Compare Descartes And John Locke's Rationalist Epistemology

Epistemology is the study of how we acquire knowledge and justify our beliefs. Descartes promoted a rationalist epistemology through his masterwork Meditations on First Philosophy (1641), which were designed to build a theory of knowledge from the ground up. Rationalism states that knowledge is acquired through the use of reason. In contrast, John Locke promoted empiricist epistemology through his Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Empiricism is any view which bases our knowledge, or the materials from which knowledge is constructed, on experience through the traditional five senses. In my opinion, John Locke’s ideas on how we gain knowledge is stronger, but I believe we need aspects of both Descartes and Locke’s ideas to fully understand where our knowledge comes from.
Descartes strategy was called methodic doubt, which is a way of searching for certainty by systematically doubting everything. He gave three arguments for doubt the unreliable senses argument, the dream argument, and the evil demon thought experiment. Descartes’ unreliable senses argument is supported by three things optical illusions, variation, and deterioration. Descartes’ second argument states that we might actually be stuck in one extended dream and if you are in a dream nothing is real. However, Descartes believes that even in a dream we know physics, logic, math, and geometry. His last argument, the evil demon thought experiment, states that in order to be really sure that we have started fresh we need to assume everything is a lie. However, even if we assume that everything we see is false, Descartes shows that we can still know things. We are able to know that we exist and we can know “necessary” truths, such as mathematical and logical truths. Overall, Descartes believes we gain knowledge through thinking, and not through