ABSTRACT
The goal of Philosophy is to critically scrutinize our knowledge of things. But first, how did we come to know the things we claim to know? Two basic schools namely, Empiricism and Rationalism, lay claim to knowledge using different approaches. While Empiricism adopts sense perception, verification principle, and the aposteriori tendencies, Rationalism adopts the analytical process of reason, innate knowledge, and intuition. One major Philosopher who gave Rationalism prominence in the modern era is Rene Descartes, whose Methodic Doubt became the foundation upon which other blocks of knowledge were built by later Rationalists, thereby giving rise to other schools of thoughts such as Foundationalism, Coherentism, etc. Rene Descartes achieved this using two major arguments, viz, the Dream Argument and Evil Demon Argument. These two arguments were in a way to diagnose the two already existing schools, Empiricism and Rationalism, with a view of establishing which gives us true knowledge. In the end, Descartes settles for Rationalism, having established the cogito ergo sum (I think, therefore I am).
