What Are Hobbes Arguments Against Sense Perception?

Descartes and Hobbes have differing views on where our knowledge comes from. Descartes supports Rationalism, the idea that our knowledge comes from ideas and reason. Hobbes on the other hand supports Empiricism, the idea that our knowledge comes from the senses. In this paper I will provide Descartes’ argument against sense perception and Hobbes’ argument for sense perception. I will then provide both philosopher’s arguments about free will and how their views factor into their philosophical systems. Lastly, I will provide my argument as to which philosopher has the stronger argument and why. Descartes' argument against sense perception is that our senses can be deceiving. In his First Meditation, he begins his argument by forgetting everything that he believed to be right and starting from the foundations. He says that all that he had believed to be true up until the moment he began writing, he received from or through the senses. The senses sometimes mislead us, therefore we should not place full confidence in them. He says, "[...] there are yet many
We have appetites and aversions. Appetites are our desires, and aversions are things that we know are bad for us due to experience (Hobbes 37). In the beginning of Book I, Hobbes said that all of our knowledge comes from sense experience. This includes our desires an averions. Since we cannot control what we experience, sense perception is random. Our desires are pre-determined, so when we deliberate, we choose the desire that is best for us and act upon it. We do so because past experience tells us that it is good. We do not choose things that are bad for us because we would be harming ourselves (Hobbes 39). His view of free will factors into his philosophical system in that it deals with the senses. All that we do and all we know depends on sense perception and