Comparing Descartes and Hume: Rationalism vs. Empiricism
Comparison: René Descartes and David Hume
Let’s compare Descartes to Hume. Hume was an empiricist.
Empiricism and Rationalism
Empiricism, like rationalism, focuses on knowledge and how it is acquired. The main representatives of empiricism were Locke, Berkeley, and Hume. The main representatives of rationalism were Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza, and Malebranche.
Hume’s Perceptions
Hume distinguishes two types of perceptions: impressions and ideas. Impressions are the immediate data of sense experience, while ideas are weak copies left in our mind after a sensory experience. He also distinguishes between simple and complex perceptions. Simple and complex are indivisible and divisible.
Hume is critical of metaphysics and denies the existence of the idea of substance, since it does not correspond to any sensory experience.
Methods of Knowledge
For Descartes, the method of knowledge was mathematics, specifically Euclidean geometry, whereas for Hume it was Newtonian physics. Descartes used the hypothetical-deductive method, ranging from the universal to the particular. Hume used the inductive method, which goes from the particular to the universal. Hume believes that knowledge is probable.
Innate Ideas vs. Experience
Descartes believed in the existence of innate ideas in man, undeniable truths and secure, but Hume denies this, since for him the human mind at birth is like a blank slate in which writing is through experience.
Criteria of Truth
For Descartes the criterion of truth was evidence: something exists when reason sees it as obvious, clear, and distinct. For Hume the criterion of truth was the criterion of correspondence: something exists when it corresponds to a sensory experience. For both philosophers, knowledge is knowledge of ideas, but they have different concepts of ideas. Descartes thinks that an idea is a sort of lens through which we see what really exists, for Hume it is a weak copy left in our mind after a sensory experience.
Hume’s position leads to skepticism and phenomenalism.
Descartes’ Biography
Descartes was born in La Haye in 1596 to a Roman Catholic family belonging to the lower nobility. He studied Aristotle in school textbooks. He graduated in law and later moved to Holland to study mathematics and pursue a military career. During a trip to Europe, where he studied “the book of the world”, he decided that his career in science and philosophy should be dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge to help mankind. Also during this trip, he conceived the universal method of deductive reasoning and esoteric study, but was disappointed. Descartes did not like military life; he was only drafted into the army to travel, thinking that learning about other cultures was a good way to learn. He returned to Holland, where he wrote the “Rules for the Direction of the Mind.” Since 1629 he devoted himself to writing and publishing, among others, the “Discourse on Method,” “Meditations on First Philosophy,” and “Principles of Philosophy.”
Descartes and the Renaissance
Descartes lived during the Renaissance. The interest of the Renaissance was to recover the original theories that had been undermined during the Middle Ages. This movement tries to achieve through education that respects human dignity and that different ideologies and beliefs can coexist. Renaissance philosophy is a critique of the criterion of authority of Aristotelian philosophy and the introduction of concepts that prepare a new philosophy more focused on reason and with a more scientific basis, that is, a philosophy based on the Pythagorean.
An example is Juan Luis Vives, who fought against the criterion of authority from the Middle Ages and affirmed the need to raise a critique of knowledge and a return to direct observation of reality and later scientifically analyze the data.