For a long time scholars have posed the question who am I? In my essay we will take a look at the two most compelling logicians of the seventeenth century. Rene Descartes and John Locke attempted to clarify what individual character is and how the brain and body are connected. The major contrast between Descartes and Locke is that Descartes was a rationalist, one who holds information of the world can be picked up by activity of immaculate reason, while Locke was an empiricist, one who trusts that learning of the world comes just through the faculties. Descartes argues self-conscious is essential to having one's very own uniqueness and a continuing self that is the same individual after some time. It is clear what Descartes supposes he is. In his Second Meditation, he attests that he is a “thinking thing” (Descartes, 82), a thing that considers: “doubts, understands, affirms, denies, is willing, is unwilling, and also imagines and has …show more content…
Like Descartes, Locke makes a qualification between the body, “an extended solid substance, and the soul,” “an irrelevant soul ... a substance that considers” (Locke, 124). Locke feels that the self is both the mind and its body. Unlike Descartes who considers thought at a given minute, Locke goes ahead to give a record of memory and clarifies character, equivalence of self, as far as coherence of awareness. John Locke said that self is brought together by awareness and consciousness is bound together between mental states. He asked what makes me the same individual I was yesterday, a week ago or a year ago. What makes me, me? Locke varies from Descartes in recognizing the spirit which is a substance and consciousness. It is our cognizance that we call ourselves, awareness makes our own