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Who is the philosopher of empiricism?
The most elaborate and influential presentation of empiricism was made by John Locke (1632–1704), an early Enlightenment philosopher, in the first two books of his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690).
Is Descartes a rationalist?
René Descartes is generally considered the father of modern philosophy. He was the first major figure in the philosophical movement known as rationalism, a method of understanding the world based on the use of reason as the means to attain knowledge.
Why is Rene Descartes a rationalist?
Descartes was the first of the modern rationalists. He thought that only knowledge of eternal truths (including the truths of mathematics and the foundations of the sciences) could be attained by reason alone, while the knowledge of physics required experience of the world, aided by the scientific method.
Is Aristotle an empiricist or rationalist?
Aristotle can be classed as a tabula rasa empiricist, for he rejects the claim that we have innate ideas or principles of reasoning. He is also, arguably, an explanatory empiricist, although in a different sense from that found among later medical writers and sceptics.
Why are Descartes and Plato considered rationalist philosophers of knowledge?
A rationalist, in the Platonic tradition of innate ideas, Descartes believed that knowledge derives from ideas of the intellect, not from the senses. Innate ideas have universal truth and are the only dependable source of knowledge.
What makes Locke an empiricist?
John Locke (1632–1704) was an English philosopher, often classified as an ’empiricist’, because he believed that knowledge was founded in empirical observation and experience. In that all our knowledge is founded; and from that it ultimately derives itself.
Was Plato a rationalist or empiricist?
Plato is an example of a rationalist. He says that sense experience fails to provide us with any guarantee that what we experience is, in fact, true. The information we get by relying on sense experience is constantly changing and often unreliable.
Was Kant an empiricist?
D. Kant goes down in the history of thought as a giant. Kant declared himself neither empiricist nor rationalist but achieved a synthesis of the two in his greatest work The Critique of Pure Reason (1781), which marked the end of the period of the Enlightenment and began a new period of philosophy, German idealism.