nally interpreted the natural world after the mechanical model of physics and believed that determinism was the cause of all physical events. Descartes described reality as a dualism consisting of two basic elements, thought and extension, whereas Leibniz, a pluralist, said that although there is only one kind of substance, the monad, there are nevertheless different kinds of monads accounting for the various elements in nature. In this paper, I will provide a general overview of these two rationalist attempts at creating a formula for truth and raise some of the more common empirical problems that apply to each.Being a mathematician, Descartes believed that a method was necessary to give his thoughts some structure and a path that could apply to all deductions of truth. In a need for a method, Descartes hypothesized that all men have virtually the same genetic disposition to reason and that the differences in opinion and error in reasoning are due to how that reason is applied. Thus he contends that there is a need for social norms of reason that emulate the certainty of mathematics. "My method," he writes, "contains everything which gives certainty to the rules of arithmetic." In it he says that we should never accept anything except clear and distinct ideas, divide each problem into as many parts as are needed to solve it, and always check thoroughly for oversights. If knowledge is to be found without error, he said that it must be by using the principles of clarity and distinctness. In this way he said that knowledge would be indubitable. To lay the groundwork for this method, Descartes establishes the idea of belief by doubting. He doubts anything that is not self-evident by intuition. A casualty of this doubt is all of his empirical belief. To this end he gives two examples as to why he can’t believe the conclusions drawn using his own senses. The first of these is the dream argument. The basic layout of the argumen...
