Philosophy Outcome 1 Gregor Leishman 1x
Rationalism and Empiricism
Within philosophy there are many forms of thought and reasoning. The two which hopefully will be explained are Rationalism and Empiricism. With both of these schools of thought there were people that believed in the explanations or theories which each school presented. The main philosophers that belonged to these schools were, Jene Descartes and David Hume, both having their own ideas and thoughts on knowledge. Descartes followed the ideas behind innate knowledge and Hume followed the ideas behind empirical knowledge. Innate knowledge can be explained as the idea of knowledge a person is born with or knowledge that comes from within a person. Where as empirical knowledge is knowledge that is gained from a person’s senses or sense organs, for example, the eyes or ears.
Descartes believed that there were two ways that enable us to arrive at the knowledge of things, these were, intuition and deduction. Descartes also set out a number of rules for the use of intuition and deduction. These were “never to accept anything for true which I did not clearly know to be such; that is to say, carefully to avoid precipitancy and prejudice and to compromise nothing more in my judgement than what was presented to my mind so clearly and distinctly as to exclude all ground of doubt”. The second rule he applied to this was “to divide each of the difficulties under examination into as many parts as possible, and as might be necessary for its adequate solution”. Descartes also believed that knowledge was based upon reason which could be arrived upon from self evident truths, for example, “two plus two equals four”. Because Descartes lived in a time when traditional ideas were being questioned he sought to devise a method of reaching the truth. This concern and his method of systematic doubt had an enormous impact on the following development of philosophy. Through this system of doubt he introduced the now famous Latin phrase “cogito ergo sum” which in English means, “I think therefore I exist”. This was probably one of the few things that he believed in and could not doubt, although he had adopted a line of thinking which rejected all that he had been taught about the world and that all his experiences were invalid or untrue. Furthermore although he was a mathematician as well as a philosopher he placed no confidence in his mathematical findings, he places no confidence in the evidence of his senses; he may be dreaming, even the apparent certain propositions of mathematics are rejected, “an evil demon may be deceiving him”. Through this reasoning Descartes did believe in something and that was “in doubting, he must be conscious, and in that consciousness lies an awareness that he is something”. In this Descartes believed he had discovered evidence that was unshakable and through this analytical method he discovered the foundation on which he would rebuild his beliefs concerning knowledge. From this Descartes moved on to trying to prove the existence of a God and in this he presumed that “a benevolent God, who, he thinks, would not permit him to be deceived in such matters”. If this proof was found it would pave the way to prove that the existence of the world and all the objects that Descartes doubted. He believed it possible to use clear and distinct ideas to demonstrate the existence of God to establish the reliability of reason. Generally despite the possibility of error, and to prove that material things did exist. On these grounds, Descartes defended a strict dualism, according to which the mind and body are wholly abstract, even though it seems evident that they interact. The proof he searched for cane from within himself (innate). He found the idea of a perfect being where as before he doubted the ideas of external things. This idea came from within, just as he was able to form an idea of himself; Descartes argued that through this there is evidence of the existence of a perfect being or God, because this being must have implanted it within him.
