Comparing Rene Descartes And John Locke's Meditations Of First Philosophy

Rene Descartes and John Locke are regarded as the first early modern philosophers. Both were in search for the answer to the same question in metaphysics and epistemology, what is knowledge? However, in search for the answer to this question, both philosophers differ in terms of their answers. They’re answers contradicted, and they critiqued one another on their own propositions. The rivalry between rationalism and empiricism emerged within epistemology. In what follows, I will be comparing Descartes’s rationalistic views and Locke’s empiricist views on senses and innate ideas. In Descartes’s writing, “Meditations of First Philosophy”, he focused on doubts and innate knowledge. Descartes’s method of doubt was a way for him to know the absolute truth. Any belief that he had the slightest doubt on, he considered false. He realized that a lot of the opinions he learned in his youth were false. Later on, he felt that everything he knew that he …show more content…
Locke was against Descartes propositions of innate knowledge and rationalism. In John Locke’s writing, “An Essay Concerning Human Understanding”, it was in his belief that if people did have innate knowledge, then everyone would come in to terms and possess that knowledge. Furthermore, Locke goes on to disprove innate knowledge using children and idiots as an example. “For, first, it is evident, that all children and idiots have not the least apprehension or thought of them. And the want of that is enough to destroy that universal assent which must needs be the necessary concomitant of all innate truths” (Locke 203). In addition, Locke also argued that since the idea of a God is innate, then it must be that any idea is innate. However, this is not the case. If the notion of God is innate, then it would be agreed upon by every single person in this world. Locke claims that there is no such thing as innate ideas in the mind, but instead a “blank