Category: Empiricism

Introduction

The focus of this essay is the analyses of the case study (sitting under a tree in the botanical garden and taking in nature). What I encountered in the Botanical garden is plants, trees and etc, therefore I tend to analyse it from the three perspectives namely, the empiricist (or natural scientist), an intellectualist (or rationalist), the embodied perspective ( ala Merleau- Ponty) and in a phenomenological sense. lastly, the explanation and description of the three perspectives will be given.

Empiricist or natural scientist perspective

In the philosophical field, empiricism is a theory that entails that knowledge comes only from sensory experience. The emphasis of empiricism is on the role of empirical evidence in the formation of ideas, rather than innate ideas or traditions. However, due to the historical view of empiricism, as it was associated with the ‘blank slate’ according to which the human mind is ‘blank’ at birth and develops its thoughts only through experience, empiricists argued that traditions (or customs) arise due to relations of previous sensory experiences. In the philosophy of science, empiricism emphasizes evidence, especially as discovered in experiments. Empiricism is a fundamental part of the scientific method which stated that all hypotheses and theories must be tested against observations of the natural world rather than resting solely on a priori reasoning, intuition, or revelation. Empiricism, usually used by natural scientists, entails that ‘knowledge is based on experience’. The empirical research, including experiments and validated measurement tools, guides the scientific method, Encyclopaedia of Philosophy (1969), ‘Empiricism’, vol. 2, p. 503

According to 2020 the study conducted on biodiversity by the Royal Botanic Gardens in the UK, 22% of the approximately 380,000 known plant species (or about 83,600 plant species) are endangered. Empiricism’s view of plants and trees sees plants as the only life forms that can produce food using energy from sunlight. According to the empiricist view, plants have a green pigment called chlorophyll in their cells, situated in the leaves and it allows plants to make food from sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide in a process called photosynthesis.

The Environmental Impact

The interpretation of empiricism on plants is that photosynthetic plant life as a dominant force on earth transformed our atmosphere into the oxygen-rich air we breathe. In addition to releasing oxygen, empiricists argued that plant/ trees are not just mere observational natural objects, but they have an essential role on earth. In contrast, plants use carbon dioxide to complete the carbon cycle and recycle the carbon dioxide released by human beings and other heterotrophs. Carbon dioxide also helps mitigate the greenhouse effect and climate change. It could be stated that according to empiricist plants has essentially led to the beginning of aerobic life due to their production of oxygen required for life to form. Trees play an effective role in removing the carbon dioxide from the surrounding air and transforming it, by photosynthesis into oxygen Fernando, W. D. (2012).

Intellectualist/ rationalist perspective

According to O’Connor, J. K. (2007), the focus of intellectualism is related to mental perspectives that emphasize the use, the development, and the exercise of the intellect; and identifies the life of the mind of the intellectual person. In the field of philosophy, ‘intellectualism’ is also known as rationalism, which referrers to knowledge derived from reasons. Merleau-Ponty to study the nature of perception, he further proposes to synthesize recent findings in experimental psychology (especially Gestalt psychology) and neurology to develop an alternative to dominant intellectualist. Merleau-Ponty rejects the empiricist idea based on an understanding of sensation, with its correlative ‘constancy hypothesis. The goal of Intellectualism is to provide a deputy to empiricism by introducing judgment or attention as mental activities that synthesize experience from the sensory reasons.

As I was sitting there in a Botanical Garden looking for a kind of a plant, I finally, judge explicitly that it was there, in fact, present, but that is only one moment in my perceptual experience; before the judgment. I was seeing the trees and the plants, but my visual experience requires the kind of determinacy recorded by the eventual judgment. The plant I was looking for was both there-to be-seen and yet not fully present in my visual field. By insisting on the primacy of judgment, the intellectualist effaces these kinds of tensions and indeterminacies in the act of perception, thereby rendering perceptual experience as more frozen and static than it is and must be. On the contrary, Intellectualism can be understood as an overreaction to the lifeless, mechanical model offered by the empiricist.

As Merleau-Ponty noted, neither view can accommodate the vital character of perceptual experience as it is lived. ’empiricism]’consciousness is poor in the first case and intellectualism is rich for any phenomenon to appeal compellingly to it. In addition, empiricism lacked to see that we need to know what we are looking for, otherwise, we would not be looking for it, and intellectualism fails to see that we ought to be ignorant of what we are looking for, or equally again we should not be searching. They are both in agreement that neither can grasp consciousness in the act of learning and that neither attaches due importance to that circumscribed ignorance, that still ’empty’ but already determinate intention, which is attention itself O’Connor, J. K. (2007). p28,29.

