René Descartes and David Hume both had a profound effect on the philosophical world. Both of these philosophers are explicitly associated with two separate philosophical schools which are Rationalism and Empiricism. It is this division between Rationalism and Empiricism that allows Descartes and Hume to present different accounts of mind and mentality. Descartes is widely recognized as the father of modern philosophy, he is a rationalist, who views knowledge of metaphysics as existing separate from physical reality believing that truth cannot be acquired through the senses but through the intellect in the form of deductive reasoning. Rationalism does not imply overcoming religious thought. Descartes began with the basic epistemological premise of "a priori certainty of consciousness", which is the belief that the existence of an external world is not self-evident but must be demonstrated by deduction from the contents of one's consciousness. Descartes stated that what This true knowledge is literally innate in us. He had an attitude of doubt towards certain beliefs and that knowledge is limited. This attitude and methodology of thinking led him to doubt the existence of God and whether our very human existence was real or not. Descartes used the deductive method in which he labeled everything that was doubtful as false until nothing remained but what was not doubtful as truth. Descartes concluded that if you doubt, doubting itself proves that you are thinking and therefore that you exist. Using the process of reasoning in geometry, Descartes discovered that the three corners of a triangle form two right angles but that this same process of reasoning may not prove their presence. With this in mind, he went... middle of paper... imaginatively, imagining a swine fly. Descartes on the other hand assumes that the "I think therefore I am" argument is the correct way to deal with things. It assumes that our thoughts are correct thoughts only when they seem correct. How do we know we exist, why do we think? How do we know for sure that these two ideas are related? He ignored the certainty of existence, proven by the contents of his mind, and opted instead for the belief that only his mind existed until he could prove otherwise. “How can I know that I exist?”, or “How do I prove that I exist?” Maybe we should refer to an old classic: Star Trek the Next Generation. When the android, Lieutenant Data, asks him if he is human, Descartes' answer would be "yes" just because he thinks. Yet Hume would probably disagree because he has no feelings and therefore cannot experience life. So the question remains; it is human Data?