Rationalism In Philosophy

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Talking about rationalism requires knowing first what is “Epistemology” or “theory of knowledge? Epistemology is a branch in philosophy that studies the nature of knowledge. Rationalism is an epistemological theory, so rationalism can be interpreted the distinct aspects or parts of the mind that are separate senses. The distinctive aspects can be identified as human abilities to engage in mathematics and intellectual reasoning. The knowledge the distinctive aspects provide is seen as separate from any exogenous factor. Two of the Philosophers who were rationalist were Plato and Descartes, whom I will tackle their view of rationalism in this paper. Philosophers who oppose rationalism are identified as “empiricist”, and their motto is that human experience comes from knowledge. Also I will tackle Kant ‘s (who was considered an idealist philosopher) view of rationalism. Briefly, Kant divided the metaphysics of knowledge into two parts; one part contains pure concepts that come from experience and the other part is independent of experience.

Descartes in his “ Mediations on first philosophy” was concerned about radical doubt and he was looking forward to question the authoritative sources of knowledge. He questioned how could people want to reach deep knowledge of the way the universe works and why at the same time they had spend so long time not doing so. This question was answered that people put too much trust in their senses so they are deceived, because our

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