Embodiment perspective

Embodiment refers to any instance of being-for-itself experiences itself as an embodied being, acting in and on the world. He rapidly adds that being-for-itself ‘cannot be united with a body. He argued further of a union between consciousness and the body involves a conflation of two different, mutually exclusive manifestations of the body precisely, the body as experienced by me and body as experienced by others. The experience of one’s body and the body’s role in the experience of other kinds of objects receives little, if any, attention, and indeed, his endeavours to isolate and narrate an ‘absolute’ consciousness and the pure, non-empirical ego, along with the requisite procedures of the phenomenological reduction, invite imagery of a kind of ghostly, disembodied field or realm of consciousness O’Connor, J. K. (2007).

Phenomenological perspective/ sense

Attention to this work dissipates entirely the ghostly image of consciousness that the characterization of the phenomenological reduction often invites and serves to lay the foundation for Merleau-Ponty’s later investigations. Merleau- Ponty made a close study of Ideas, precisely the archival form, and its influence may be discerned in his Phenomenology of Perception. A brief outline of some of the main arguments on the body from this work helps to both give a more developed picture of Husserlian phenomenology and prepared the way of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of embodied experience. Husserl’s account of the body in Ideas is oriented around two principal claims firstly, that the body is something that appears inexperienced as a categorically distinct kind of thing, and lastly, that the body and bodily self-experience play an essential role concerning the possibility of different forms of intentionality, that is, to the possibility of experience that is of or about objects other than the body itself. To have experiences that are of or about various kinds of objects O’Connor, J. K. (2007).

Husserl has material things and objects in mind. Analysing the case study from the perspective of phenomenology we could say that Husserl claims to have an experience that is of or about the material, spatiotemporal objects, basically ordinary things such as rocks and trees as encountered in the Botanical garden that one must experience oneself as embodied. Husserl claims that “the Body is, in the first place, the medium of all perception; it is the organ of perception and is necessarily involved in all perception’. To clarify this claim, the upper-case for ‘Body’ records an important distinction. In the German language, all nouns are capitalized, but the translation’s use of the capital ‘B’ signals that the signify the body understood in material terms, as a physical object of a particular kind, whereas in other distinct it specifies the living body and, in the phenomenological context, the experienced body or body-as-lived. One of Husserl’s and Merlau- Ponty principle is that the body has not been experienced as just one more material object among others, but rather is manifest in a categorically distinct manner. Husserl claims that the body is the ‘medium’ and ‘organ’ of perception seems reasonably clear from many of the most basic descriptions of our perceptual experience involve reference to our bodily existence O’Connor, J. K. (2007).

Conclusion

The empiricism perspective, emphasis on the knowledge-based on experiments precisely encountered through scientific methods, The intellectual perspective’s emphasis is on the knowledge encountered through reasoning and lastly, the embodied emphasis on the consciousness and the body, and lastly, the phenomenological emphasis is on material and spatiotemporal object.

References

• O’Connor, J. K. (2007). Understanding Phenomenology—David R. Cerbone. International Philosophical Quarterly, 47(4), 486-488.
• Fernando, W. D. (2012). Plants: An international scientific open access journal to publish all facets of plants, their functions, and interactions with the environment and other living organisms. Plants, 1(1), 1.
• Encyclopaedia of Philosophy (1969), ‘Empiricism’, vol. 2, p. 503

Philosophy is the oldest science that was born in the ancient Greece and study the fundamental problems related to the meaning of life, human existence, etc. One of the branches of philosophy is epistemology that deals with the nature of knowledge, how it is acquired, what is knowledge and what are the sources of it? There are many theories of epistemology. The major ones are empiricism, rationalism and constructivism.

In this essay, I am going to compare and contrast two opposing theories of epistemology that explored the question “From where does knowledge come from?” and which influenced on the Enlightenment’s concept of the mind.

Thus, according to the rationalism theory of knowledge, the reason is the main source of knowledge. As opposed to the rational theory, the empiricism theory estimates that the main source of knowledge is the experience which can be based on the “perceptional observation of the world”. Two major philosophers of the Enlightenment provided these theories and based their activities on them. Descartes was the supporter of rationalism and Locke described empiricism.

