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Essay / Analysis of the skepticism of Descartes and Hume
Throughout this course, we met several philosophers who shared their ideas about human knowledge. The two texts we will focus on are “Meditations on Early Philosophy” by René Descartes and “Inquiry into Human Understanding” by David Hume. In both texts, each philosopher shares similar skeptical arguments, but to different degrees. Say no to plagiarism. . Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay To begin with, Descartes' skeptical argument is the unreliability of human senses since they deceive us. In the past his senses have deceived him and this causes him to not believe in a single thing because all his beliefs come from or through his senses. This is also called “Cartesian doubt”. Additionally, Descartes brings up the idea of a demon devil, who is not God, whose job is to deceive him into believing false beliefs. If Descartes believes nothing, he can be sure that the devil does not benefit from his knowledge. As he moves forward, Descartes realizes that he is deceiving himself or someone else is deceiving him and comes to the conclusion that he is a thinking thing, therefore he exists regardless of how he is deceived. Having come to this conclusion, he goes on to say that the things he can be sure of are clear and distinct. Furthermore, he mentions the principle of sufficient reason which simply means the fundamental fact about the meaning of cause and effect in which it is clear that in any effect the cause must exist and has a much deeper substance. Descartes explains that human error is possible in his argument that the scope of the (infinite) will is wider than that of the (finite) intellect in Meditation 4. This leads to the new dilemma: if God is not not a deceiver, how humans can even make mistakes. God is the most perfect being, which prevents him from deceiving humans. It is precisely for this reason that God is incapable of giving human beings the capacity to make mistakes. He believes that God made Descartes incapable of making any mistakes, which leads him to wonder where the ability to make mistakes comes from. Descartes says that this is due to a difference between understanding and will. Then he says that the intellect only allows us to perceive ideas, not to make judgments about them, which means that this is not a source of error. And this will is perfect and immeasurable, which means that it is not a source of error. Descartes says that his own understanding was created by God, so it is also not a source of error. Descartes' solution to his problem of skepticism ends when he concludes that God is not responsible for human error. It is not God's fault that human beings decide to judge things that are beyond their understanding. Humans should make it a habit to avoid error by being careful in their judgments and focusing only on judging certain cases. Likewise, Hume shares a skeptical argument similar to that of Descartes. The only difference is that Hume claims that human knowledge is more limited. The test of contradiction, where the argument most supported by the evidence wins, plays an important role in Hume's theory. Hume does not begin to doubt everything like Descartes because of his belief that it would be useless. Hume instead presents his idea of the “fork” in section IV where he expresses that all objects of human reason or inquiry can naturally be divided into two kinds which are relations of ideas and questions of fact. This is a distinction regarding.