Comparing Descartes, Hume, And The Stanford Encyclopedia Of Philosophy

Reason takes a journey through various philosophical thinkers such as Descartes, Hume, and Kant, throughout history. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy discusses the difference between rationalist and empiricist theses. For rationalists believe that some of our knowledge comes from our own rational nature; whereas empiricists say that all of our knowledge is derived from our sensory experiences. Reason is objectively what we know about the world to be true regardless of our opinion. The truth cannot be disputed and reason cannot be contradictory. It is a structuring mechanism by way we know things and grounding of how we come to know things. Reason uses rational thoughts to have a sense of control over an individual’s desires. People use

He stated that kids would go into the doctor’s office, get vaccinated, and start to show signs of autism right there. Without questioning it, people assumed that since one event occurred and then another event followed; it means the initial event caused the second to occur. Hume says that by habit we binds together the false idea that there is connection between cause and effect. He argues that there is no connection, and that this is a random process. We are habitually inclined to think there is a necessary connection, but there is not. To continue the example, the doctor was removed of his credentials for publishing a falsehood that vaccinations cause autism in children. Correlation does not equal causation. Hume concludes that causality is brought by way of habit and there is actually no connection between two events. The habit of thought is the binding mechanism between causality. Kant comes in to solve Hume’s problem saying that reason supplies the necessary connection that Hume could not find with empiricism. Kant argued that a-priori statements that describe the world are true by way of our mental reasoning that does not rely on our senses. Kant said that the knowledge we have before we experience it is a-priori, which is justifiable by our reason. For example, we learn in math that one plus one equals two. We learn how to add but we don't question the basic fundamentals of math, we just accept it and build from