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Descartes Vs Hume

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Michael Ryerson Philosophy 200 Final Paper The understanding of the way we acquire knowledge has been one of the most debatable topics in philosophy, either through experience or reasoning. Experience is defined as dealing with the impressions and the events through one’s life. Hume and Locke are empiricists, or those who believe that experience is the ultimate form of knowledge. Descartes and Kant are rationalists, who believe that reasoning is the better and more fundamental form of acquiring knowledge. Hume and Locke agree that impressions and ideas are what form the background and the foundation of reasoning for humans to rationalize or reason about their experience. Hume however further explains, while he agreed with Locke’s concept, …show more content…

Using examples of people who have been brain damaged or considered insane, who cannot rationalize or reason about the senses being deceived and normal or mentally healthy people would be able to realize that the senses can be deceived. Descartes states that dreams are a prime example of being deceived by the senses and the experience because dreams are made up similar to movies from our experiences which we cannot distinguish from reality. The dreams are made up of copies of real things, but since dreams are vivid and consist of things like eyes, heads, hands, and the body as a whole, it must be real and not imaginary. During Descartes’ work of reasoning he only comes up with the certainty of: if one can think, then they are real and they do exist, but it never proves that the knowledge through the senses is …show more content…

Kant joins all of these into as aforementioned synthetic and analytic statements: analytic propositions or statements are true by logic of our mind, nature and convention. Synthetic truths are factual truths proven through experience. An analytic proposition is a triangle having three sides: people use logic, reason and the context of the definition to prove and support this claim. Synthetic proposition is defined as one having to use his/her experience to go out and prove or disprove the statement because the statement is not true by

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Descartes begins his argument by comparing the dreams he could have to the dreams of a madman. He says he has similar experiences as one would except of a madman why asleep, if even sometimes more outlandish ones (Descartes, 13). He goes on to describe how his dreams in the past contained events that are hardly different from the time he considered himself to be awake. Theses help to support the claim that there is no way to tell whether or not he is dreaming or awake. This defines Descartes’ first premise to be “If you cannot distinguish between the time when you are dreaming and the time when you are awake using the sense, then the sense can be doubted.

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