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Summary Rationalism vs Empiricism notes
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Rationalism Vs Empiricism Acquiring knowledge and early psychology (1600s)
o Renaissance and enlightenment was a period in the last millennium
o Are we born as a blank slate that the environmental experience provides
information about the world (empiricism), or are we born with morals
and information about the world (rationalism)? – this is yet to be
discovered
Epistemology
o Kant tried to unite nationalism and empiricism
o Descriptive and prescriptive knowledge
a priori comes from before experience
a posteriori comes after experience
o Plato – innate ideas (rationalist)
o Aristotle – empiricist
Descartes (rationalist)
o He was first modern rationalist
o “Cogito ergo sum” (1647) – “I think therefore I am”
o Things may not be real (everything else might be false, e.g. dreams) but it
is for sure that we are thinking about these things
o The idea that God exists, is what sparked his theory of innate ideas within
us
o Thinking and cognition is the only thing you can be sure of everything else
is ambiguous
o The fact that I am thinking means that I exist
Locke (empiricism)
o He set out the case for modern empiricism
o Machinery (like a computer) for appetites, memory and imagination
Hume (empiricism)
Rationalism vs Empiricism (Leibniz)
o Leibniz criticised the tabular rasa, saying we have innate ideas instead
o The mind is immaterial, there cant be a thinking physical substance
o You cannot create a physical machine that could perceive
o Did not believe animals had sensations, feelings and souls and they were
purely there for our pleasure
Rationalism vs Empiricism (Kant)
o Disturbed by Hume’s radical scepticism (empiricist) but also critical of
pure reason (rationalist)
o He realises that all knowledge coming from experience is not enough –
experience assumes certain knowledge, like space time, cause and effect.
o We don’t perceive space or time, we assume it
o Noumena – the real universe behind our perception
o Phenomena – the experience of things
o Science must be only about phenomena as we cannot experience the
noumenal world as it really is
Kant’s analytic & synthetic statements
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