ICOANA CREDINȚEI No. 12, Year 6/2020 http://revistaicoanacredintei.com/ ISSN 2501-3386, ISSN-L 2393-137X STUDIES AND ARTICLES Page | 57 https://doi.org/10.26520/icoana.2020.12.6.57-64 A short rejection of the innate ideas of R. Descartes through the epistemological scope of D. Hume Rocco A. ASTORE Adjunct Lecturer of Philosophy CUNY: Borough of Manhattan Community College, USA, E-mail: rastore@bmcc.cuny.edu ABSTRACT Descartes’s belief in innate ideas still looms, in one form or another, over the history of philosophy today. In typical Early-Modern, Rationalist fashion, Descartes presents readers with main arguments for his belief in these pre-packaged ideas, via appeals to God and the application of logical thinking techniques. That is, Descartes asserts that the so-called inherent idea of God derives from God and that the mind can establish this notion as well as the surety of its supposed innate ideas of immortality and identity. However, such ideas may appear alien to some, and even unfounded upon critique. First, this essay will present Descartes’s philosophy of innate ideas by using his Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy. Next, this piece will then describe the philosopher Hume’s Empiricist understanding of ideas and the problems of abstraction, and then challenge the Cartesian view that innate notions like God, immortality of the soul, and identity may not be so innate, or as precise as Descartes leads us to believe. Keywords: Hume; Descartes; Empiricism; Rationalism; Epistemology; Innate Ideas. 1. AN EXPLICATION OF MAIN ARGUMENTS BY DESCARTES SUPPORTING INNATE IDEAS As presented in Descartes’s Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy, we readers encounter the argument that God is an innate idea of the mind, one which God itself establishes, in such a way that once we achieve a clear and distinct idea of God, we can be certain that such a Divinity embedded us with an inherent idea of itself. 1 One reason that leads Descartes to this conclusion is that because he is something rather than nothing, which derives from his inability to doubt his existence as a thinking thing, he may assert that he possesses the capacity for perfections. 2 Now, by perfections, Descartes understands the mind’s refinedness of which he can partake in, such as thinking, or intuiting, imagining, remembering, and even, to a degree, sensing. 3 Moreover, Descartes notices that his awareness of his shortcomings leads him to recognize that others possess perfections, perhaps in a more significant proportion than himself. 4 As such, Descartes envisions a perfect being, one by which we compare our perfections to, this being God. 5 Finally, because this entity, or substance, God, affirms 1 Descartes, René. Donald A. Cress trans., Discourse on Method & Meditations on First Philosophy (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1998)., 18. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid., 67. 4 Ibid., 17-18. 5 Ibid., 74, 76, & 79.