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RATIONALISM AND EMPIRICISM: WILL THE DEBATE EVER END?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 February 2010

Benjamin Murphy
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Extract

Anyone taking a class in Modern Philosophy will learn that one of the most important issues in 17th and 18th Century philosophy was the debate between rationalists and empiricists. In 2005, Matthias Steup and Ernest Sosa edited a book entitled Contemporary Debates In Epistemology (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 2007), which includes a chapter entitled ‘Is There A Priori Knowledge?’ (pp. 98–122). In this chapter, Laurence BonJour defends rationalism and Michael Devitt defends empiricism. So, this philosophical debate has been going on for four centuries, and it still has not been settled. This is the kind of thing that gets philosophy a bad reputation. If a dispute can continue for four centuries without resolution, that is surely an indication that nobody knows how to tell a good answer from a bad one. In this article I want to consider why the debate is unresolved after so much time.

Type
Research Article
Information
Think , Volume 9 , Issue 24 , Spring 2010 , pp. 35 - 46
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 2010

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References

NOTES

1 Dehaene, Stanislaus, The Number Sense (London: Penguin, 1997), p. 56Google Scholar.

2 Greenberg, Marvin Jay, Euclidean and Non-Euclidean Geometries (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman and Company), 1972, pp. 127–150Google Scholar.

3 Einstein, Albert, Relativity: The Special and General Theory, New York: Plume, 2004, p. 110Google Scholar.