Hume vxs Descartes

Well Hello there. I am really terrible at keeping up with this whole blog concept so please forgive me.

Now last week we had a discussion in class among students that was supposed to be a portrayal of a debate between Rene Descartes and David Hume. From this discussion I felt the students heavily preferred Rene Descartes view on philosophy rather than Hume's. Now a quick overview of the two men's ideas.

Rene Descartes had the opinion that true knowledge is only obtainable through reasoning and that we cannot trust our perception. David Hume on the other hand had the opinion that perception gave us knowledge. He however also had ideas of complex ideas and simple ideas and how to use whether we have perceived a complex idea in and of itself all at once or whether our mind has simply used various other simple ideas to form a false complex idea for example....

A person's ego. If I think about myself i would say I am open minded, pleasant, quiet, and responsible. This is my entire view of myself (well not quite but we will pretend it is) and it is a complex idea. However if I use Hume's idea of comparing simple and complex ideas I can realize that i have never been all of those qualities at one time. Therefore it is impossible for an ego to exist since it is actually many simple ideas that the mind has put together falsely.

Now in the debate with the students, i felt that this point was never given much attention by the students defending Hume. People were simply going back and forth saying Reason is better because... then saying Perception is better because..... I felt it was very to one side as those portraying Descartes were often very agressive and would call out how perception can mislead us. it overall seemed a very one sided debate.

I myself am a supporter of both I believe but I think I support Hume's theories more. His use of perception to distinguish between false ideas of the mind and not really intrigues me.