During the course of this course, we met several philosophers who shared their ideas about human knowledge. The two texts we will focus on are "Meditations on First Philosophy" by René Descartes and "An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding" by David Hume. In both texts, each philosopher shares similar skeptical arguments, but at different levels. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay To begin, Descartes' skeptical argument is the unreliability of human senses as they deceive us. In the past, his senses have deceived him and this makes him decide not to believe in a single thing because all his beliefs come from or through his senses. This is also called “Cartesian doubt”. Furthermore, Descartes raises the idea of a devil demon, who is not God, whose job is to deceive him into false beliefs. If Descartes believes nothing, he can be sure that the devil demon is not taking advantage of his knowledge. Moving forward, Descartes realizes that he is either deceiving himself or that someone else is deceiving him and comes to the conclusion that it is a thinking thing, therefore it exists regardless of how it is deceived. Having reached this conclusion, he goes on to say that the things he can be sure of are clear and distinct. Furthermore, it mentions the principle of sufficient reason which simply means the fundamental fact about the meaning of cause and effect where it is clear that in every effect, the cause must exist and have a much deeper substance. Descartes explains that human error is possible in his argument that the scope of the (infinite) will is broader than that of the (finite) intellect in Meditation 4. This leads to the new dilemma: if God is not a deceiver, how humans can even make mistakes. God is the most perfect being, which makes it impossible for him to deceive human beings. Precisely for this reason God is incapable of giving human beings the ability to make mistakes. He believes that God made Descartes incapable of making mistakes, which leads him to wonder where the ability to make mistakes comes from. Descartes says this is due to the difference between the intellect and the will. Then he says that the intellect only allows us to perceive ideas, not to make judgments about them, which ensures that this is not a source of error. And that will is perfect and immeasurable, so it is not a source of error. Descartes says that his own understanding was created by God, which makes it not even a source of error. Descartes' solution to the problem of skepticism ends when he concludes that God cannot be blamed for human error. It is not God's fault that humans decide to judge things that are beyond their understanding. Human beings should form the habit of avoiding mistakes by being cautious with their judgments and focusing only on judging certain cases. Likewise, Hume shares a similar skeptical argument to Descartes. The only difference is that Hume argues that human knowledge is more limited. The test of contradiction, in which the argument with the most supporting evidence wins, plays an important role in Hume's theory. Hume does not begin to doubt everything like Descartes due to his belief that it will be useless, rather Hume presents his idea of the "fork" in Section IV where he states that all objects of human reason or inquiry can be naturally divided into two types that are relations of ideas and facts. It is a distinction regarding propositions. Some propositions affirm or purport to affirm relations of ideas, while other propositions affirm or purport to affirm facts. Hume claims that all propositions.
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