Descartes vs Hume

Hume: Empiricism- knowledge comes only or primarily from sensory experience.
(1711-1776)
Believed in desire over reason
Laws to nature; searched for order, harmony, and lawfulness in all nature, physical and human, in contrast to Descartes who believed in deductive reasoning (p.136, From Socrates to Sartre) 
Attacked the basic assumptions of religion and the Christian belief
Humans are active beings, driven by desires and feelings


Descartes 

• “I” or ego--basis of Descartes’ philosophy
• To Hume, the idea of an ego is a “complex idea”, because our emotions and sense perceptions are complex
• The idea of having an unalterable ego is a false perception--we have never experienced things simultaneously, meaning that we do not have a uniform, simple ego

Hume would try to attack descartes theory of i think therefore i am. One way I think to attack this is to say how do we know that we are the ones thinking and making our own decisions. What is there is a demon or person who has planned out our path for us before we started out.