TheHistory of Modern Philosophy

Very roughly, empiricists believe that all knowledge is derived from, and justified by, sensory experience; rationalists hold that knowledge is obtained only through rational thought; while Kant argues that knowledge involves a synthesis, in which the faculties of sensation and thought come together (Scruton, 442).

Among the rationalists are Descartes, Spinoza, and Liebniz, and among the empiricists are Bacon, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume.

Descartes began with his method of doubt, undertaken because he had reached an age where he now believed that he would be able to remove all of his earlier beliefs and begin with a clean slate, as it were. He says that everything he knew or thought he knew in the past was based on sense perception, and the senses can lie. Because of this, Descartes has to begin from a position of doubt and must prove everything to himself through the application of reason:

I observed that there is nothing at all in the proposition "I am speaking, therefore I exist" to assure me that I am speaking the truth, except that I see very clearly that in order to think it is necessary to exist. so I decided that I could take it as a general rule that the things we conceive very clearly and very distinctly are true; only there is some difficulty in recogniz

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oldly assert that he has discovered the real nature of the physical object as far as human intelligence and the experimental observations will allow. The philosopher can then reverse the process and start with the simple natures and deduce the effects, which should be consistent with the effects actually observed. Experience or experiment can then tell whether these are consistent (Copleston 80-81). Leibniz was another rationalist who suggested the importance of two concepts, the principle of contradiction, and the concept of sufficient reason. According to the principle of sufficient reason, for anything that exists, there is a reason why it exists and why it exists exactly as it does exist. This was claimed by Leibniz as the main principle of rationality, and he said that anyone who rejected it was irrational. Everything should be open to human inquiry to determine why it exists and why it exists precisely as it does exist, though it may be that only God can know why this existence is necessary and why it is necessarily as it is (Scruton 463). The empiricists see experience as the primary source of knowledge. John Locke states that the mind at birth is a tabula rasa, a blank slate, and it is only through experience tha
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