Modern Philosophy: Rationalism Versus Empiricism

Rationalism and Empiricism in Modern Philosophy

Rationalism

Rationalism is the first philosophical current of Modernity (17th century), inaugurated by Descartes. Leibniz, Spinoza, and Malebranche also belonged to this movement. It argues that our valid and true knowledge about reality does not come from the senses, but from reason, from our understanding.

Two key statements regarding knowledge are:

• Our knowledge about reality can be constructed deductively from certain ideas and clear principles, independent of experience—experience only provides the necessary, but confused, materials.
• Ideas and principles are innate to the intellect: the intellect possesses them in itself, independent of any sensory experience.

This is called nativism: there are innate ideas in the understanding, which are not generalizations from sensory experience.

Rationalism is opposed to "empiricism"—the response that emerged in the 18th century to 17th-century Rationalism, represented mainly by Locke, Berkeley, and Hume. Empiricism maintains that all our knowledge ultimately comes from the senses, from sense experience.

Empiricism

Empiricism is the second great philosophical current of modernity. Any philosophy is empiricist if it claims that all our knowledge and values are rooted in experience (Aristotle, Aquinas, Ockham...). In this context, we refer to 18th-century English empiricism, which emerged in response to 17th-century rationalism. Its most important representatives were Locke, Berkeley, and Hume.

Empiricists rejected innate ideas or principles in the understanding. They held that all our knowledge comes from experience, and the understanding is like a blank page before experience provides knowledge. If there were innate knowledge, all men would know it forever and everywhere, which is not the case.

Locke laid the foundation for Empiricism, upon which others built their systems. His school of thought is called psychological because it addresses the fundamental problem of the Origin of Ideas and the psychological mechanisms the mind uses to form them.

Berkeley, in turn, used his thinking in the service of faith and religion. However, the Scot Hume is the greatest exponent of Empiricism. In his "Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding," he shows a more radical thinking than Locke, eventually leading to total skepticism.