René Descartes

According to Plato’s Cave Allegory, the prisoners are kept in the cave since birth as they can only see and name the shadows of objects on the cave wall. This causes the prisoners to mistaken the appearance of reality due to the reason that they have never seen anything outside of the cave. Similarly, in The Matrix, the main character, Neo is trapped inside a reality created by a computerized program as the program was designed by the artificial intelligence that took over the world. Furthermore…

Rene Descartes born in France in 1956 has brought many influential ideas. Among many of his ideas was that of analytical geometry. He was based on using mathematics as a foundation for knowledge and finding truth. As such, he wants to prove God’s existence by surrounding himself of ideas. He questions himself about things in doubt and clear and distinct ideas. As well, Descartes wants to clarify that being imperfect cannot produce something more perfect and that is better to know perfect than…

Arwa Alnasser G00038951 PHI201 Descartes Vs. Locke René Descartes and John Locke are two philosophers who study metaphysics and epistemology. They try to answer the questions related to that field of philosophy asking: What is knowledge? what can we know? and what is the difference between opinion and knowledge? The answers to those questions for Descartes are radically different than those of Locke. The former comes from a rationalist’s point of view while the later comes from an empiricist…

Descartes argues that man has reason and is therefore able to think and think rationally. Hume’s theory, for Descartes, would probably lower man to the level of animals as many philosophers at that time believed that animals only have a base nature reacting and acting towards their environment requiring no rationality. Descartes would probably argue with Hume on the meaning of the self and personal identity. For Descartes, Hume is wrong in the fact that because…

The most serious objection to Descartes claims attacks the Connection Principle. Without the Connection Principle, Descartes has nothing outside of himself. The Connection Principle is based on the idea that everything has a cause. His entire argument for the Existence of God and by extension, the external world, relies on the premise that it is impossible for him to have an innate idea that does not have any correlation to the real world. Descartes considered the notion that the idea of a…

neuroscience. After discussing René Descartes, Gardner then introduces empiricist responses to Descartes’s rationalist explanation. John Locke, George Berkeley, and David Hume introduce their opposing beliefs in this chapter that challenge the views of the rationalist. As a neuroscience major, I found these competing models to be quite compelling for the realms of philosophy…

“I think therefore I am”, was said by one of the most important philosophers from the Enlightenment period. This philosopher goes by the name of René Descartes. He used the deductive method to arrive to ‘truths’, which eliminated nonsense errors. However, it began when he questioned intellectual certainty. Descartes found the need to restore philosophy and the way that one should acquire knowledge. Thus, he sets himself to find a system, a method, that challenges skepticism. His famous work,…

the difference. Numerous beliefs were once accepted by society as the absolute truth but are now known to be completely false, such as the shape of the earth or the idea that the earth was the centre of the universe. Some philosophers such as Rene Descartes encourage us to question the existence of almost anything. For instance, when we were children we were told to believe in figures like santa and the tooth fairy, but we, later on, found out that they were simply imaginary. This motivates the…

The Skepticism to Descartes Arguments for God's Existence One would sometime question the existence of god just like how René Descartes questions and argues about god’s existence. In Descartes “meditation on first philosophy,” he talks about reality and as well his existence. But he also talks about the existence of God, in how god could be a deceiver and yet still believing that God is not a deceiver as he said “I have no reason to think that God is such a deceiver. In fact, I don’t even know…

portraying reality as nothing more than a computer simulation implanted into humans’ sensory receptors by a race of intelligent super-computers, is nevertheless an idea that has intrigued philosophical thinkers for many ages. For example, in 1641, Rene Descartes wrote about his doubts of perception in Part I of Meditations on First Philosophy, and as early in history as about 380 BC, Plato describes an alternate reality with “The Allegory of the Cave” in his work, The Republic. These three works…