... René Descartes is another of these examples. Descartes asserted in The Meditations that our notion of the existence of the self: cogito ergo sum (I think, therefore I am), the existence of God, and some logical propositions like, from nothing comes nothing are all innate ideas and are all central to his philosophy. He believed that these innate ideas appear to us above all other notions in a way that is 'clear and distinct'2 and that it is these ideas that are the source of all real knowledge. More recently, and in opposition to the already established rationalist movement, which bases itself on the belief that our knowledge of the world is acquired by the use of reason, and that sensory input is inherently unreliable, more a source of error than of knowledge, grew a school of philosophy known as empiricism. John Locke, who has come to be regarded as ...

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