meditation I, he was in a state called “Abyss,” where he was skeptical of all things and decided that the empirical world was presented to him by an evil demon He then reasoned that for him to be deceived by the demon, he must exist as something, a mind or a thinking thing
After stating that his mind is the sole certain thing, he used wax to illustrate that human cannot achieve knowledge through sense, or imagination alone. He stated that just from observing a piece of already melted wax, he would not be able to identify it as the same piece of wax he had seen earlier in its former form, if he had not been witnessing the melting process. So, sense alone is not the source of knowledge. If he then removed every qualities that a piece of wax can be without, what remain is “something extended,
René Descartes and David Hume touched upon epistemology on the same question, “where does human knowledge come from?” They both came to very different conclusions. Descartes claimed that our knowledge came from human reasoning alone and this is an absolute certainty principle. This faculty of reasoning is innate tool that came with human species. He called this tool, “mind,” which is separated from our body. Hume on the other hand, claimed that human learned from observing the empirical world, and connecting ideas using, “cause and effect.”
René Descartes realized that many of the things that he have accepted as the truth was false opinions, and consequentially the principles that were built upon them. He wanted to start anew by try to find out “the truth”, and then build upon that, because the foundation of science requires absolute certainty. In his attempt to find “the truth,” he started to criticize all of the things he had formally believed: applying the method of doubts, and then remove from the foundation what he found to be doubtable or deducible. He did this as he believed as his doubt increase, certainty decrease and vice versa. By the end of Meditation I, he was in a state called “Abyss,” where he was skeptical of all things and decided that the empirical world was presented to him by an evil demon He then reasoned that for him to be deceived by the demon, he must exist as something, a mind or a thinking thing
After stating that his mind is the sole certain thing, he used wax to illustrate that human cannot achieve knowledge through sense, or imagination alone. He stated that just from observing a piece of already melted wax, he would not be able to identify it as the same piece of wax he had seen earlier in its former form, if he had not been witnessing the melting process. So, sense alone is not the source of knowledge. If he then removed every qualities that a piece of wax can be without, what remain is “something extended,