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Rationalism And Rationalism

Decent Essays

Prompt 3 Philosophy can be divided into Metaphysics and epistemology. Metaphysics is concerned with what is to be? While epistemology is concerned with concrete knowledge and with “what is knowledge”? In other words, what can be known, how it came to be known, and the source of knowledge is epistemology. Empiricism and rationalism both deal with the epistemology branch of philosophy. Even more specifically, rationalism and empiricism are concerned with how knowledge is gained. Rationalism argues that knowledge is innate and harbored in the human mind before birth, in a sort of pre-existence. An example of this would be when Plato tried to illustrate innate knowledge by showing that a boy constructed a square of twice the size of a …show more content…

Empiricism makes more sense to me, but maybe that is because I was brought up in a world always obsessing over the materialistic and hard concrete data or statistics. The idea that sensory perception and experiences contribute to knowledge in the fullest makes the most logical sense to me because that is how anyone has ever mastered a certain field or area. No one had the innate knowledge of surgeon or a carpenter, for example. Some things are innate but it would be complicated to classify what is for certain. Another problem with rationalism is where this hidden innate knowledge originated from. This sort of knowledge is not tangible and it would prove very difficult to provide an answer to the source of a pre-existing knowledge. We are born not knowing. Think of anyone who has learned a serious profession; this profession or skill was not drawn out of them due to it being innate but was rather incorporated into their minds where it settled and stuck into the long term memory of the brain. I can think of philosophy as an example. I know for a certainty that the teachings of the Socrates Plato and Aristotle was never an innate knowledge within me. It could have been possible I thought of the same questions these men asked and came up with a somewhat similar answer, but I never came up or drew out the exact philosophy or exact ways of thinking

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