B) Foundational debates in epistemology
- Created by: Freya Woolley
- Created on: 09-04-14 12:55
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- Foundational debates in epistemology
- Rationalism
- The view that all knowledge starts with the mind and is derived from reason not the senses.
- All knowledge starts with the mind.
- Truth = intellectual not sensory.
- Descartes
- Represents the starting point of modern philosophy.
- 'Of what can I be certain?'
- 1. Method of systematic doubt- couldn't doubt his own senses.
- 2. Senses can be deceived and you can't always trust your own logic.
- 3. If he doubted, he was there to doubt; therefore he must exist.
- 'Cogito ergo sum'
- Couldn't doubt even his own body, but while doubting, he could not deny himself as a thinking being.
- All knowledge is a priori, prior to sense experience and innate.
- We know innately that events have causes, that we exit in time etc...
- Spinoza
- A radical Jewish thinker who argued that God was the only absolute substance.
- For Spinoza the reality of the world, as known to reason, is very different from the appearance of the world.
- Leibniz
- Opposite to Spinoza,
- Takes a view about particulars and wholes.
- The world is divided between mental things and physical or material things according to Leibniz.
- The difference between them is that physical things can be divided into its constituent parts, and these can be subdivided again and again.
- Empiricism
- All knowledge starts with the senses.
- The view that all knowledge starts with the senses- the mind is initially 'tabula rasa'.
- All knowledge is a posteriori.
- Knowledge comes inductively, through linked sense-perceptions.
- We experience the effect of something and then reason out the cause.
- Bacon
- Locke
- Berkely
- Hume
- Aristotle
- Epistemology
- The Theory of Knowledge.
- Within epistemology, there is a fundamental issue about whether our knowledge originates in, and is therefore dependent upon, the data we receive through our senses or...
- …whether the only true certainties are those that come from our own minds-from the way in which we think and organise our experience, from the principles of reason and logic.
- Rationalism
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