The empiricism theory of knowledge is based on the suggestion that knowledge generates from one’s personal experience. This supposition is still predominant among the theories of epistemology and is contradictory to rationalism. According to the empiricism theory of knowledge, all the knowledge acquired is based on individual experience.

The experience comes from evidences and “sensory perception of the world” which leads to the formation of certain ideas. In other words, the senses and perceptions serve engines for our beliefs. Perception is a starting point for the knowledge.

John Locke was the first philosopher who clearly explained the essence of empiricism theory of knowledge, “Locke set forth what would become the Enlightenement’s dominant conception of the mind: a blank slate on which the sensation provided by sensory experience produce ideas” (Kramnick 185). He suggested the “blank slate” theory that explained how the knowledge is acquired.

Thus, every child is like a blank sheet of paper, only through using its senses of perception like hearing, smelling, seeing, the child gains the understanding of the better world. This theory was adopted in pedagogic and is still used in it:

“The mind as a “blank slate” received sensation from the external world. That individual mind imperially ordered chaotic sensory experience, constructing, therefore, its own meaning for the world” (Kramnick 16).

Thus, this statement provides the idea that there are no good or bad children. The individuality forms under the influence of events and situations that appear to a personality during its life. The notion of idea was the core of the Locke’s empiricism, “the fundamental unit in Locke’s theory of knowledge is the idea. He understands the ideas in the first instance as the images received by the sense” (Nelson 330).

The one has certain perception of a new thing, under the influence of this perception, the idea about this thing is formed, furthermore, the ideas are analyzed and developed into the knowledge. Locke’s theory denied the suggestion that every person is born with the “innate knowledge”. In case it was true, than everybody were similar and there would be no place for the moral education.

However, not all the philosophers supported this point of view. There were scientists that provided different idea.

The theory of knowledge of rationalism provides the ideas that the source of knowledge is not an idea of the past experience, but the idea of reason:

“The rationalists believed in fundamental speculative and ethical truths or principles which are not derived from experience but discerned immediately by reason, and which reflect the eternal divine truth” (Copleston 30).

This statement means that in the core of rational knowledge are several fundamental concepts. First of all, each of us is born with the first principles. These principles form the “inner knowledge” (the knowledge that we have when we are just born). This knowledge is created by some reason and the knowledge that we acquire during our lives are generated from these “innate knowledge”.

In order to explain what the “innate knowledge is, the rationalists provided as example the understanding of the categories of time and space, cause and consequences. For, example, if X is bigger than Y and Y is bigger than Z, than Z is smaller than X. This ability to come to a conclusion is the “innate knowledge” that was not developed from the experience, but “was born with us”. According to rationalists, every individual thinks in terms of reason and its consequence, and this reasoning directs and forms our life experience.

One of the greatest thinkers who developed the theory of rationalism during the period of Enlightenment was Descartes:

“There is a profoundly radical individualism at the heart of Enlightenment thought. Its rationalisms led Enlightenment philosophy to enthrone the individual as the center and creator of meaning, truth, and even reality” (Kramnick 15).

Descartes was the philosopher that used the theory of doubts as a basis for the rationalism. He provides the idea that all our experiences and beliefs can be called into doubt, “Descartes had doubted everything, but he could not doubt himself. He as the I, the irreducible thinking being, existed at the core of reality” (Kramnick 15).

A famous quote by Descartes “I think; therefore I am” (Kramnick 181). Illustrates the ideas that there is no knowledge outside your mind, in other words, everything that exists can be put into doubts. This statement gives a reason to be skeptical about everything in the world. In addition, it becomes a premise for the acquisition of new knowledge. Thus, only if one explored the issue “thought it over” by himself/herself, one can estimate that it is the acquired knowledge.

Today, the philosophers do not think that the rationalism and Descartes in particular, achieved success in the theory of knowledge, “John Locke rushed in where Descartes feared to treat. Descartes never fell into the error of thinking that a representative theory of knowledge could stand in its own right” (Harris 126).

The ideas of Locke are still used in the pedagogic practices and generally accepted among modern philosophers. In its own turn, the theory of knowledge provided by Descartes is quite individualistic and can be applied only to some scientific domains, such as mathematics, for example.

So, in the branch of philosophy called epistemology, there are several theories of knowledge aimed at answering the question “From where does knowledge come from?” Empiricism and rationalism are the two which contradict each other providing opposite ideas.

