Essay rationalism empiricism
The history of philosophy has seen many warring camps fighting battles over some major issue or other. One of the major battles historically has been over the foundations of all our knowledge. What is most basic in any human set of beliefs? What are our ultimate starting points for any world view? Where does human knowledge ultimately come from? Those questions always seems to frighten students, though it is still possible writing essays for money.
The team of professional writers will debate between rationalism and empiricism is centered around the means by which the individual accumulates knowledge under the framework of writing essay service. The latter asserts that experience is the ultimate source of knowledge while the former plays up the mental faculties as being of greater importance in this. Rationalism is not mutually exclusive of empiricism, but can stand for extremes in which reason is contrasted with experience, rivaling poles within the field of epistemology.
Rationalism began with Greek philosophers who championed the importance of reason, suggesting that it is through the supreme use of logic that one can deduce the totality of knowledge. Socrates suggested that rationalism is not merely the ability to intellectualize ideas, but to perceive the true nature of the world by purging our understanding of it of unnecessary assumptions. It is from Socrates that the core ideal of deduction and the concept of innate truths are derived. Descartes argued for a bifurcation of the essence of the world by suggesting a dualism in which eternal truths were reasoned out, existing simultaneously with a world of experiential knowledge. Descartes also argued that the boundary between the two was blurred as the sense experience of a dream is not a source of knowledge, while sense experience produced by an illusion is dubious. As such, the belief in reality must always be questioned and reason must be in constant employ. You may familiarize with full version of paper below, that was performed by writers on help essay basis.
Empiricism emphasizes the primacy of experience and evidence and thus, the faculties for sensory perception in the formulation of knowledge. Its most well known proponent, John Lock argued that humans are born as blank slates, and are therefore devoid of any of the innate knowledge that rationalists maintain to exist. Locke proclaims that the acquisition of knowledge is derived from experience: the construction of complex ideas from simple ones and the formation of relations and generalizations.
As noted earlier, rationalist ideas are not mutually exclusive of empiricist ideas. Although sense experience takes greater importance under the school of empiricism, it is still necessary for reason to infer and deduce any kind of knowledge from it. Similarly, rationalism does not annihilate the value of experience, it merely suggests that higher truths and innate knowledge can be formulated through the sole power of reason, that we can draw conclusions about the world without experience.
Immanuel Kant attempt at reconciling both disciplines of epistemology began with the idea that just because experience cannot affirm the existence of something divine, it does not mean that it has been proven not to. As such, Kant argued that there are certain transcendental aspects of the universe necessary to make it ‘work’. He argued that both rationalists and empiricists err in their understanding of knowledge.
Kant declared that any knowledge that exists independently of experience is a priori, while knowledge that is derived from experience is a posteriori. Empiricists could not justify a synthetic a priori claim (that is to say a proposition in which the predicate concept is not contained in its subject, e.g., “All widows are unhappy.”) because they conflated the synthetic with the a posteriori.
Kant therefore concluded that the only way to prove the existence of synthetic a priori propositions was to ‘turn’ towards the human subject and realize that a noumenal realm exists hidden beyond the phenomenal realm that we know, which aids in constructing a theory of knowledge. When the human subject ‘intuits’ something, this is a manifestation of a priori categories of intuition (which itself is one of many categories he has developed). Man’s knowledge of things is therefore based on what it appears to be based on the a priori categories.
Propositions of a synthetic and a priori nature are then possible, because man can impose categories of the mind upon the experience of phenomenal reality. As such, cause and effect is merely the way in which our reasoning faculties understand reality, regardless of the truth of it.
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