Rene Descartes and David Hume lived in two completely different time periods, yet they shared interest in some of the same philosophical categories. Could animals reason? How did humans expand their knowledge compared to animals? Questions like these were answered both by Descartes and Hume even though they had two opposing views. Descartes was the first to address the questions about animal instincts, and later on Hume set out to refute some of his ideas.
Rene Descartes views humans and animals on completely separate levels. He claims that animals do not possess intelligence and only act through their nature. While humans can perform a multitude of tasks by reasoning, animals can only carry out tasks where nature has given them the skills to do so. One of Descartes’ main arguments about animal’s inability to reason is that they are unable to communicate. If animals are born with the same general organ structure as humans, what’s stopping them from communicating with us? To Descartes, it’s their lack of intelligence. Sure parrots and some other animals can mimic human sounds and words, but they lack the ability to think about what they are saying.
Another one of Descartes arguments supporting the separation of humans and animals is that if machines were created to resemble and act like animals, there is no way we would be able to tell them from the real thing. Unlike the animals though, a machine created to resemble a human could never pass off as real. According to Descartes, it would be impossible to get the machine to react to other humans in an appropriate way. Human conversations are too complicated for machines to understand and interact properly without flaw. This is what separates humans from animals. Even the dumbest ma...
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... and wrong. While Descartes believes that all bad things that happen were actually good if we could just see the bigger picture, Hume says this does not matter. The human and animal mind is not created to think of the bigger picture, it is only able to think about what is right in front of it. So in this aspect, humans and animals are both able to perceive what is right and wrong, therefore supporting Hume’s idea that humans and animals aren’t so different.
Despite having polar opposite views, Rene Descartes and David Hume were both very prominent philosophers of their time. They both contemplated the ideas of reasoning within animals and sought to find the truth about the acquisition of knowledge. Both sides had valid points about whether animals can reason, and it really leaves it up to the individual to decide whether animals have the ability to reason or not.
Beuchamp, Tom (ed), David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ( Oxford University Press 1999).
Hume was an empiricist and a skeptic who believes in mainly the same ideals as Berkeley does, minus Berkeley’s belief in God, and looks more closely at the relations between experience and cause effect. Hume’s epistemological argument is that casual
Regardless of the disagreement between both schools of philosophy that Rene Descartes and David Hume founded, Descartes’s rationalism and Hume’s empiricism set the tone for skepticism regarding knowledge. Rene Descartes rationalism served to form a solid foundation for true knowledge. Although Descartes reaches an illogical conclusion, his rationalism was meant to solve life’s problem by trusting and using the mind. David Hume’s empiricism serves to be the true blueprint on how humans experience the mind. Hume’s empiricism shows that the world only observes the world through their own sense and that there are no a priori truths. For that reason it became clearer that David Hume’s empiricism explains and demonstrates that it is the better way
According to Descartes, “because our senses sometimes deceive us, I wanted to suppose that nothing was exactly as they led us to imagine (Descartes 18).” In order to extinguish his uncertainty and find incontrovertible truth, he chooses to “raze everything to the ground and begin again from the original foundations (Descartes 59).” This foundation, which Descartes is certain to be the absolute truth, is “I think, therefore I am (Descartes 18).” Descartes argues that truth and proof of reality lies in the human mind, rather than the senses. In other words, he claims that the existence of material objects are not based on the senses because of human imperfection. In fact, he argues that humans, similarly to Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, are incapable of sensing the true essence or existence of material objects. However, what makes an object real is human thought and the idea of that object, thus paving the way for Descartes’ proof of God’s existence. Because the senses are easily deceived and because Descartes understands that the senses can be deceived, Descartes is aware of his own imperfection. He
To start, Hume makes the distinction that humans’ relationships with objects are either relations of ideas or matters of fact. “All the object of human reason or inquiry can naturally be divided into, relations of ideas and matters of fact.”(499) Lets discuss these one at a time.
