For Descartes, the soul may be the only thing that we can be aware of; he argued that true knowledge is only gained through rational introspection and that the senses cannot be trusted. Descartes was also a mind-body dualist; because he could conceive of his mind existing without his body, he concluded that the mind must be made of an entirely different substance, a substance that thinks.
Upon this foundation he claims all knowledge is built. Locke argues that innate ideas are just another name for one’s pet ideas. Locke realizes that we only know things as we experience them, we don’t know the essence of the substances that make up the world. Descartes wants to know what’s true. He begins by doubting everything and argues that knowledge derives
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Berkeley realizes that we can have perceptions without there being an external world at all. We have perceptions, but their source is unknown. He also applies this skepticism about the existence of the external world to science, morality and religion. Still, Hume believes that mathematics and the natural sciences are sources of knowledge. Scientific knowledge is not absolute because there are problems with the idea of cause and effect as well as with inductive reasoning. That source could be a god or gods, other powerful beings, substances, the imagination, etc. All reality may be in the mind! Recognizing the implications of this radical philosophy, Berkeley claims that his God constantly perceives the world and thus the world is real after all. Hume follows this thinking to its logical …show more content…
Instead, he remained just as sceptical about the existence of the mind. Hume argued that innate ideas, like those found in mathematics, do not tell us anything useful about the external world. Hume combined Descartes' rationalism with Locke's empiricism, and argued that we gain knowledge from both impressions, which arise from external stimulus, and ideas, which are innate. All useful knowledge comes from experience, but these do not tell us anything that is necessarily true. Hume claimed that knowledge of the self is also formed by custom and habit. He could not see any evidence that the mind is made of a non-physical substance, or that it persists through time separately from the body. Although Hume accepted that there are thoughts, he did not accept Descartes' claim that this means there must be a thinker. In a similar fashion, Hume did not think that there was any evidence of God; he did not think that the mind could conceive of such an entity. Hume described the mind as a 'bundle' of perceptions, and did not think there was any evidence of something that takes ownership of these sensations, a