The empiricism emphasizes that the source of knowledge is one’s personal experience. As opposed to empiricism, rationalism provides the idea that each individual is born with the “innate knowledge”. These, days, the ideas of empiricism by Locke are recognized as more reliable ones.

Works Cited

Copleston, Frederick. A History of Philosophy: the Rationalists. Descartes to Leibnitz. New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2003.

Harris, Errol E. Nature, Mind and Modern Science. London: Routledge, 2004.

Kramnick, Isaac. The Portable Enlightenment Reader. New York: Penguin Books, 1995.

Nelson, Alan Jean. A Companion to Rationalism. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2005.

Introduction

Empiricism deals with assertion that all that is in the world and beyond is known through the senses. To the empiricists, especially of the modern era, there was no other way of gaining knowledge except through the sense perception.

Postmodernism has been the branch of knowledge that questions the previous approaches to knowing and advocating for pluralism in epistemology instead of relying on only one epistemological approach, empiricism is incorporated into postmodernism (Brooker 1996).

Epistemology is mainly interested and concerned with the nature and the scope that knowledge can cover and the various limitations to attaining knowledge. Mainly epistemology deals with the various philosophical questions like whether knowledge is possible, if so what is it? How is it acquired? and if we really know then how do we know what we know? (Sosa 2004).

Empiricism deals with a specific method of attaining knowledge and its proponents claim and endeavour in proving that actually, knowledge emanates from our senses and all that we know is from sense perception. Most of the proponents lived during the modern era.

Having observed how the various school of thoughts clashed over which was right in its endeavour to seek the method of knowledge attainment postmodernism thinkers sought out to harmonize these school of thoughts.

Eventually, the postmodernists came to agree that no single school of thought could claim monopoly of providing the source of knowledge. Postmodernists therefore united many of these schools of thought views to state that knowledge is gotten from many sources (Grenz 1996).

Empiricism as a Source of Knowledge

As observed, empiricists entirely dwell on the senses. The renowned British philosopher John Locke, who was once an assistance of Francis Bacon before his death, is the pioneer of British empiricism. In his empiricism illustration, he adopted the case of a child at birth to support empiricism as the only source of knowledge.

He stated that at birth, the mind of a human being is tabula rasa- empty blanket. He said that the brain of a person at birth is like a plain white paper. As one grows experiences are written on the white sheet of paper, which is the brain. The brain is fed by experiences and its work is like that of a machine, processing the raw data given.

Locke believes that the world is physical and thus in his account of solving the mind body problem, he says that the mind and body are just one and the same thing and continues to expound by saying that the mind is just an attribute of the body so physical rather than spiritual. The postmodernists have posed the question, if the mind is physical and the brain is empty, then how does a young baby know ho to suckle? (Reck 1963).

Another empiricist by the name Bishop George Berkeley asserts that there is only one source of knowledge in the universe and that is empiricism. He stated that to be is to be perceived, that is to say, for a thing to be said to exist it must be perceived first. He states that if something is not perceived then that thing is inexistence.

To him the idea of God is conceived out of premeditated intuition and goes on to state that the phenomena that occur unexplained are occasions when God intercedes on behalf of man thus acts of God. The postmodernism have come to pose the question, when a tree falls in the forest and nobody is there to witness, does that mean that the tree did not fall? (Richardson 2007).

Francis Bacon developed a new method. He said we should refrain from using myths, ideas and notions only. Knowledge cannot be coming from universal particulars to universal general and still call it knowledge as that is commo0n sense knowledge as in the case with deduction method of inference. He developed and popularized the inductive method of inference.

That is you start by assembling all that you know of which is mainly the general knowledge. Then you expose the assembled knowledge to rigorous analysis eliminating the inconsistent facts one by one until you arrive at a particular truth.

This method developed by Bacon which he called the scientific method entails lots of experiments and observation. It has close connections with modern science also involves extensive and intensive research, experimenting and observation (Furmerton, 2006).

David Hume another of the modern empiricists came up with a rather sceptical approach. He says what we know is gotten from the experience of engaging in every day’s life’s activities. To him every society is peculiar to its knowledge due to exercising its cultures. To Hume universal truth is impossible as every society is different from the other.

Knowledge as par his argument is derived from customs and belief. He further states that all that we know is from general norms, intuition and instincts. Hume was an influential person and his sceptical approach negatively affected science as he argued there is no need of scientific investigation.

Postmodernism and Empiricism

Empiricism has been widely regarded as the method of science thus an authentic and credible source of crucial information. Its method of emphasis on the integral role played by experience and evidence as presented especially through sense perception closely resembles scientific methods and principals.

