Hume, Hegel and Descartes on Knowledge In

Philosophical questions can be divided into three broad categories: 1) those that deal with the nature of reality; 2) those that deal with the nature of knowledge; and 3) those that deal with the nature of value. These categories correspond to the three major branches of philosophy: metaphysics, epistemology and axiology (Schick & Vaughn, 1999. Of these three branches it is epistemology - the study of the nature of knowledge - that is of concern herein.

Generally, epistemology seeks to identify how man "knows" that he exists, that God exists, that the world is real and not an illusion, and that the evidence of the five senses is valid (Warburton, 1995). Thus, philosophers who deal with such issues are in pursuit of, among other things, enhanced understanding of human beings, of the world and of the interaction between mind and body.

Many philosophers have developed a theory of knowledge that underpins their general concept of nature and ethical behavior. Among the epistemologists whose contributions are of special significance are G.W.F. Hegel, Rene Descartes, and David Hume. This brief report will examine these philosophers' views on knowledge and then compare and contrast those views. The report will conclude with a personal assessment of their attempts to explain knowledge.

G.W.F. Hegel is said to have greatly admired and even emulated Kant while developing his own unique approach to epistemology (Solomon & Higgins, 1996). Hege

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ss these things seem to exist exactly as Descartes saw them. Descartes stated that an all powerful being could put thoughts into a human's mind and arrange it so that everything the human believed about the external world was false. Thus, because man cannot be certain that he is in the grip of such a demon, he cannot acquire knowledge through the senses (Schick & Vaughn, 1999). By offering this skeptical example, Descartes maintains that if God deceived man in such a manner, man would never be able to discover the truth. It is from this starting point that Descartes builds up his confidence in his own knowledge, beginning with the basic knowledge of the fact that he is not dreaming and that there really is a material world. His project involves the use of deductive reasoning in which every principle must be derived or deduced from prior principles which have already been established on the basis of other principles or premises (Solomon & Higgins, 1996). Hume David Hume made man, and man alone, the center and whole of the universe (Frost, 1962). Hume argued that all man could know was his own ideas because there could be no material or spiritual substance causing these ideas. In this view, Hume argued that man's

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