Comparing Descartes and Hume

Descartes in his Meditations sets out to derive a “firm and constant knowledge in the sciences”. He does so by first rejecting anything that can be doubted because then it can’t be the absolute truth. He answers the question about who we are based on his popular phrase “I think, therefore I am”. After proving that we are all thinking things, he proves in the existence of god based on the existence of an ultimate divine power. If God were the culmination of all perfection then why would he create imperfection at all? In Meditation IV, Descartes addresses this issue. We all

Furthermore an error is just not the defecieny of some knowledge but the want of knowledge that we all should already be equipped with. According to Descartes, our errors are dependent on the co-existence of cognition and will. God has bestowed each one of us limited knowledge and unlimited free will. Even though we do not have an understanding about everything in the world, it is not because we are deprived of them by nature. We simply don’t posses a comprehensive understanding of everything and God has no reason to provide each and every human being with unlimited knowledge. But he has provided each one of us with unlimited potential to do or not to do something that has been comprehended by our understanding. Both of these powers are perfect in their respect. But then how are we led into making wrong decisions? Descartes believes that the answer to this lies in discerning our will to that which we do not truly comprehend. We do not restrain our will to that which we clearly understand but also to things that we do not, which leads us into error. If we confine our will to only those things that we clearly understand, then and only then can we achieve true knowledge. Descartes believes that there is a discrete difference between true and false, and we are only led into deceit if we don’t understand something and still judge it to be true or false. Our knowledge and our will are perfect but the misapplication of the will alone leads us into making wrong decisions.

Hume in Section IV of the ‘Inquiry’ creates skeptical doubts based on the model of mental activity. Human inquiry yields to two basic forms of judgment: relation of ideas and matters of fact. Relational ideas are abstract judgments that do not depend on any particular experience and follow the principle of noncontradiction. These judgments are always necessarily true. Matters of fact, on the other hand, do not follow this principle and hence a person can negate a matter without contradicting himself if he has never had any past experience on that matter. Now the real problem arises, how do we know any matter of fact to be true at all? We tend to judge a matter of fact based on an old complex idea. Hence, the new idea never enters our realm of consciousness, and all we do is compare it with an idea of that thing but not the concrete thing itself. Only through past impressions we can know things. We are always encompassed in our minds, and since we can’t escape from it we can never tell which idea is true and whic

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