TF-of-IS_Sharaf

Hume, David, 1711-76, Scottish philosopher and historian. Hume carried the empiricism of John Locke and George Berkeley to the logical extreme of radical skepticism. He repudiated the possibility of certain knowledge, finding in the mind nothing but a series of sensations, and held that cause-and-effect in the natural world derives solely from the conjunction of two impressions. Hume's skepticism is also evident in his writings on religion, in which he rejected any rational or natural theology. Hume, the extreme empiricist, thoroughgoing skeptic and radical subjectivist, is often seen as the more or less complete antithesis of Descartes, the anti-skeptical rationalist who argued for the existence of a benevolent God as the guarantor of the objectivity of scientific knowledge. Hume believes that all the materials of thinking are derived either from our outward or inward sentiment: the mixture and composition of these belongs alone to the mind and will. Or. To express myself in philosophical language, all our ideas or more feeble perceptions are copies of our impressions or more lively ones.
 * __ David Hume __**
 * Major Works: **
 * A Treatise of Human Nature (1739, 1740)
 * An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748)
 * An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751)
 * Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (published posthumously, 1779)


 * Major Ideas: **
 * All our ideas are derived originally from sense impressions.
 * Since our beliefs are based not on reason but imagination, they cannot be rationally justified.
 * We cannot establish the existence of an external, physical world.
 * Causation must be explained subjectively rather than objectively.
 * There are no minds distinct from the contents of consciousness.
 * Ultimately, nothing can be known.
 * Our moral convictions are based on feeling rather than on reason.
 * The question of God's existence is an enigma; although the chief arguments that attempt to establish that God exists are subject to telling objections, they still have a residual validity.

French rationalist philosopher, soldier and mathematician **René Descartes** (March 31, 1596 – February 11, 1650) is considered the father of modern philosophy. He developed a dualistic system in which he distinguished radically between the mind and matter. As a mathematician, he founded analytic geometry, reformed algebraic notation and ushered in the era of modern mathematics. For Descartes, man has ultimate knowledge of his own existence because he is a thinking being--//cogito ergo sum//--"I think, therefore I am." Thus the foundations of knowledge consist of a set of first, "self-evident" principles, //a priori principles//. The mind is not an empty cabinet but is filled with universal, though not readily known, principles. Descartes distrusted sensory evidence as much as he avoided undisciplined imagination. Descartes published his approach to knowledge in 1637, in //Discourse on Method//. He deduced that knowledge is not so much what corresponds to experience but what has coherency within and among the principles and their deduced statements. And so the rational method is born. Rene Descartes made another important contribution. Descartes reasoned that if the mind is capable of clear, objective thinking, then it cannot ultimately be reducible to the influences of the material world. "Mind" and "matter" are the basic constituents of the universe. Each is absolutely different from the other, requiring nothing but itself to exist. Neither has the properties of the other nor is reducible to the other, yet all in the universe is reducible to one or the other, to "mind" or "matter." Descartes’ argument for the existence of God is roughly this: I have a concept of God, as perfect, infinite and so on. This concept is not vague or fuzzy, but quite clear and distinct. An idea must have a cause – even an idea cannot appear from nowhere. Moreover, it is obvious that, while a greater object can cause a lesser one, the reverse is impossible. No object can produce something greater than itself. Thus, my idea of God, which is supremely great, can only have been caused by just such a being. Thus God, as I conceive of him, must exist. Now, since God is perfect, he must be supremely good, containing to evil at all. Since deception is evil, it follows that God is not a deceiver. God would not allow me to be systematically deceived about everything, in such a way that I cannot possibly discover the truth. Thus my sense experiences must in fact be reliable, for the most part. While I am sometimes deceived, I can at least discover these errors by further investigation. For example, a tower may look round from a distance, but when we get closer we see that it is square – we know that the closer view is more authoritative than the distant view, so we end up with a true belief.
 * __ René Descartes __**


 * Major Works: **
 * Comments on a Certain Broadsheet, 1647
 * Conversation with Burman, 1648
 * Correspondence, post hum. 1657
 * The Description of the Human Body, 1647
 * Discourse on the Method, 1637
 * Geometry, 1637
 * Meditations on First Philosophy, 1641
 * Passions of the Soul, 1649
 * Principles of Philosophy, 1644
 * Rules for the Direction of the Mind, 1630
 * Treatise on the World, 1633


 * Major Ideas: **
 * //Mind and body// are separate substances: Descartes means "a thing existing in such a manner that it has need of no other thing in order to exist"
 * //Freedom of the will//: Descartes does not engage in an extended discussion of problems about free will. But he clearly thinks that the will is free.
 * //Religion and Science:// Descartes has tried to make theology compatible with natural science by insisting that God, and indeed the spiritual or mental side of human nature, is completely different from the corporeal world and hence need not be subject to the laws of physics, which are the laws of corporeal substance.
 * //Skepticism//: Descartes launches a devastating skeptical attack on our received views. The gap between what we can be certain of and what, until later in the Meditations, we cannot, coincides with the gap between mental substance and physical substance: we can be certain about the contents of our own minds; the main skeptical problem is how we can ever get from that knowledge to knowledge of the physical world.
 * //The source of knowledge//: Descartes' conviction that sensation and imagination are not reliable sources of knowledge; only understanding or reason can be trusted.
 * //Subjective and objective//: Descartes, says that sensory properties -- taste, warmth, colors, and so on -- are not really features of objects, Although I feel heat upon drawing closer to the fire, and I feel pain upon drawing even closer to it, there is indeed no argument that convinces me that there is something in the fire that is similar either to the heat or to the pain, but only that there is something in the fire that causes in us these feelings of heat or pain.

Hume argues that man gains knowledge from experience and that we should be skeptical of all other knowledge. Descartes believes all knowledge comes from the mind, and that the only thing we cannot question is our existence "I think, therefore I am." For Descartes, nothing else can be proven. The two philosophers turn out to have a lot in common: in particular, they share the program of undermining and replacing scholasticism, Descartes more especially in physics, Hume more in morality and the human sciences. In effect, this involved them both in an attempt to substitute a whole new language and conceptual scheme for the one used to express the scholastic (and to a certain extent the common-sense) picture of the world. Above all, they had to elaborate a language which would make it perfectly clear that such mentalistic concepts as "purpose" and "value" had no place in the description of external or physical nature.
 * __Differences__**
 * __Commonalities__**