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Philosophy Hume and Descartes were the greatest world philosophers who had his assumptions and argumentation concerning almost any philosophical issues presented for society. Humes test for the meaningfulness of an idea involves the clear evaluation of any particular idea and than looking for justification for that idea. As long as any idea has particular proof or solid base that it is expressed on the idea can be considered meaningful. The revival of skepticism, brought about by these modern concepts, had many philosophers seeking answers to different questions such as: Do people know anything at all, and do the sciences give us knowledge of reality?
Rene Descartes, who is the establisher philosophy sought to kill skepticism for good. Descartes gave his Cartesian quest for the meaning of certainty the center stage in his theory of knowledge. Following Descartes, later in the 18 th century, Hume also broke away from the religious belief of the day to explain knowledge from non-theological point of view. However, his epistemology releases Cartesian methods as both unworkable and barren.
Instead, he adopts his own theories, which counter the ideas of his of predecessor, and sheds a different view on the levels of certainty that can be obtained by humans. Contrary to his rational predecessor, British philosopher David Hume approached his epistemology with an empirical view. Because he denied miracles and other religious dogmas, he believed that clarification was the first thing he needed to do in order to remove them, as well as dissolve the Cartesian method of thinking. This is to say that he wanted a clean slate. In order to do this, he believed that, unlike Descartes principals, perceptions were the main content of knowledge. Hume thought thatprori ideas did not exist and that our ideas are not innate, but derived purely from experience of perceptions.
According to Hume, perceptions, can be reduced to impressions and ideas. He believed that humans learned ideas through impressions, which means that if there is no impression, there can be no idea. Therefore this clearly formed a dependence of ideas on the initial impression that made them. Unlike Descartes belief that reason is the same for every person, Hume believed that every individuals perceptions were his alone, and distinct from other peoples. Hume thought that three principals of association bound perceptions together: Resemblance, Contiguity (in time or place, ) and Cause and Effect. For Contiguity, Hume refers to the mention of an apartment building would cause the thought of other apartment buildings.
And if one thinks of a wound, they would primarily think of the pain that is associated with it (cause and effect. ) These are also Humes objects of knowledge, and they are used in the approach to determine whether certainty exists. Descartes decides to base his method on fours rules or laws. The first rule was to not accept anything for pure true which was not clearly known to be such; that is to say, avoid precipitance and prejudice, and to comprise nothing more in judgment than what was presented to the mind so clearly and distinctly as to exclude all grounds of doubt. The second rule of Descartes was to divide each of the difficulties under clear examination into as many manageable parts as possible for its adequate solution. The third was to conduct thoughts in such order that, by commencing with objects the simplest and easiest to know, they ascend by little and little to the idea of the more complex; therefore, assigning in thought a certain order even to those objects that in their own nature do not stand in a relation of antecedence and sequence. The forth rule was to make enumerations so complete, and reviews so general.
Hume believed that Causation is the method of which humans reason. He believed that it is causation that allows us to reach out beyond the limits of sensation and memories. With this in mind, Hume divided all human reason into two kinds: relations of ideas -- that is, reasoning found in mathematics and logic, such as 2 + 3 = 5; which is certain not because it introduces us to such a world of realities, but simply because of how it relates ideas to one another. Hume also recognizes matters of fact- that is; reasoning derived from sense perception such as the sun will rise tomorrow. These are clearly conceived related ideas that could possibly be true, but the evidence is never great enough to amount to certainty. David Hume believes that all our analysis of matters of fact beyond perception and memory is based on the relation of cause and effect.
Causes are nothing more then predictions onto a supposed objective world from a feeling in the mind. We may be able to say one event follows another, but we cannot say that one event caused the other. For example, night follows day, but day did not cause night. Contrary to Descartes belief that effects must come from a cause, Hume believed that causes are senseless and not uncertain.
It is clear, therefore, that unlike Descartes, who used skepticism to arrive at truth, Hume was a skeptic through and through. The Certainty and limits of knowledge- Descartes Although Descartes used methodical doubt; he only used it in order to establish certainty. Descartes arrived at the conclusion that the universe has a logical structure and that even a single method of reasoning could apply to all natural sciences, providing a unified body of knowledge. He believed he had discovered such a method by breaking a problem down into parts, accepting as true only clear, distinct ideas that could not be doubted, and systematically deducing one conclusion from another. Descartes often describes collisions as 'causes' of subsequent events; but he means this as (Hume) vernacular, not serious metaphysics. In such a case, he holds, the whole truth of the matter is this: two bodies collided, then the second one began to move, and this pair of events conforms to a regularity which God established throughout the corporeal world.
But where Hume usually seems content to accept the given regularities as basic, thus founding his picture of the world on a great brute fact, Descartes seeks to explain them by invoking the God in whom Hume did not believe; only then, for Descartes, does real causality within the material world begin. Descartes believed therefore, that human knowledge becomes the complete correlation of reality. This is to say that there is no question so far removed from us as to be beyond our reach or so deeply hidden that we cannot discover it Descartes thought that the mind is equally intelligent; however, diverse the objects it considers; and those objects are always equally intelligible because of their perfect enchainment. Therefore it is possible to say that Humes perception of the meaningfulness of an idea depended largely on the concepts of certainty and limits. Humes empirical line of inquiry called into question our common sense beliefs about the source and support of our sense perceptions. Hume emphasizes that we cannot provide a priori justifications for a number of our beliefs such as: Objects and subjects persist identically over time, or Every event must have a cause.
According to Hume, it becomes clear that empiricism can not give us an epistemological justification for the claims about objects, subjects, and causes that we believe to be most certain about the world. Everything known, according to Hume, depends on perception; however, perception cannot get any evidence outside itself to verify anything. Real knowledge, in his eyes, became completely impossible to achieve. In conclusion, Rene Descartes and David Hume worked in a revolutionary and turbulent time in history. This is to say that, the revolutionary impact of modern science caused great changes in the thoughts of scientists and philosophers. Many of Descartes and Humes ideas are still used as the basics of modern philosophical thought today.
Hume expressed our main concern about the meaningfulness of an idea in his philosophical works. This notion proves to be so destructive to other philosophers, such as Descartes and Lock on the basis of its irrationality. The fact that Descartes was the representative of the rational philosophical movement makes his standpoint to be the one of big argument to what Hume had to say concerning the meaningfulness of an idea. Hume had his priori approach towards the notions of mind and ideas and that approach involved the factual basis for the proof of the idea to be rational. Therefore such metaphysical approach towards the perception of mind and thought as was supported by Descartes has many contradictions to what Hume had to say.
Bibliography: T. Z. Line, From Socrates to Sartre, New York: Viking Press 2 nd Edition, 1998. J. Bennett, Learning from Six Philosophers: Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, Hume - Vol. 1, Clarendon Press, 2001.
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Research essay sample on Cause And Effect Matters Of Fact