Postmodernism argues that a method, empiricism is a credible source of knowledge though not the only source of knowledge (Jencks 1996).

Against empiricism, postmodernism argues that human being’s senses are sometimes deceptive and thus not always reliable. They cite the case of illusion as and hallucinations as a credible reference. Sometimes due to psychological disorders, people tend to claim to observe objects and spirits like ghosts.

If empiricism was the taken as the only source of knowledge, then in that particular cited case, the knowledge obtained will be misleading. Post modernists also points out the case where motorists tend to perceive pools of water on a highway in a sunny day, but on reaching there no water is seen.

The reflected light rays in form of a mirage can also be cited as a case where senses cannot be trusted. Medical disorder is another basis for disapproving empiricism. Persons with epilepsy at times tend not to realize they are burning yet they are on fire.

Postmodernists have in their quest to look for a reliable source of knowledge borrowed heavily from empiricism and rationalism which sharply contrast each other. Postmodernism thus believes in the diversity of the sources of knowledge and instead of coming with a different view unifies the two major sources of knowledge.

Rationalism is the school of thought which hold that knowledge is purely derived from thinking and not senses. Rationalists believe what we see or experience is facilitated by the mind.

The world like Plato put it is a representation of a pure form in the mind, he further goes on to illustrate that when a cup in the physical world breaks into pieces the idea of a cup still remains in the mind as the real perfect cup is in the realm of ideas and cannot be crashed. We thus make and develop things as they are presented to us by the mind. God to Plato is thus a perfect being in the realm of ideas.

Rene Descartes is probably the most renowned protagonist of the rationalist theory of knowledge. He was a French mathematician. Descartes states that knowledge begins with the doubt of one’s existence. His Methodic Doubt method was employed in that he first doubted the existence of everything in the world including his own existence.

He then proclaimed “cogito ego sum” loosely translated as “I think therefore I am”. (Huemer 2002)To him, doubting his own existence is enough proof of his existence. In knowledge about the mind he propagated the Cartesian Dualism. Cartesian Dualism holds that the mind and only the mind is capable of generating knowledge.

The body houses the mind yet not related at all as they are two different entities, the dualism applies in that although each is independent of the other and the mind being the purely thinking agent, the two interacted through the pineal gland.

However, he never explained what kind of interaction I was. Descartes refers the think thing as the cogito. Descartes unlike the empiricists insisted that knowledge was only possible through the use of deduction method of inference.

Others like Spinoza and Leibniz who were also rationalists came up with different unique methods of explaining their explanation for the mind being the main source of knowledge and not the body that is empiricism.

Spinoza came up with the parallelism theory where he stated that the body and mind were actually two different entities with no common traits, they are at all times in parallel operations and their interaction can be explained in a kind of diffusion. Leibniz proposed the theory of monads where these monads were small tiny objects in spontaneous flux state.

The postmodernists credit Leibniz for formulating a method like the one discovered later involving atoms. Rationalists thus strictly advocated for the use of thinking as the main source of knowledge. Immanuel Kant though a rationalist, who is credit for coming up with a kind of a Copernican revolution, was the first person to clearly-show that these two rival schools of thought could actually be united.

With his transcendental series, he showed that the senses provided for the experience and then the mind processed these raw experiences and produced them as finished products. His Copernican Revolution was for saving science and philosophy from Hume’s scepticism, which had resulted to the stopping of all scientific investigations (Feldman 2003).

Empiricism has advocated for a singular method as the source of knowledge while postmodernism advocates for pluralism as a broader way for looking at sources of knowledge. In empiricism there is no accommodation of pluralism as this source advocates for senses alone and has been at loggerheads with rationalism.

Pluralism portrayed in postmodernism accommodates both these rival schools of thought as sources of knowledge. Post modernism is thus wider, has more depth and can explain for phenomena from both sides, as rationalist and as empiricists.

The postmodernism as source of knowledge is also more refined and less ambiguous, this can be attributed to the fact that postmodernism came much later than the modern empiricism. This accorded the postmodernism scholars more time and a wide range of knowledge bank to compare and contrast (Cahoone 2003).

To explain the phenomena of love, this cannot be explained by either rationalism or empiricism, postmodernism has employed intuition as a source of knowledge. Intuition is the art of understanding without much effort.

