Comparing Descartes, Berkeley, And Hume

Philosophers such as Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume have similar but also contrasting views on the nature and existence of external objects. Descartes said that God is not a deceiver. His view about external objects, is that God created and gave him reasoning that lets him know that his ideas come from external things. Meaning that external objects have to exist because if they did not, that would mean that God was a deceiver, which is not true. Descartes views external objects as also as external “bodies”. We know through our mind and faculty of judgment, not through our senses or imagination. You cannot identify substances, but properties of substances, which is manifest substances. He believed that substances are independent and do not need to rely on any other substances. There is perpetually one principle property of substances which establishes its nature and essence, which all others rely on. Descartes is commending the view that matter is infinitely divisible. If matter is infinitely divisible, then we can never reach at the simple unities that must exist at some metaphysical ground level. Another, is if matter is simply extension, then there is in its nature no source of activity. If this is so, Leibniz thought the bodily …show more content…
Skepticism and atheism comes from materialism, which makes us to believe that our senses failed and mislead us about the external world around us. Atheism cannot be raised, because that would mean that the material world can exist without the guidance of God. To Berkeley, we only see the idea of trees, tables, or chairs, that we believe we are “looking” at. Ordinary things are only ideas, which means that they do not exist beyond our mind. He believed that visual ideas of external objects came from tactile ideas of them. The objects must be distinct, since there is not a direct connection between sight and