Compare And Contrast Descartes And John Locke

Throughout the past years we had great philosophers who expressed their studies and conclusions that made them very famous. Rene Descartes and John Locke were two philosophers that had the same idea, but different views of it. Descartes was a rationalist, which are people that argue that only reason can separate reality from illusion and give meaning to experience. The idea that eliminates reasoning can produce certain truths about reality and those important truths can be discovered without observations, experiment, or experience. Locke on the other hand was an empiricist. An empiricist believes that all ideas can be traced back to the sensory. They also believe that reason alone is unable to provide knowledge of reality; and knowledge can
Descartes supposed that in order to obtain knowledge, there must be a method than could help find the truth and as a result he came up with his method of doubt or method of reasoning. Descartes was certain that math could be used to solve the most important problem and anything can be achieved by reasoning. According to Descartes some ideas must be acknowledged before people can be familiar with anything else. The priori knowledge is developed from reason independently without experience. An example of a priori idea would be that every event has a cause. The opposite of prior knowledge is a posterior knowledge which is an experimental knowledge developed by experiences. An example of posterior knowledge would be a shirt being white. However, Descartes believed that people were born with certain ideas. He then came across the famous “cogito” “I think, therefore I am.” The meaning of this was that he knows that he exists because he thinks. He believed that this was the same for every human, that all individuals have innate ideas. In order for people to discover these ideas, Descartes suggested that they should perform the method of reasoning. He believed that knowledge of external things was a result of the mind alone, and not the sensory. Descartes also used the method to prove the existence of God by showing that the idea “God” cannot be obtained from human experience but can only come from the actual existence of God. (Soccio