This kind of knowledge is a priori or at other times experiential of certain characterized beliefs, which have immediate impacts. It is a much-debated branch of knowledge that cannot be explained without controversy (Audi 2011).

Conclusion

Epistemology entails the learning of knowledge. In epistemology, there are various sources of knowledge like rationalism, empiricism, scepticism, idealism and intuition whose theorization, development and propagation was highly witnessed during the era of modernism.

Postmodernism tries to study these theories wholesomely to come up with a theory of knowledge that is more credible and authentic. Empiricism is such one theory that is incorporated in postmodernism as postmodernism takes a pluralist approach.

In the study of knowledge, empiricism and post modernism are important schools of thought that contribute a lot into the field. They compliment one another, one having been largely practiced in the era of modernism while the other in the postmodernism era. They illustrate the growth of knowledge from one epoch to the other (Alcoff 1998).

Reference List

Alcoff, L., 1998. Epistemology: The Big Questions. Massachusetts, Blackwell Publishers.

Audi, R., 2011. Epistemology: A Contemporary Introduction to the Theory of Knowledge 3^rd ed. New York, Routledge.

Brooker, P., 1996. Modernism/Postmodernism. New York, Longman.

Cahoone, L., 2003. From Modernism to Postmodernism. Malden, Blackwell Publishing.

Feldman, R., 2003. Epistemology. New York, Prentice Hall

Furmerton, A., 2006. Epistemology. Malden, Blackwell Publishing

Grenz, J., 1996. A Primer on Post Modernism. Michigan, Erdmann Publishing Co.

Huemer, M., 2002. Epistemology: contemporary readings. Abingdon, Routledge.

Jencks, C., 1996. What is Postmodernism. Michigan, Academy Editions.

Reck, A.,1963. Studies in Recent Philosophy. New York, Springer,

Richardson, A., 2007. The Cambridge Companion To Logical Empiricism. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

Sosa, E., & Villanueva, 2004. Epistemology: Volume 14. Malden, Blackwell Publishing.

Having obtained the ability to think, man also obtained the need to discover the nature of things and the world around him. Studying it, obtaining new and new facts, enlarging his knowledge, man started to think not only about the principles of the functioning of the surrounding world, but about the ways his percepts the information and about the nature of the acquired knowledge. At that moment, philosophy in general, and epistemology in particular, appeared. “Epistemology is the study of knowledge and justified belief. As the study of knowledge, epistemology is concerned with the following questions: What are the necessary and sufficient conditions of knowledge? What are its sources?”(Epistemology, 2005, para. 1). People were not satisfied with the unknown nature of knowledge they obtained, giving their own theories in order to explain the process.

Rationalism was one of the first attempts to classify knowledge and the way people obtain it. The main thesis of it states – “some propositions in a particular subject area, are knowable by us by intuition alone; still others are knowable by being deduced from intuited propositions” (Rationalism vs. Empiricism, 2013, para. 12). The main source of obtaining knowledge is proclaimed to be human mind, which can make prepositions on the basis of some facts or intuition, which tends to be one of the main issues in the rationalism. With the help of deduction, man can make obvious conclusions and obtain knowledge about the things, he has never seen.

Empiricism, on the contrary, states that our feelings can be the only reliable source of getting knowledge – “we have no source of knowledge or for the concepts other than sense experience” (Rationalism vs. Empiricism, 2013, para. 30). Consequently, only having acquired definite knowledge about the subject, only having seen it and having obtained the sensual experience about it, we can gain some true knowledge. Sensual experience is the key point in the empiricism, and the only way to obtain new ideas. Empiricism denies the human ability to form new, clear and, what is the most important, true image about the nature of things just making suppositions, based on mans thoughts and conclusions, not on the sensual experience.

Two polar ways of the world perception and cognition appeared. People wanted to understand the way they get knowledge. That is why, debates between rationalists and empiricists had been going on through the centuries. Over the years, in epistemology their dispute obtained some new character. The new problematic issues like the nature of our reality and the existence of God appeared. Their debates came to metaphysics level. Still having the human knowledge as the main topic for consideration, they, however, discuss more abstract terms as freewill and relation between the mind and body (Rationalism vs. Empiricism, 2013)

Epistemology, as the main branch of the philosophy, helps people to discover not only the world around them, but to reveal some peculiarities of the way they study this world. Constant debates between rationalism and empiricism only lead to the further development of the human thought and better understanding of the nature of things.

Reference List

Rationalism vs. Empiricism.(2013). Web.

Epistemology.(2005). Web.