David Hume Compare And Contrast

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Contrast of Hume and Descartes Before any clarifications are made, differences between Descartes and Hume are made. Renee Descartes began his search for answers in solitude and presented his findings in a manner as if they were the fruits of his meditations. In his book, Meditation on First Philosophy, Descartes, in his path to absolute certainty, discarded all his pre-held notion that he had. In this endeavour to find ideas and truths that were beyond a shadow of doubt crystal clear he had to disregard all his pre-conceived ideas that were a result of his senses. The process is called methodological doubt, Descartes was a Rationalist. He stated that all sensory data could be unclear (misleading)
On the other hand, there is David Hume. In his book, An Enquiry concerning human understanding, David Hume speaks of how ideas are built up on the basis of impressions. By impression, Hume simply means those of sensory and emotive nature. In contrast, ideas are what we think and believe about these said impressions. These ideas are constructed on the basis of three stages (or laws of association), which are, resemblance, contiguity, and cause and effect. Hume justifies that matters of fact and ideas vary in importance and how they can be treated, meaning accepted. Matters of facts are simple truths which do not hold much importance and, therefore, be denied and contradicted. However, ideas hold a huge amount of significance and if they are not accepted then contradictions
He rejects anything that comprises of doubts. He stops himself to fall into the trap of building on ideas that are doubtful in any magnitude. He states that senses provide information that helps us to move and work in the physical world, it does not provide truths. Another conclusion of the First meditation is that nothing should be accepted at face value, everything should pass the test of evidence- meaning do not accept anything as truth unless it has evidence. On the other side, David Hume falls from certainty to doubt because he starts of saying that all ideas are stemmed, and are copies, from impressions and that these impressions are a source of knowledge. Hume was more interested in the relations that ideas have with one another, not if they were true or not. In his opinion, the relation that should be given importance is of cause and effect but at the same time he says that causal relation is mostly influenced by habits (probability/connections). The madman views are, therefore, evident when Descartes states that nothing can be trusted if it has a shred of doubt, which he states is impossible. In case of Hume, when he says that matters of fact can be denied is wrong because they can also be proved through empiricism (Hume says we are not supposed to ascertain