René Descartes: The Ideas Of Skepticism

The idea of skepticism contains many different opinions, viewpoints, and details all within one big topic. Skepticism, in shorter terms, is defined as “the theory that we do not have any knowledge. We cannot be completely certain that any of our beliefs are true.” The two main types of skepticism are known as academic skepticism, arguing that the only thing we can know is that we know nothing, and Pyrrhonian skepticism, which rejects the ideas of academic skepticism entirely. Two philosophers that had very strong attitudes towards skepticism, were René Descartes who was a global skeptic, and David Hume who entertained both global and local skepticism. Due to their theories about skepticism as a whole, we can now understand it and put our own

A major strength of his was the idea of objective reality. He believes that it is useless to claim the existence of one thing until we are positive as to how that claim can be defended as a true belief. He shows how we are able to prove our beliefs about existence by limiting what we believe is indeed certain. He goes about doing this through three main points. First, that “in order to have knowledge, we need to be able to tell the difference between a hallucination and a perception.” Secondly, “it is impossible to distinguish between an hallucination and a normal perception.” And lastly, “we do not know whether any of our perceptual beliefs are true.” Through his ideas presented in Meditation I, he pleads that our look on the world cannot provide an insured basis on which all other knowledge can be based. This makes us think about whether everything that we see to be obvious are actually inaccurate. In order for us to prove something's existence, Descartes recommends that we use a method that traces what we know back to a definite foundation of unquestionable