Comparing Descartes And John Locke On Innate Ideas

Descartes and Locke on Innate Ideas Descartes’ trademark argument is outlined as follows:
I have an idea of God.
God is infinite.
Everything has a cause.
The idea of God has infinite objective reality.
God has infinite formal reality.
I do not have infinite objective reality.
The idea of an infinite God cannot come from me.
An infinite being must exist, God. Descartes believes that all objective reality has to be caused by some idea with equally as much formal reality, for all ideas that are clear and distinct. So if we are able to hold a clear and distinct idea of an infinite being then a being with infinite formal reality must exist. This argument makes it clear that Descartes believes in the theory of innate ideas. These are ideas that the mind holds from the very beginning are not based on any prior knowledge or experience. To Descartes God is an innate idea because humans have never seen a being that …show more content…
Locke believed that all of our ideas come from some form of experience that we have through our senses. Locke attacks the idea that there are certain innate principles that are shared by all humans. Locke goes on to explain that there can be some other reason why these principles are explained but even before one can get to this conclusion Locke gives to arguments for why principles that are commonly believed to be innate, actually are not. These two principles are the law of identity and the law of noncontradiction, respectively, they mean that something is the same as itself but different from something else, and the idea that something can be and not be at the same time. Locke states “Children and idiots have no thought—not an inkling—of these principles, and that fact alone is enough to destroy the universal assent that any truth that was genuinely innate would have to have” (Locke, 4). Locke states that these principles are not innate because they are not applicable to children and

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Comparing Descartes And John Locke On Innate Ideas

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