“... the right question for animals is not ‘Can they reason?’ ‘Can they talk?’, but ‘Can they suffer?’ ”
For thousands of years, the nature of human intelligence has been debated, discussed and examined. Descartes’ argument that it is not bodies that think, but an immaterial substance that exists non-spatially is problematic because it vies thinking from a flawed, incomplete understanding of the human brain and its functions. Descartes would defend his claim by arguing that the thinking soul connects to the body through the brain, and while influenced by the states of the brain, exists outside of our bodies, however that would still be ignoring years of study and scientific evidence exploring the brain. The argument that the soul is what thinks, and would therefore makes artificial intelligence impossible is highly flawed.
One of the ways in which Descartes attempts to prove that the mind is distinct from the body is through his claim that the mind occupies no physical space and is an entity with which people think, while the body is a physical entity and cannot serve as a mechanism for thought. [1]
Once Descartes recognizes the indubitable truth that he exists, he then attempts to further his knowledge by discovering the type of thing that he is. Trying to understand what he is, Descartes recalls Aristotle's definition of a human as a rational animal. This is unsatisfactory since this requires investigation into the notions of "rational" and "animal". Continuing his quest for identity, he recalls a more general view he previously had of his identity, which is that he is composed of both body and soul. According to classical philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle, the key attributes of the soul involve eating, movement, and sensation. He can't claim to h...
Descartes’ argument for why corporeal things exist follows logically. Descartes begins his argument stating there is a difference between sensory perception and understanding. He explains, “There is in me a passive faculty of sensory perception…but I could not make use of it unless there was also an active faculty, either in me or in something else, which produced or brought about these ideas. But this faculty cannot be in me since the ideas in question are produced without my cooperation and often even against my will (AT VII: 79; p. 55)”. Descartes establishes that when he senses something, he understands it and does not imagine it. Here he also concludes that it is not our discretion whether we sense something or not; we cannot chose to
In conclusion of this paper, from the arguments stated above about Humes’ and Descartes philosophical positions, Hume has a stronger position on the existence of the external world.
During the enlightenment era, rebellious scholars called philosophers brought new ideas on how to understand and envision the world from different views. Although, each philosopher had their own minds and ideas, they all wanted to improve society in their own unique ways. Two famous influential philosophers are Francis Bacon and John Locke. Locke who is an empiricism, he emphasizes on natural observations. Descartes being a rationalist focus more on innate reasons. However, when analyze the distinguished difference between both Locke and Descartes, it can be views towards the innate idea concepts, the logic proof god’s existence, and the inductive/deductive methods. This can be best demonstrate using the essays, “An Essay Concerning Human Understanding”
John Locke, Berkeley and Hume are all empiricist philosophers that believe in different things. They have things in common such as the three anchor points; The only source of genuine knowledge is sense experience, reason is an unreliable and inadequate route to knowledge unless it is grounded in the solid bedrock of sense experience and there is no evidence of innate ideas within the mind that are known from experience. The relationship between our thoughts and the world around us consisted of concepts which were developed from these philosophers. I have argued that Locke, Berkeley and Hume are three empiricists that have different believes.
Descartes and Hume may have both come from Europe, but there ideas concerning self are opposing. They do both hold similar ideas in some form but their philosophical methodologies lead to conflicting viewpoints.
Like John Locke, Hume believed that at birth people were a blank slate in terms of mental perception but his perspective was that humans do have one advantage: reason. Hume believed that everyone has the ability to reason with the natural order of the world and that it is this ability that separates us from other animals. However, Hume argues “against the rationalists that, although reason is needed to discover the facts of any concrete situation and the general social impact of a trait of character or a practice over time, reason alone is insufficient to yield a judgment that something is virtuous or vicious” (Hume’s Moral Philosophy). It is this distinction that separates him from some of his compatriots in terms of what he considers to be the drive of the whole of